Turns out Ghislaine Maxwell—who apparently dodged authorities until her arrest this week—has a rather powerful ally. "We never saw her do anything inappropriate," writes Alan Dershowitz at the Spectator. "We knew her only as Jeffrey Epstein's thirty-something girlfriend." The celebrity attorney often saw her "in the presence of prominent people such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nobel Prize-winning scientists, presidents of universities, and prominent academic and business people," he writes, yet they share something else: Both are accused of sexual misconduct by Jeffrey Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre. On that front, Dershowitz delivers a harsh assessment of Giuffre and the Netflix series about Epstein in which she appears.
"No one should believe anything they saw in that series," he writes, "because it was based largely on the accounts of two women with histories of making dubious accusations." He adds that Giuffre's own lawyer admits she was "wrong ... simply wrong" to accuse Dershowitz of having sex with her six or seven times (a quote
McClatchy attributes to Dershowitz himself), and says Giuffre told a friend she'd been "pressured to falsely accuse me by her lawyers" (which is from Dershowitz's own book,
Guilt by Accusation). As for Maxwell, she "must be presumed innocent" and might just go free thanks to an expired statue of limitations or immunity from Epstein's plea deal. "So stay tuned," Dershowitz writes. "The case against Ghislaine Maxwell is far from over."
(More
Ghislaine Maxwell stories.)