Alan Dershowitz responds to Casey Sherman column
In a letter to the editor, Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz has responded to Casey Sherman’s Dec. 2 column in the Boston Herald:
Casey Sherman would have Harvard “cancel” my 50-year career as a professor even though I have done absolutely nothing wrong, either during my long teaching career or following my retirement. For Sherman, the mere fact that I was falsely accused by a woman with a long history of lying about prominent people is enough for Harvard to follow the British royal family in canceling my reputation and career. But unlike members of the royal family, I was not born into my career at Harvard. I earned it by an unblemished half century of hard work. Yet Sherman would have Harvard cancel me based on a demonstrably false accusation made for money.
I never met the woman who has falsely accused me. She has written emails and a manuscript in her own words that conclusively prove she had never met me. She told her friends and the FBI that she never met me. Her own lawyer has said in a recorded conversation that she is “wrong, simply wrong” in accusing me and it would have been impossible for me to have been in the places she claims to have met me.
Sherman admits that “Dershowitz has every right to defend himself especially if he is innocent.” But then he says that “Harvard does not need to stand by him in this process.” In other words, he believes in guilt by accusation — the title of my new book (“Guilt by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of #MeToo”).
Sherman claims that just as Prince Andrew was bad for the Royal brand, that I am “bad for Harvard’s brand especially in this #MeToo culture.” This reminds me of what Sen. Joseph McCarthy would have said about people who were falsely accused of being Communist back in the 1950s. Shame on Sherman for emulating Sen. Joseph McCarthy. If the brand matters, it would be much worse for the Harvard brand were it to take any action against me merely because I was falsely accused.
When I was first falsely accused five years ago, I urged Harvard to conduct a thorough investigation of the charges, because I know that any such investigation would vindicate me. The former director of the FBI conducted a thorough investigation and determined I was falsely accused. That is not enough for Sherman. Nothing would be enough for him as long as there was an accusation, even if it came from a woman, Virginia Guiffre, who has lodged false accusations against Tipper Gore, Al Gore and numerous other people.
Sherman also emulated Sen. McCarthy by faulting me for representing defendants of whom he disapproves.
Is this really what we have become in the age of #MeToo?
— Alan Dershowitz, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2Yk2ihr
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