Self-proclaimed “sex slave” Virginia Roberts Giuffre can move forward with her defamation lawsuit against lawyer Alan Dershowitz — but she’ll have to find new representation, a Manhattan federal judge ruled Wednesday.
Giuffre — who claims she was lent to the firebrand attorney for sex by the late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein — sued Dershowitz in April after he publicly denounced her as a “serial perjurer,” a “serial liar” and a “serial prostitute.”
Dershowitz tried to claim that his 2018 and 2019 statements were just repetitions of the same comments he’d made in 2015, meaning the statute of limitations had run out for Giuffre to sue him.
But Judge Loretta Preska disagreed.
“Surveying the cases shows this ain’t that,” writes the judge, noting that Dershowitz’s multiple statements over the years back up his self-proclaimed “appreciation of chutzpah.”
“Dershowitz went looking for trouble, and by his own repeated affirmative republications, he found it,” Preska wrote.
Preska did, however, grant Dershowitz’s motion to disqualify Giuffre’s law firm, Boies Schiller Flexner, after the Harvard professor claimed he intended to call lawyers from the firm as witnesses at a trial.
Dershowitz claims Giuffre plotted with her lawyers to extort him, and that he also possesses a recorded phone call in which Giuffre’s lawyer, David Boies, allegedly conceded his client may be wrong about having sex with Dershowitz.
“It is plain that several of the Firm’s lawyers will be essential trial witnesses,” Preska writes, noting that she can’t have lawyers from the firm cross-examining their own colleagues. “The Firm is thus hoist on its own petard.”
Giuffre issued a statement saying she was pleased with the court’s decision not to toss her lawsuit, yet said she was “dismayed” that the judge would make her part ways with her longtime legal advocates.
“For over five years, my lawyers at Boies Schiller Flexner have worked tirelessly to bring Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators to justice,” she said. “When it was not in vogue and not a breaking news story, my lawyers Sigrid McCawley and David Boies stood up to the muscle of the Epstein machine and its grip on the legal system.”
McCawley said they would appeal Preska’s decision to disqualify the firm.
Meanwhile, Dershowitz’s lawyer Imran Ansari lauded the decision, and reiterated previous assertions that Dershowitz “will call David Boies and his colleagues at trial to prove that their client — in Boies’ own words — is ‘wrong… simply wrong’ in accusing him.”
The parties are due back in court Nov. 20.