ABC Was Right Not to Run Anti-Epstein Interview in 2015

Here is the true story that you’re not hearing or reading in the media. A National Public Radio reporter broke the story and sent me the following email:

I cover media for NPR and wanted to ask — I’ve been told that you felt you were successful in persuading ABC NEWS’s legal team in not running an interview with Virginia Roberts Giuffre in 2015 because you convinced them she was untruthful.

I assumed, therefore, that he was interested in the evidence I provided ABC that “convinced them she was untruthful.” But as we shall see, that was the last thing he was interested in reporting. This is what I told the NPR reporter about my interaction with ABC.

In mid-2015, I was sent an email that one of Giuffre’s lawyers had circulated, announcing that an interview with Giuffre would be run on "Good Morning America," the ABC evening news, and "Nightline." I immediately called ABC to inquire whether my name was being mentioned, since she had falsely accused me of having sex with her, even though there was incontrovertible proof that I had never even met her. They said it was not. (To this day, she has not publicly and directly accused me out of court, in order to avoid being held accountable for her defamation.) I asked about Leslie Wexner — who she had also privately accused — and was told that his name was also not mentioned. (Perhaps because her silence about him was being negotiated.) I told the producer that Giuffre had a long history of lying about prominent individuals, including Tipper and Al Gore and Bill Clinton, as well as about other matters, including her age at the time she met Epstein. I also told them about my conversation with Giuffre’s friend Rebecca Boylan, in which she told me about the plan to obtain a billion dollars from Wexner. I told them that these interviews with Giuffre were part of the shakedown plan — that Boylan had told me that Giuffre went on TV in order to send Wexner the following message: See, I have access to the media; this time I didn’t mention you; but next time . . .

The people at ABC said they would look into the matter and I sent them the evidence. I made it clear that I was calling only on my own behalf and not on behalf of Epstein. I told the same thing to the NPR reporter when he interviewed me about this episode. But he had an agenda and a story line, and reporting accurately what I told him would undercut his pre-determined narrative. So this is what he falsely reported in a piece entitled “How media fell short on Epstein.”

The NPR reporter described me as Epstein’s lawyer, without disclosing that I explicitly told him that I had called ABC only on my own behalf as someone who had been falsely accused by Giuffre.

Notwithstanding his expressed interest in how I “convinced” ABC not to run the interview, he never mentioned the evidence I provided to ABC and to him proving that Giuffre had a long record of lying. Instead he quoted Julie Brown, a reporter for the Miami Herald, recently telling him, “I [Brown] found [Giuffre] to be very truthful and credible.” But Brown had never told that to ABC, back when they were making their decision. She only told it to the NPR reporter when he was doing his report years later. So her after-the-fact assessment of Giuffre’s alleged credibility was completely irrelevant to ABC’s decision, while my evidence — which I sent to ABC at the time — was highly relevant. Yet the NPR reporter deliberately omitted my evidence from his reporting.

Accordingly, he made it sound as if ABC had succumbed to pressure from Epstein and his powerful friends rather than making a decision, based on hard evidence they received from me and perhaps others, that Giuffre’s lack of credibility did not satisfy ABC’s journalistic standards. This is yet another example of biased and unprofessional journalism — this time by NPR — promoting the credibility of false accusers even in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are lying, and attacking a responsible network for making the right decision based on the evidence they had at the time.

So ABC was right and its critics are wrong.

Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School and author of "Guilt by Accusation" and "The Case Against the Democratic House Impeaching Trump." Read more reports from Alan M. Dershowitz – Click Here Now.