Famed defense attorney Alan Dershowitz on Tuesday forcefully denied that he had sex with an underage girl provided to him by Jeffrey Epstein.
Standing outside a New York City courthouse, Dershowitz pushed back against the claims by accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre.
"I've never met Virginia Giuffre. I've never had sex with her. And the reason I'm saying it is because it's true," Dershowitz said to a gathering of reporters after a hearing related to a defamation lawsuit filed against him.
"She, on the other hand, has never and will never stand in front of any media and repeat her lie that she did have sex with me."
A female bystander heckled Dershowitz at one point — shouting 'Liar! Liar!' We don't believe you!' — but he kept speaking. Dershowitz said Giuffre and her lawyer David Boies had done "a terrible disservice to a great movement, the 'Me Too' movement."
"The 'Me Too' movement relies on credible reports of sexual misconduct and when a woman and her lawyer make false allegations and falsely accuse people, it hurts not only the falsely accused person, me, but it hurts everybody who is a true victim of sexual abuse," Dershowitz said.
Dershowitz spoke out after a hearing that marked the latest development in a legal battle stemming from the Epstein child sex abuse case.
Giuffre sued Dershowitz in April alleging that she was lent out to him for sex while she was underage. The suit contends that Dershowitz defamed Giuffre by branding her a liar who concocted a false story with the help of money-hungry lawyers.
Giuffre claims Epstein ordered her to have sex with Dershowitz in the years after she was recruited to join Epstein's sex-trafficking ring in 2000.
Giuffre's account gained new attention last year after the Miami Herald published a series of articles detailing how Epstein managed to avoid serious charges and a long prison sentence when he was investigated for preying on children in Florida in the mid-2000s.
In her lawsuit, Giuffre claims that Dershowitz made a series of "false and malicious defamatory statements" about her after the newspaper expose was published.
"I never met Roberts; I never had sex with her; she simply made up the entire story for money," Dershowitz said on Dec. 1, 2018, according to Giuffre's suit.
Three days later, Dershowitz was quoted calling her a "certified, complete, total liar."
"I can prove conclusively that she made the whole thing up," Dershowitz said.
During the Tuesday hearing, Dershowitz remained silent as his attorney, Howard Cooper, argued that the judge should throw out the case because the statute of limitations had run out since the high-profile lawyer first attacked Giuffre's credibility in 2015.
Giuffre's lawyer, Sigrid McCawley, countered that each time Dershowitz made his statements about Giuffre the countdown on the statute of limitations started anew.
Epstein, who was arrested on new sex trafficking charges in July, committed suicide in his federal jail cell last month while awaiting trial.
