Media outlets host Alan Dershowitz without asking him about Jeffrey Epstein

During news appearances, Dershowitz didn’t comment on his role in a settlement prosecutors gave to the billionaire pedophile, which a judge ruled was illegally hidden from victims

Written by Bobby Lewis

Published


Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

On February 21, the Miami Herald reported that a federal judge has ruled that prosecutors, including current Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, “broke the law” over a decade ago “when they concealed a plea agreement from more than 30 underage victims who had been sexually abused by wealthy New York hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein.” Frequent news show guest Alan Dershowitz was part of Epstein’s defense team that accepted the deal from prosecutors, but three major news shows that have hosted him since the story broke failed to ask him about the case.

Instead, the hosts gave him a platform to discuss Empire actor Jussie Smollett’s case or special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. (Dershowitz did, however, address the ruling on Twitter.) 

The same day the Herald reported on the ruling, Fox News host Laura Ingraham invited Dershowitz to appear on her show The Ingraham Angle to discuss Smollett, who is charged with filing a false police report. While giving his legal opinion about the case, Dershowitz referenced biblical laws, saying, “If you are going to follow the Bible, this guy ought to get the same penalty that he falsely accused other people of getting.”

The following day, Fox host Sean Hannity also hosted Dershowitz on his prime-time show Hannity to discuss the Smollett case. Dershowitz again brought up biblical laws and said the “hard left” wasn’t “prepared to give a presumption of innocence to the nonexistent MAGA hat-wearing assailants” in the Smollett case because “the presumption of innocence, like so many other aspects of our life, is selectively employed by the left against the right and sometimes by the right against the left.”

On February 24, host George Stephanopoulos invited Dershowitz on his ABC show This Week to talk about the Mueller probe. During the discussion, Dershowitz speculated that Mueller’s report “may just be a road map given to Congress and given to other prosecutors that will continue these investigations till the end of President Trump’s first term.”