Legal eagle Alan Dershowitz showed up to be honored at the Brooklyn Bar Association’s annual dinner Monday in a sling, a cast and with a medical boot on his foot — the result of a bad fall from uneven pavement on the Upper East Side.
But the lawyer, who repped Mike Tyson, O.J. Simpson, Patty Hearst and Jim Bakker, assured Mayor Bill de Blasio at the dinner that he’s not suing the city, even though the room was filled with hundreds of lawyers encouraging him to do so.
The Rev. Al Sharpton’s daughter, Dominique, is suing the city for $5 million over a measly sprained ankle from “uneven pavement,” though she’s since been spotted on social-media posts trekking in Bali and marching in Times Square.
Famously tough Dershowitz — who injured both wrists, a toe, his ribs and his neck on Friday — told us, “I’m not going to sue the city. There was a little protrusion on concrete right by my house . . . it was dark, I tripped and it was completely, unequivocally, totally my fault. I went headlong.”
When de Blasio saw him at the Bar Association party in “a sling, a cast and a funny shoe . . . He asked if I got into a fight. I haven’t punched anybody in over two years! I was 75 at the time,” Dershowitz told Page Six, adding he told de Blasio, “This was nobody’s fault — a pure accident.”
But in a roomful of 50 judges and 800 attorneys, “a hundred lawyers handed me their business cards,” Dershowitz said. “They were saying, ‘You gotta sue!’ Most with a smile.”
Because both of his hands are injured and he writes his legal arguments long-form, it’s slowed his work some. He’s had to cancel a trip because of pain. But he did appear, bandages and all, on CNN Tuesday to talk about Donald Trump.
Also honored at the dinner were judges Patricia DiMango, John Leventhal and Sterling Johnson Jr. Guests included Brooklyn Bar president Arthur Aidala and Geraldo Rivera, who may have been shopping for a lawyer of his own for a bitter dispute with ex-employer WABC 770.
Summed up Dershowitz of the Friday fall, “My mother would’ve said, ‘If you’d gone to shul, this never would have happened!’”
The city perhaps has dodged a bullet as Dershowtiz previously filed a suit against the TD Boston Garden for a slip in the stadium’s men’s room.