Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax has an odd habit of giving Trump-friendly lawyer Alan Dershowitz space to defend himself (and offering its own defense of him) regarding links to convicted pedophile and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, for whom he served as a defense lawyer. That hasn't stopped.
In his first Newsmax column since January, Dershowitz spent a July 12 column complaining that "The View" co-host Meghan McCain said he shouldn't be allowed to appear on TV until the Epstein sex-related allegations against him are resolved. Needless to say, Dershowitz spun this comment into a complaint that he was being "censored" and going into full victim mode: "Imagine what America would be like if McCain’s rule became the norm. Every accused person would be presumed guilty and shut down. Our traditional presumption of innocence would be reversed and a presumption of guilt would be substituted. That is the norm in today’s China, Iran, Venezuela, and other totalitarian nations that do not operate under the rule of law."
Dershowitz penned a July 17 column that was essentially a prebuttal to a longform piece the New Yorker was doing on him, insisting without evidence that editor David Remnick commissioned the "hit piece against me for the explicit purpose of silencing my defense of President Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu, and the State of Israel." As he has before, he vehemently denied allegations that he had sex with an underage girl in Epstein's orbit.
Of course, he didn't mention his admission the previous week that he did indeed receive a massage at Epstein's mansion (though he insisted he was massaged by an adult woman and he kept his underwear on).
After the New Yorker article came out -- which included revelations such as his advocacy for reducing the age of consent and his history of discrediting any sexual assault accuser that passed in front of him -- Dershowitz cranked out another lengthy defense in the form of a letter to the New Yorker that Newsmax published on July 26, once again denouncing the "hit piece" as an attempt "to silence my voice on issues – Trump, Netanyahu and Israel – on which we disagree." He didn't address the age-of-consent stuff.
Dershowitz concluded his column with this appeal: "Finally, a word to my readers: if you read The New Yorker article, please compare it to this letter and see what they included and excluded. Please also ask yourselves how you and your family would feel if you were falsely accused with no evidence of horrible crimes of which you were entirely innocent.
Newsmax also gave Dershowitz space on its TV channel. In a July 18 appearance, Dershowitz repeated an attack on the lawyer representing the woman accusing him as "a genuinely evil man" who "has a very questionable sexual history himself, while ""I have never done anything wrong sexually. During the relevant period of time, I had sex with one woman: my wife."
On July 29, Dershowitz was given a nearly 6-minute-long segment on Newsmax TV to repeat his attacks on the New Yorker piece, whining: "If they falsely accuse me and I never met them, I'm the victim now, they're not the victims. I'm going to continue to call them liars and perjurers. That's the truth. It's not victim shaming. It's criminal shaming. They are criminals. They belong in jail."
In between his two New Yorker-related pieces getting published on Newsmax, Dershowitz appeared on Newsmax TV in an 18-minute segment discussing Robert Mueller's congressional testimony, in which he served up a reliably pro-Trump talking point that "a "radical Democrat" winning the White House could go after Trump like a "banana republic." (Nerver mind that Trump indicated he would act in the exact same way against Hillary Clinton.) Dershowitz was never asked about his connections to Epstein during this segment.
