A federal judge in Florida presiding over a civil lawsuit against the federal government on Tuesday, struck from the record all factual allegations concerning Jewish attorney, Harvard Law School professor emeritus and pro-Israel activist Alan Dershowitz.
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Dershowitz, who is not a named party in the suit, was accused by 30 year-old Virginia Roberts of having sex with her and other underage women provided to him by former client and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Those paragraphs pertaining to Dershowitz were “stricken as improperly placed in the record and the lawyers were sanctioned for doing it,” said Dershowitz in an interview with Washington Jewish Week Tuesday. “So it was more than just taken off. It was a complete vindication of my legal position and a complete condemnation of the lawyers who filed the original issue.”
Judge Kenneth Marra struck from the record all of what he called the “lurid factual allegations” against Dershowitz, calling them “impertinent details regarding non-parties.”
“It’s taken a lot of time, energy and resources to fight this but in the end, we won,” added Dershowitz.
However, Marra’s order permitted the plaintiff reassert those same allegations against Dershowitz, provided she can produce proper proof and demonstrate a “good faith basis” for believing that such details would even be pertinent to her lawsuit against the federal government for its handling of a plea deal with Epstein on underage sex charges years ago.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of multiple “Jane Does” who claimed to have been Epstein’s “sex slaves,” accuses the federal government itself of violating the Crime Victims’ Rights Act (CVRA), alleging that the United States deprived them of justice as crime victims when prosecutors offered Epstein what they characterize as a sweetheart deal.
Roberts, mentioned in the lawsuit as “Jane Doe 3” — later losing her right to anonymity after her participation in a BBC documentary was discovered — claimed that she was 17 years-old at the time of the alleged sexual encounters with Epstein’s associates. She included Dershowitz as one of a number of wealthy, powerful and internationally recognizable men she was forced to have sex with by Epstein, including Britain’s Prince Andrew, brother of Prince Charles.
Dershowitz maintained his innocence from the beginning, even requesting to be added as a named party to the case in order to fight the allegations. Marra declared this motion moot since he had already removed the offending accusations against Dershowitz.
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