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Portrait of a whiny narcissist

Alan Dershowitz is terribly hurt by his social stigma, and did a long interview in the New Yorker which is basically nothing but Dershowitz having a pity party. What makes it worth reading, though, are italic asides in which he gets fact-checked.

Yeah, of course. So I’ve been cancelled, basically, by the Chilmark Library. That has resulted in lots of people in Chilmark calling me and calling the library and saying, “We’re being deprived of Alan’s annual speech.” [Ebba Hierta, the Chilmark’s director, disputed Dershowitz’s characterization, and said, “Not one single person has contacted me to complain that they haven’t had a chance to hear Alan speak.”]

Or my favorite:

The Abraham Accords. So I played a central role—not a central role, an important role in that. I helped. So they were celebrating that at the White House. I was there anyway because it was the day after I made my speech in the Senate, so I was invited to come. They assigned seats. They sat me right in back of Mike Pompeo, who had been my former student at Harvard Law School. Trump made a very bad joke, and people laughed. I didn’t laugh. [He did.] I thought it was a bad joke. My wife laughed. I didn’t laugh. I patted him on the back, and I said, “Mike, this, too, will pass. You’ll be remembered for what you did in the Middle East.” That was it. That was the entire encounter. I don’t know Mike Pompeo—

I would never have imagined that a serious article about Dershowitz could ever be funny, but this one is hilarious.

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Comments

  1. Pierce R. Butler says

    Aww: Torture advocate made to feel slightly uncomfortable. Film at eleven!

  3. raven says

    Is this bloke someone we outside Merica should know about?

    No. You aren’t missing anything.

    Whenever I hear the name, Alan Dershowitz, is just assume he said something both stupid and wrong and never read any further.
    Credibility of zero.

  5. StevoR says

    Dunno about “should know about” but FWIW :

    an American lawyer known for his work in U.S. constitutional law and American criminal law.[1][2] From 1964 to 2013, he taught at Harvard Law School, where he was appointed the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law in 1993.[3][4] Dershowitz is a regular media contributor, political commentator, and legal analyst.

    Dershowitz is known for taking on high-profile and often unpopular causes and clients.[4][5][6] As of 2009, he had won 13 of the 15 murder and attempted murder cases he handled as a criminal appellate lawyer.[7] Dershowitz has represented such celebrity clients as Mike Tyson, Patty Hearst, Leona Helmsley, Julian Assange, and Jim Bakker.[8] Major legal victories have included two successful appeals that overturned convictions, first for Harry Reems in 1976, then in 1984 for Claus von Bülow, who had been convicted of the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny.[6] In 1995, Dershowitz served as the appellate adviser on the O. J. Simpson murder trial, part of the legal “Dream Team”, alongside Johnnie Cochran and F. Lee Bailey.[9] He was a member of Harvey Weinstein’s defense team in 2018[6] and of President Donald Trump’s defense team in his first impeachment trial in 2020.[5] He was a member of Jeffrey Epstein’s defense team and helped to negotiate a 2006 non-prosecution agreement on Epstein’s behalf.[10] One of Epstein’s underage victims accused Dershowitz of rape in a sworn affidavit and in the Netflix documentary Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, which resulted in a lawsuit and his own countersuit.[11][12]

    Dershowitz is the author of several books about politics and the law, including Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow Case (1985), the basis of the 1990 film; Chutzpah (1991); Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O.J. Simpson Case (1996); The Case for Israel (2003); and The Case for Peace (2005). His two most recent works are The Case Against Impeaching Trump (2018) and Guilt by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of #MeToo (2019).

    Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Dershowitz

  7. birgerjohansson says

    Got it: “Defended torture and the Israeli occupation”.
    Why isn’t he a republican senator yet?
    .
    He wrote about integrity and standing up for impopular views
    – I get it, every time I talk about n*ggers and the War of Northern Aggression I also have to endure a lot of liberal commie name-calling.

  8. Rich Woods says

    @birgerjohansson #2:

    Dershowitz’s high point was his defence of Trump, where he claimed that a sitting president can shape policy to do anything short of outright illegality in order to get re-elected, just as long as he thinks that his re-election is in the national interest. In other words, the entire potential of the government apparatus can be turned towards keeping a president in office. It’s a blank cheque for electoral dirty tricks.

  9. dstatton says

    Isaac Chotiner is expert in making the subject of his interviews look ridiculous.

  10. Reginald Selkirk says

    Laughter does not always mean you find the joke funny. You might find it amusing that everyone else is laughing, or you might be surprised that anyone would tell a joke so bad.

  11. birgerjohansson says

    OT
    Another whiny narcissist- Boris Johnson- had his last PMQ today but will remain PM for more than a month during which he will no doubt neglect his duties and party like crazy.
    As Britain faced the unprecedented heat wave he ignored a COBRA emergency meeting, so it is business as usual.

    This narcissist mismanaged a pandemic that killed 200,000 British citizens so even a massive turd like Dershowitz looks like small fry by comparison.

  12. bargearse says

    from the article

    Obviously, it’s about the audiences. The audiences are being deprived of my voice as the result of a deliberate cancellation decision. So it’s not me who’s being cancelled. It’s the audiences who are being cancelled.

    Aaaand, I think we’re done with Dershowitz. Hubris like that I can live without.

  13. PaulBC says

    I recently saw a headline that Dershowitz is a “pariah” on Martha’s Vineyard and I thought I had seen that years ago. Here it is: a story from 2018. (Not 2017?) He even uses the word “pariah” in a quote. There was also something on Martha’s Vineyard involving Larry David last year.

    I am not sure why this is a news story every year. Also, somebody remind me, was there ever something I was supposed to admire about Derpowitz?

  14. StevoR says

    @12. bargearse : Seems one of the things Deshowitz doesn’t get about so-called “cancel culture” is that the audience that cancels him. Its not that Dershowitz hasn’t been heard – its exactly because he’s been heard that he’s being cancelled. Well, that and the whole rape accusation thing..

    See :

    https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/7/30/20746983/alan-dershowitz-jeffrey-epstein-sarah-ransome-giuffre

    Of course, he wouldn’t be the first or last reichwing F-grade celebrity of sorts to be that clueless about it.