“You meet David Boies, magically you remember that you had sex with Alan Dershowitz,” Dershowitz said bitterly. As an 80-year-old academic, he said some of the stories — threesomes, airplane trysts, group sex in Epstein’s limousine — sounded “so phantasmological.” He recognizes that the #MeToo movement has surfaced numerous accounts of preposterous-sounding sexual misbehavior by prominent and respected men, and almost all of them have turned out to be true. But he swears he is different.

“Mine is the only case, singular, the only one, where I never met the people,” Dershowitz said. “There’s no evidence we’ve ever met, no evidence we were ever in the same place at the same time, ever.” He has sued to unseal evidence filed in the Maxwell defamation case that he predicts will prove damaging to his accusers’ credibility. The record contains emails, he said, from Ransome to a New York Post reporter, in which she purports to possess sex tapes of Hillary Clinton, Richard Branson, and Donald Trump. There are also emails between Giuffre and a tabloid journalist, he said, in which she appears to shape her story to make it more salable as a book. Dershowitz also stresses that there appears to be a discrepancy in Giuffre’s accounts of her age at the time she worked at Mar-a-Lago, meaning she may have been as old as 17 when she met Epstein, which may make a legal distinction, if not a moral one. Constantly, he calls Giuffre a “liar” and worse. Counterpunching is his style as a defense attorney, but his vehemence often turns ugly.