At almost 80, Dershowitz back in the headlines OPINION
Former lawyer to O.J. Simpson and Claus von Bulow, and current Trump apologist, says he’s misunderstood
Tom Cruise might be back in theatres, free-climbing rock face and running like a maniac at 56 — doggedly defying time in the Mission: Impossible role that he first embarked on an amazing 22 years ago — but he has company in the audacity department this summer: legal eagle Alan Dershowitz.
A free speech fetishist as well as indefatigable strategist — a “man who has raised to hardball science the techniques of adversarial justice, in which truth and legally provable truth are often different matters,” as a profile once described — he is as wily, bespectacled and publicity-partial as ever.
At almost 80, he looks like a senior you might see at water volleyball at the local Y but has actually spent much of his time lately being beamed onto cable news shows.
Since he took to ardently railing against the overreach of the Mueller investigation, and in turn giving cover to President Trump, he has clocked close to 200 appearances on CNN, MSNBC, Fox and the like in the last year.
What’s remarkable about this latest zeitgeist-climb of the one-time Harvard prof? The extent to which he — already known for defending Claus von Bulow and O.J. Simpson, not to mention high-wattage cases like Patty Hearst (the woman who gave us the term “Stock- holm Syndrome”), Leona Helmsley (“The Queen of Mean”) and Mia Farrow (more on that in a bit), among others — is a one-man jukebox of scandals past. Oh and boldface six degrees.
(Did you know that O.J. was at Donald’s second wedding to Marla Maples? Well, yeah, he was.)
Dershowitz’s latest pivot?
Unsurprisingly, it’s made Dershowitz a target of his one-time student, and now fellow tele-legal jouster, Jeffrey Toobin, who has accused the one-time lion of the left of “carrying water” for the president.
In the court of public exposure, the Brooklyn native has never shied away from promoting his personal brand — here, after all, is a man who once posed in his sauna for People — but it all reached a fresh crescendo of absurdity recently when the self-professed “liberal Democrat” who voted for Hillary Clinton, but now spends his days defending Trump, complained that he was being snubbed from dinner parties on Martha’s Vineyard, where he has long summered.
It was a lament that instantly became low-hanging fruit, story-wise, and resulted in a burst of coverage, including a lengthy dispatch in the New York Times. Naturally, the boo-hoo also turned into a social media trending item, complete with Twitter jabs aplenty.
Sample snark: “I had no idea that ‘McCarthyism’ meant not wanting to meet Alan Dershowitz for a glass of Crémant Rosé on Martha’s Vineyard. My sympathies.”
Speaking of Martha’s Vineyard, Dershowitz’s own dinner parties there in the past have included guests ranging from Yo-Yo Ma to Larry David to … Harvey Weinstein.
Weinstein was brought down, in part, by the investigative hustle of Ronan Farrow, whose mother Dershowitz represented in her War of the Roses battle against Woody Allen, back in the ’90s.
“We did not have a dream team; we had a nightmare team. The lawyers did not get along.” ALAN DERSHOWITZ ON O.J. SIMPSON TRIAL
Of course, Dershowitz wouldn’t be Dershowitz without the von Bulow case, when he represented British stiff Claus (a one-time personal assistant to J. Paul Getty) in his successful appeal for the attempted murder of wife Sunny von Bulow, who went into a mysterious coma in Newport, R.I.. A massive story at the time, it was O.J. before O.J., the first such court case to be televised live. Sex, drugs, money, mistresses, revenge and briefs — it had it all.
The saga was turned into a film, Reversal of Fortune, based on a book written by Dershowitz and starring Jeremy Irons as Claus (which garnered him an Oscar).
In one of the more bizarro twists in that particular saga — one that succumbs to my hypothesis that everything connects when you get to a certain rung of society — Truman Capote entered a sworn statement on behalf of Claus that Sunny, his heiress friend, took amphetamines “off and on for a long time” and even taught him to use a hypodermic needle.
Looking back at his celebrity clients, Dershowitz continues to maintain, O.J.-wise, that the planting of blood evidence on a sock was the thing — even more so than the glove that didn’t fit — that led to the acquittal.
He has also been more than open about how difficult a case it was to work on: “We did not have a dream team; we had a nightmare team. The lawyers did not get along.”
He has also frequently said that his biggest failure as a lawyer is that he was unable to get a new trial for Mike Tyson following his rape conviction.
All in all, Dershowitz, who just published his 37th book, The Case Against Impeaching Trump, thinks he is misunderstood. “I’m seen by some as extreme because sometimes I state my views quite firmly, categorically — particularly on television, where nuance is difficult.”
You don’t say.