Virginia Giuffre, who has spent more than a decade pursuing legal action against the late Jeffrey Epstein and his associates for sexually trafficking her as a minor, today, Nov. 8, settled a federal defamation suit against the lawyer Alan Dershowitz. In a joint statement, the two announced that they have “dismissed with prejudice all pending litigation,” with no payment on either side. A court filing obtained by Rolling Stone confirmed that all parties also waived the right to appeal.
Since 2014, Giuffre had maintained that Epstein trafficked her to Dershowitz for sex at least six times, beginning when she was just 16 years old. Now she says she may have made a “mistake” in identifying him as one of her abusers. “I was very young at the time, it was a very stressful and traumatic environment,” she wrote in her statement, “and Mr. Dershowitz has from the beginning consistently denied these allegations.” She added that the suit — and Dershowitz’s countersuit — had been “burdensome” for her family, “and we believe it is time to bring it to an end and move on with our lives.”
Dershowitz, for his part, said that Giuffre was to be “commended” for admitting her possible error. He is also expected to drop a separate defamation suit against her former lawyer, David Boies, whom he had successfully motioned to have removed from the case in 2019.
Dershowitz — who, aside from being friends with Epstein, served on his legal defense team when the financier was charged with procuring a minor for prostitution, and later helped negotiate the infamous “sweetheart” plea deal that prevented the FBI from further investigating his trafficking ring — also celebrated with a livestream of his series The Dershow on the right-wing video website Rumble. In the 30-minute recording, he criticized what he called “the #MeToo at any cost movement,” saying he would like to start his own movement called “#MeToo, I’ve been falsely accused.”
“Look, don’t have any sympathy for me,” he continued, “I’m gonna live through this. I’m not going to jail, no prosecutor ever even implied that I was guilty of anything. It’s just that one person who said — and now she says she’s not sure, and she recognizes she may have made a mistake. So don’t have sympathy for me, have sympathy for person who’s serving a prison term, based on somebody who might not have been sure, but who expressed certainty on the witness stand, and was believed. That’s the real victim of our system of injustice now, particularly when it comes to women accusing men.”
Giuffre’s suit against Dershowitz stemmed from a 2014 court filing she made in a challenge brought by two other Epstein victims against the non-prosecution agreement that had, unbeknownst to survivors, shielded the sex offender from a federal probe since 2007. In that document, Giuffre described Epstein lending her to Dershowitz for sex. When that claim resurfaced in a 2018 series of Miami Herald articles exposing Epstein’s legal maneuverings, Dershowitz accused her of perjury and attempted extortion. In response, she sued him for defamation in 2019.
Earlier this year, Giuffre settled her suit against disgraced British royal Prince Andrew, another Epstein pal she’d accused of raping her when she was underage. That resolution involved a donation of £12 million ($16 million) to Giuffre’s sex trafficking survivor charity, Speak Out, Act, Reclaim (SOAR). The sum was to be paid in part by Andrew’s mother, Queen Elizabeth II.
One remaining legal battle for Giuffre is a defamation suit filed in 2021 by a fellow Epstein accuser, Rina Oh. The suit references tweets made by Giuffre in October 2020 that allege Oh was Epstein’s girlfriend and co-conspirator, not a victim, and recruited young women into his trafficking ring. Giuffre’s counterclaim holds that Oh slashed her leg during a “sadomasochistic” act performed for “Epstein’s pleasure,” while Oh maintains that it was Giuffre and Epstein who together sexually assaulted her.