Alan M. Dershowitz. (Photo: Rick Kopstein/ALM)

Attorneys for Alan Dershowitz are expected to appear in Manhattan federal court Tuesday morning for arguments in the retired law professor's bid to dismiss a defamation suit from an accuser of Jeffrey Epstein and to have her Boies Schiller Flexner lawyers disqualified from the case.

The dueling motions, set to be argued before Senior Judge Loretta A. Preska of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, represent the latest front in a high-profile battle between Dershowitz, a former attorney for Epstein, and Virginia Giuffre, who has claimed that she was recruited as a minor into the deceased financier's underage sex ring and then trafficked to Dershowitz and other prominent men for sex.

The allegations first surfaced in late 2014, when Giuffre sought to intervene in a lawsuit targeting the U.S. government over a plea deal that ended a now decade-old federal investigation into Epstein and resulted in an 18-month prison sentence that has since been widely scorned as lenient. Her allegations were stricken from the record but not before the details of her claims were covered into the press.

At the time of Giuffre's failed bid to intervene, Dershowitz, who had represented Epstein in the 2008 prosecution, made numerous television appearances portraying Giuffre as a liar, a prostitute and a "serial perjurer," according to court papers.

Dershowitz has repeatedly denied all allegations of improper contact with Giuffre and claims to have evidence clearing him of any wrongdoing.

Earlier this year, Giuffre filed a libel suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The complaint came in the wake of comments Dershowitz made to the Miami Herald in November 2018, when he was contacted for the paper's groundbreaking series "Perversion of Justice," which reexamined Epstein's case in Florida and raised new questions the deal he reached with prosecutors.

In his comments to the Herald, Dershowitz denied ever having sex with Giuffre and said the allegations were simply a ploy by his accuser and her attorneys to "get money" from "powerful, wealthy people." He moved to dismiss the suit in June, arguing that the claims were time-barred by New York's one-year statute of limitations for defamation claims.

According to Dershowitz' Todd & Weld attorneys, the more recent statements were "identical in substance" to those he made to the same "global audience" four years ago, and thus were protected under the "single publication rule."

Giuffre's Boies Schiller attorneys, however, have countered that Dershowitz' comments to the Herald were new statements and attacked Dershowitz' notion of a global audience.

"His recent statements were made to new media outlets, and different publications have different audiences. Even if they were the same websites or news agencies (they are not), these news organizations would have a different audience now than they did four years ago," Giuffre's lawyers said in a July 9 filing signed by Boies Schiller partner Joshua I. Schiller.

"Dershowitz cites no authority for a 'global audience' that would immunize serial defamers from repeated acts of slander or libel, and the court should decline his invitation to create one," Schiller said.

In addition to the dismissal motion, Dershowitz is expected to lay out his case Tuesday for why Giuffre's entire legal team should be disqualified from the case. That dispute, which dates back early 2015, centers on correspondences Dershowitz had with Boies Schiller partner Carlos Sires, following Dershowitz' appearance on the "Today" show.

According to court filings, Sires sent Dershowitz an unsolicited email to express support, and, as the two continued to exchange emails, Sires said that he and his firm would be interested in joining Dershowitz' legal team.

Dershowitz said it was at that point that he reasonably believed that an attorney-client relationship had been formed with the firm, and he sent Sires a confidential memo that he said outlined his legal strategy and plans to disprove the allegations at the heart of the suit. Unbeknownst to him, however, Boies Schiller had already begun representing Giuffre, and Sires told him the next day that he could not be a part of Dershowitz' legal team.

In a June 7 court filing, Dershowitz said there was no way to be sure that Giuffre's attorneys had not seen the information he passed along to Sires, and claimed the incident was enough to raise "irreconcilable conflicts of interest" with the firm's representation of Giuffre.

Boies Schiller denied that Dershowitz had ever been a client and said it had implemented screening procedures to ensure that no sensitive information had been compromised. The firm said Sires himself had not been aware of his firm's work on behalf of Giuffre and never passed the document along to the attorneys working her case.

Instead, they argued, the motion was a "transparent attempt to manufacture a basis for disqualification where none exists."

Preska, who has received the memo under seal, indicated in a brief order last week that she would hold separate arguments regarding its contents, in proceedings that would likely happen outside of public view.

"The court will ask Professor Dershowitz how disclosure of the memorandum to the Boise Schiller firm could result in any detriment to him and will ask [Boies Schiller] to specify how the contents of the Memorandum have been made public," she said.

Arguments are slated for 10 a.m. on Tuesday.

An attorney for Dershowitz declined to comment ahead of the hearing, and a lawyer for Giuffre did not return a call seeking comment on the case.

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