The woman who accused attorney Alan Dershowitz of sexually abusing her is now saying she may have been mistaken. Her defamation lawsuit against Dershowitz is also being dropped.
“I have long believed that I was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein to Alan Dershowitz. However, I was very young at the time, it was a very stressful and traumatic environment, and Mr. Dershowitz has from the beginning consistently denied these allegations,“ Virginia Giuffre, formerly Virginia Roberts, said in a joint statement that announced the settlement of the suit. “I now recognize I may have made a mistake in identifying Mr. Dershowitz.”
The parties said that no payments were involved in the settlement, which also involved other related lawsuits.
Dershowitz, a professor emeritus of law at Harvard Law School, represented sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein in the earliest criminal case against Epstein.
Giuffre has said that both Epstein and Epstein’s onetime girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell raped her. She reached a settlement with Epstein in 2009, after he pleaded guilty to a state charge in Florida of procuring a prostitute below the age of 18.
Giuffre later said that she was also raped by Dershowitz six times across three states and in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein maintained a home, but Dershowitz has maintained he was innocent.
“As I have said from the beginning, I never had sex with Ms. Giuffre,” Dershowitz said in a statement. “I have nevertheless come to believe that at the time she accused me she believed what she said. Ms. Giuffre is to be commended for her courage in now stating publicly that she may have been mistaken about me.”
The settlement also involved Dershowitz’s countersuit against Giuffre, a defamation suit from lawyer David Boies against Dershowitz, and a countersuit from Dershowitz against Boies.
“I agree with Mr. Dershowitz and Ms. Giuffre that the time has come to end this litigation and move on,” Boies said in a statement. “I know that Alan Dershowitz has suffered greatly from the allegation of sexual abuse—an allegation that he has consistently, and vehemently, denied.”
Boies had said in a complaint that Dershowitz was trying to “distract attention from his own misconduct” when he launched “a campaign to attack and vilify each of the lawyers who have represented his victims,” including Giuffre.
Dershowitz, meanwhile, now says his claims that Boies engaged in an extortion plot and tried to induce perjury “were mistaken.”
Giuffre also accused Prince Andrew of raping her. She had produced a photograph showing her with the prince and Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking and sentenced more recently to 20 years in prison.
