Alan Dershowitz, a prominent legal analyst who frequently defends President Trump on TV, was part of a high-powered legal team that secured a remarkably lenient 13-month county-jail sentence for well-connected financier Jeffrey Epstein in 2008, the Miami Herald reported last week. Epstein pleaded guilty to two state counts of soliciting prostitutes, one of whom was 14, but he was under FBI investigation at the time for running what the Herald describes as a sexual pyramid scheme involving girls as young as 13 recruited to massage him, then have sex.
The highly unusual 2007 federal non-prosecution deal was kept sealed, and Dershowitz and Epstein's other lawyers reportedly helped write it with Miami federal prosecutors, primarily Alexander Acosta, now Trump's labor secretary. On Saturday, Dershowitz, 80, told Axios that Epstein "has called me a couple of times about legal issues, because I'm still technically his lawyer. ... But I haven't had any social, or any other kind of contact. ... You never stop being a person's lawyer."
One of the women who accuses Epstein of sexual predation, Virginia Roberts, also said in a court document that through Epstein, Dershowitz had sex with her several times when she was 16, a charge Dershowitz denies and likened to extortion. Dershowitz told Axios that when Epstein lent his family his Palm Beach house one week, "I had a therapeutic massage with an old old Russian," but he'd had no idea "anything improper had even taken place in that house."
You can learn about the members of Epstein's legal team, including Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr, and other figures in Epstein's address book, like Trump and former President Bill Clinton, in a Miami Herald interactive report and this video:
Roberts also told her story to the Herald, and it contains some descriptions of sex acts.
You can read more about the Epstein case at the Miami Herald, and watch a synopsis of their reporting in a disturbing 12-minute mini-documentary.