Alan Dershowitz**, the Harvard Law professor who negotiated Jeffrey Epstein's controversial 2008 non-prosecution agreement, threatened to send a sex-trafficking victim to jail — then refused to produce a single document supporting his own claims of innocence.
The threat appears in court records filed in Florida's 17th Judicial Circuit. The filings are among 1,588 documents linking Dershowitz to the federal Epstein archive — a paper trail spanning two parallel legal battles over allegations he has denied since January 2015.
Get the full documents delivered to your inbox — subscribe to the InvArchives newsletter.
The Defamation Case in Broward County
On January 6, 2015, attorneys Bradley Edwards and Paul Cassell — representing Jane Doe No. 3 in a federal Crime Victims' Rights Act proceeding — filed court papers accusing Dershowitz of sexual abuse. The allegation was that Epstein had trafficked her to prominent men including Dershowitz.
Dershowitz denied it. He did not deny it quietly.
Within hours he appeared on CNN stating: "The end result of this case should be she [Jane Doe No. 3] should go to jail, the lawyers should be disbarred and everybody should understand that I am completely and totally innocent." He repeated the threat on ABC the same day: "My goal is to bring charges against the client and require her to speak in court."
On April 7, 2015, Dershowitz escalated again. He told the New York Daily News: "She was hiding in Colorado...but we found her and she will have to be deposed. The end result is that she'll go to jail because she will repeat her lies and we'll be able to prove it and she will end up in prison for perjury." Document vol00009-efta01078765-pdf shows these quotes were filed into the Florida court record by Jane Doe No. 3's attorneys as evidence of witness intimidation.
The Harvard Professor Who Claimed Irrefutable Proof
Dershowitz told Fox Business on January 7, 2015: "I did the investigation in a day and was able to prove through all kinds of records that I couldn't have been in these places." The next day, on Fox News, he stated: "I can prove through documentary evidence that I was never at the times and places she alleges."
The documents tell a different story. Jane Doe No. 1 and Jane Doe No. 2's court response — filed in federal Case No. 9:08-80736 — notes that despite these public claims, Dershowitz "has yet to produce a single document to this Court." Document vol00009-efta01081604-pdf records that his failure to comply with discovery had already triggered a pending motion to compel production in the parallel Florida defamation case.
Edwards and Cassell had sued Dershowitz for defamation in Broward County (Case No. CACE 15-000072) after he publicly called their client a "prostitute" and a "bad mother" to her three minor children. That case generated hundreds of the 1,588 archived documents.
Subpoenas, Sealed Records, and the Boies Schiller Dispute
Dershowitz's legal strategy relied heavily on aggressive discovery. He subpoenaed Jane Doe No. 3 directly, subpoenaed her law firm Boies Schiller & Flexner, and filed motions seeking to seal court records.
Boies Schiller filed a motion to quash in April 2015, arguing Dershowitz was using the subpoena power as "backdoor discovery" for separate litigation — not to advance the defamation case. Document vol00009-efta01078617-pdf, a 148-page filing, records Boies Schiller's response and quotes Dershowitz's stated intent: "We're considering suing her for defamation...we found her, we served her and now she'll be subjected to a deposition."
The motion to seal court records — filed November 23, 2015 — was contested by Edwards and Cassell, who argued in a 130-page response (vol00009-efta01116693-pdf) that Dershowitz himself had publicly invited media coverage and had "repeatedly referred to these documents...in defamatory statements broadcast worldwide."
1,588 Documents and an Unanswered Question
By the time the Florida defamation case wound down, the Epstein federal archive contained 1,588 documents touching on Dershowitz. They span court filings, discovery motions, subpoena battles, and media-quoted threats — all stemming from a case Dershowitz said he could resolve in a day with documentary proof he never filed.
Dershowitz did not face criminal charges. In 2019, Virginia Giuffre — the woman identified as Jane Doe No. 3 — and Dershowitz reached a settlement in a separate defamation action. In 2023, documents filed in that case revealed Giuffre had signed a statement saying she "may have made a mistake" in identifying Dershowitz. He has cited this as vindication. The underlying federal CVRA documents remain in the archive.
All individuals mentioned are presumed innocent unless proven guilty in a court of law.
Share this investigation
This analysis references publicly released documents from the Epstein case archive. All individuals mentioned are presumed innocent unless convicted in a court of law. Language such as “documents indicate” reflects what appears in source materials, not conclusions of guilt. Readers are encouraged to review the cited source documents directly.