Dershowitz Set to Subpoena Boies in Epstein-Related Defamation Case
The Harvard law professor's attorney said he planned to subpoena the high-profile lawyer and his firm under the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege.
December 02, 2019 at 12:57 PM
4 minute read
Previewing what could become a long and grueling discovery process, attorneys for former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz said they planned to subpoena David Boies and his law firm in a defamation case by an accuser of Jeffrey Epstein.
The comments, made during a conference Monday morning in federal court, were the latest escalation in a high-profile dispute between the two legal luminaries, now on opposite sides of allegations by Virginia Giuffre, who said she was forced as a teenager to have sex with Dershowitz and other powerful men.
Giuffre sued Dershowitz in April, saying that he had defamed her through public statements calling her a liar and a prostitute.
Dershowitz has vehemently denied any wrongdoing and claims the allegations were part of a plot by Giuffre and her attorneys to extort prominent men with ties to Epstein, the Manhattan and South Florida-based financier who died in August while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges.
He responded by filing counterclaims for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress in November.
Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge Loretta A. Preska of the Southern District of New York disqualified Boies and other Boies Schiller Flexner attorneys from the case after finding that Dershowitz's allegations had placed them at issue in the case. In the same ruling, however, Preska did allow the case to proceed toward trial late next year.
On Monday, Dershowitz's attorney, Howard Cooper, said he planned to subpoena Boies and his firm under the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege, and that responsive materials would likely need to be reviewed privately by the judge.
Boies has rejected Dershowitz's allegations as baseless, and last month sued the former professor and one-time Epstein attorney for defamation in New York Supreme Court. He did not immediately respond to a call seeking comment on the Giuffre matter.
Attorneys for both sides tussled Monday morning over the scope of discovery in the case, which they said could include travel documents, employment records, depositions, experts and state and federal court proceedings involving Epstein.
Preska, however, indicated that she would not be inclined to greenlight sweeping discovery in the case, and said that some of the initial requests seemed "pretty far afield from the main allegations."
"There has to be some reasonable limit on what we're going to do here," she said.
Chuck Cooper, who now represents Giuffre, also said Monday that he planned to amend his client's complaint to add new state tort claims under New York's Crime Victims Act, which allows adult survivors of child sexual abuse a one-year window to sue their abuser, regardless of when the acts took place. The new filing, Cooper said, would also include additional allegations of allegedly defamatory statements Dershowitz made about Giuffre in his recently released book.
Dershowitz and his team said there was no good-faith basis for the prospective CVA claims because Giuffre was no longer legally a child by the time she claimed to have met the professor in 2000.
Dershowitz also pointed to a Nov. 30 report by the New York Times, which he said described the same "plot to shakedown" men that Dershowitz had alleged in court. In the article, the Times reported a plan by Boies and another attorney to purchase video recordings that a hacker had obtained of Dershowitz and other men engaging in sex acts with young women at Epstein's house.
Dershowitz denied that he had been pictured in the recordings, though he did confirm that he was contacted by the man at the center of the Times' reporting. On Monday, he said the story backed up his assertions that Giuffre's claims were all part of an effort to take him extort him with false allegations.
"What the Times reported now completely corroborates my story and shows exactly the same plan being used to get money from other billionaires as part of a shakedown plot," Dershowitz told reporters after the hearing.
Dershowitz' attorney, Howard Cooper, said he hopes for the case to go to trial by next fall and that he doesn't expect any additional discovery on the Giuffre's anticipated state law claims.
Preska on Monday cautioned the parties against pursuing overly broad discovery and encouraged the sides to try to reach an agreement on how they wanted to proceed.
"I would very much like to stay in contact," she said. "Let's do this quickly."
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