TRIGGERnometry - Alan Dershowitz Tells Truth About Trump Trial, Epstein, OJ & Harvard

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00:00:31.000 I'm a Biden supporter. I'm a liberal Democrat.

00:00:34.700 The idea that they're weaponizing the criminal justice system against a political opponent is extremely dangerous.

00:00:43.540 He committed suicide, you know, allegedly.

00:00:46.200 Did he? Well, no, that's what I was going to ask you. Did he kill himself?

00:00:49.060 He certainly didn't commit suicide alone.

00:00:51.500 Why was O.J. Simpson acquitted?

00:00:54.340 Because some black jurors were saying, we don't care if he's innocent or guilty.

00:00:59.520 He deserves to be acquitted on behalf of all the black people who have been wrongly convicted.

00:01:05.860 And Alan, reading between the lines, it sounds to me like you think he was guilty.

00:01:09.720 I can't comment as to whether he's guilty.

00:01:12.260 I can tell you a funny story about it.

00:01:14.100 Yeah, go on.

00:01:14.800 Tell us a funny story.

00:01:15.260 Okay.

00:01:18.640 Should he be deported for lying on his VTAP application?

00:01:23.760 Her taking an awful lot of prison time to stay silent, people will say some smoke there for that. 1.00

00:01:30.680 There's smoke, and there's certainly some fire as well.

00:01:33.760 The question is, how much fire?

00:01:36.980 Alan Dershowitz, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:39.080 Thank you.

00:01:39.400 So much to talk about.

00:01:40.720 Don't want to waste any time whatsoever.

00:01:43.020 The first thing, we're going to talk about many different subjects.

00:01:45.360 The first of which is, for the layman who is looking at Donald Trump, all of these court

00:01:51.700 cases, all of these things that are going on, most of us are not legal experts.

00:01:57.940 We don't really understand what's going on.

00:01:59.840 There are people who say it's all a sham.

00:02:01.700 There are people who say it's him being prosecuted for all the terrible things he's done.

00:02:06.000 Give us a kind of legal expert's view of it.

00:02:08.900 I wish I could.

00:02:09.740 I've been doing this 60 years.

00:02:11.080 I probably have more experience as a criminal defense attorney than any person in American

00:02:15.880 history, with all due modesty.

00:02:17.800 I've been teaching 50 years criminal law.

00:02:20.940 I've litigated more criminal appeals probably than anybody.

00:02:25.120 I've written 55 books, many of them on criminal justice.

00:02:28.900 I do not understand these cases.

00:02:32.300 Let's start with the New York case.

00:02:34.160 The New York case starts with a minor misdemeanor, writing down some corporate hack.

00:02:41.080 He writes down that legal expenses instead of saying legal expenses for hush money, for

00:02:48.940 Stormy Daniels.

00:02:50.600 So he writes legal expenses.

00:02:53.020 The statute of limitations expired on that.

00:02:55.560 So they resurrect the statute of limitations by claiming that in his mind, when the corporate

00:03:01.880 person filed the incomplete statement, he must have intended to use that to win the election.

00:03:09.780 So essentially, he defrauded the American public as if he's the first candidate for office ever

00:03:15.560 to defraud the public and tell them that he will do something that he wouldn't do.

00:03:19.820 The case is absurd.

00:03:21.260 I just don't get it.

00:03:23.620 And they're introducing all this extraneous evidence, which has no bearing on whether he

00:03:30.280 is responsible for that statement and whether the statute of limitations expired.

00:03:35.300 The goal is to get a conviction quickly in New York, where 85 percent of the jury pool doesn't

00:03:41.360 want it to run for president.

00:03:42.400 Uh, and then it'll be reversed on appeal, but it'll be too late.

00:03:46.520 He would not be charged with any crime if his name weren't Donald Trump and he weren't running

00:03:52.060 for president.

00:03:53.460 And there was a desire to keep him, uh, off the campaign trail, gag orders, et cetera.

00:04:00.280 So although I'm not a Trump supporter, I'm a Biden supporter, I'm a liberal Democrat, the

00:04:05.540 idea that they're weaponizing the criminal justice system against the political opponent

00:04:11.300 is extremely dangerous.

00:04:13.540 It was H.L.

00:04:14.120 Mekin who once said, they go after the SOBs first, they establish the bad precedent on their

00:04:19.140 back, and then they'll come after the rest of us.

00:04:21.000 That's why I'm interested in that.

00:04:22.140 So in, in your conception, this is open and shut case of political interference, criminal,

00:04:28.340 using the criminal justice system for political tactics.

00:04:32.240 This isn't anything to do with justice.

00:04:34.240 Nothing to do with justice.

00:04:35.240 It has everything to do with injustice, misusing the criminal justice system for partisan political

00:04:41.160 purposes.

00:04:41.640 Look, he's guilty of having waived a piece of classified material in front of a journalist

00:04:48.740 and saying, see, it's classified.

00:04:51.280 I could have declassified it.

00:04:52.920 That's a smoking gun, not a smoking gun, a smoking cigarette butt, because everybody does

00:04:58.740 that.

00:04:59.420 Biden did the same thing.

00:05:00.480 He showed a piece of classified material to his biographer.

00:05:03.180 You never go after people based on classified material being possessed.

00:05:10.200 He didn't give it to the Russians.

00:05:12.220 He didn't sell it.

00:05:13.600 So, you know, there are technical cases, but they never would have been brought heading up

00:05:18.620 and running for president. 0.60

00:05:19.600 Well, I don't want to overstate the case here, but what you're saying is horrific.

00:05:24.440 It's horrific.

00:05:25.200 You've got a fiercely contested upcoming election.

00:05:30.140 The country's polarized to hell.

00:05:32.340 And we see that talking to people from both sides of the political spectrum while in the

00:05:36.940 time that we've been here.

00:05:38.220 The last election was people claimed it was illegitimate.

00:05:44.020 It wasn't.

00:05:44.440 The last election was perfectly illegitimate.

00:05:46.300 I totally accept that.

00:05:48.500 But nonetheless, a lot of people believe that it wasn't wrongly, based on what you're saying.

00:05:54.380 So my point is, we are in a fever pitch moment.

00:05:57.280 And then you have people using the criminal justice system to prevent their political

00:06:02.880 opponent from being able to run.

00:06:04.400 It is horrific because if he loses, if Trump loses, he's not going to accept it.

00:06:09.160 He's going to say...

00:06:10.280 But why would he in this circumstance?

00:06:11.440 Yeah, he's going to say, I was defeated by misuse of the legal system, particularly the

00:06:17.620 polls show that some independent voters, we don't know how many, would be influenced

00:06:22.180 by a conviction, even if the conviction were based on a non-crime like in New York.

00:06:28.440 It would be so much better to allow people just to vote.

00:06:32.140 I have a constitutional right to vote against Donald Trump, and I don't want it interfered

00:06:37.240 with by the scales being influenced by the thumb of politics and the politicization of

00:06:45.720 the justice system.

00:06:46.820 So, look, I have a podcast and I award bananas on a scale of 10.

00:06:52.560 If you get 10, you're a banana republic. 0.82

00:06:54.160 And I've now awarded six bananas on the scale of 6 to 10 based on these criminal prosecutions

00:07:02.140 of the man running against the incumbent for president.

00:07:05.940 Look, I like Joe Biden.

00:07:07.600 I've known him for 44 years.

00:07:09.800 I met him in 1980.

00:07:11.440 I voted for him.

00:07:13.080 If he's going to win, I want to win legitimately.

00:07:15.540 Alan, what do you think that says about the United States that Donald Trump's political

00:07:23.140 enemies are waging war against him in this fashion?

00:07:28.460 First, people who hate Donald Trump think he's Hitler.

00:07:32.520 So when I defended Trump on the floor of the Senate against an unconstitutional impeachment,

00:07:37.760 I lost many of my liberal friends.

00:07:40.920 They said, you're Goebbels, you're Goering, you're a facilitator, you're going to help

00:07:46.460 this Hitler come to power. 0.91

00:07:47.920 They feel so strongly that they cannot think rationally about constitutional rights.

00:07:57.000 Many of my clients have had the same thing.

00:07:59.280 You cannot think rationally about Jeffrey Epstein. 0.99

00:08:02.180 He is the world's worst monster. 0.80

00:08:04.100 And so if I defended him, I must be a facilitator of his wrongdoing. 0.97

00:08:09.160 I think it's very hard for people to understand the role of a criminal defense lawyer.

00:08:14.520 It's interesting.

00:08:15.400 Everybody understands the role of the doctor in the emergency ward treating Jeffrey Epstein

00:08:19.640 or Donald Trump.

00:08:20.800 In fact, a good friend of mine is a doctor who treated Donald Trump and saved his life.

00:08:25.960 Nobody criticizes him.

00:08:28.020 But that's probably because they don't know his name.

00:08:30.020 Well, it could be.

00:08:31.660 But even if they did, I think they'd understand that.

00:08:34.540 Or if a priest or a rabbi or a minister ministered to a terrible mafiosa, they understand that.

00:08:42.360 But they don't understand the role of the criminal defense lawyer in providing a zealous

00:08:46.740 defense for horrible, horrible people.

00:08:49.360 Why do you think that is?

00:08:50.480 Why do you think that people look at Donald Trump?

00:08:53.280 And again, I'm not a fan of Trump, but I think we can objectively say there are far worse

00:08:58.380 people in the world than Trump.

00:09:00.400 What is it about him that sends people on the left, people who are liberals, and makes

00:09:06.980 them lose their mind?

00:09:08.160 People, conservatives too.

00:09:10.160 Centrist kind of white Anglo-Saxon conservatives, Rockefeller conservative Republicans, Reagan

00:09:17.860 conservative Republicans.

00:09:19.280 I feel the same way about Donald Trump because he is a disruptor.

00:09:24.180 Uh, he's provocative, um, he's hateful in his speech.

00:09:28.980 I mean, some of the things he has said about women, what he said about McCain, a great hero

00:09:34.500 who was captured, he said, he's no hero.

00:09:37.740 I don't like people who are captured.

00:09:39.440 But, you know, he lost. 0.94

00:09:41.100 So I never liked him as much after that because I don't like losers.

00:09:44.380 But, but Frank, Frank, let me get to him. 0.79

00:09:46.640 He hit me.

00:09:47.720 He's not a war hero.

00:09:49.060 He's a war hero.

00:09:49.540 He's a war hero.

00:09:50.300 Five and a half years.

00:09:51.120 He's a war hero because he was captured.

00:09:52.700 I like people that weren't captured, okay?

00:09:55.180 I hate to tell you.

00:09:56.360 Do you agree with that?

00:09:57.540 You know, he's made these outrageous statements that make you just hate him.

00:10:03.420 Uh, and, and you can't say that about Biden.

00:10:06.120 You know, nobody hates Biden.

00:10:08.060 You can dislike him.

00:10:09.220 You can disagree with him.

00:10:10.400 But, you know, he's not a hateable person.

00:10:13.440 Trump is hateable, lovable.

00:10:15.340 He's precisely the kind of charismatic person that people are very much afraid of.

00:10:22.880 I mean, it's, it's, you know, Boris Johnson wasn't even close to that, but probably came

00:10:28.260 as close as any modern British politician to that kind of extreme feelings.

00:10:34.320 Nigel Farage.

00:10:35.180 Yeah.

00:10:35.600 Nigel Farage.

00:10:36.480 He's, he's way closer to that position.

00:10:38.740 Oh, yeah, but he's not mainstream.

00:10:40.120 He was, he was never going to be prime minister, but yes.

00:10:43.780 Yeah.

00:10:44.080 Um, let me ask you something else, which is why are you a Biden supporter?

00:10:48.300 Why do you like Joe Biden?

00:10:50.020 I'm not a Biden supporter.

00:10:52.320 I'm just a Biden preferer.

00:10:55.060 Um, I don't love Biden.

00:10:57.280 I think he's a nice man.

00:10:59.100 I think he's a decent man.

00:11:01.400 Um, I wish he weren't running.

00:11:03.500 I wish a younger, more vibrant and, um, more savvy person were running.

00:11:09.540 But as an alternative, you know, I vote often for the least worst candidate.

00:11:16.420 Don't we all?

00:11:18.760 It's, it's interesting just touching back on what you were saying about people not understanding

00:11:24.420 the role of the defense attorney.

00:11:26.340 Yeah, yeah.

00:11:27.220 What do you, because I think, and push back if you disagree, I think that people are losing

00:11:32.820 faith in the justice system.

00:11:34.560 And they should be.

00:11:36.140 And they should be.

00:11:37.480 They should be losing faith in the justice system.

00:11:40.340 I'll give you a perfect example.

00:11:41.840 So Trump's on trial in New York.

00:11:45.000 It's not on television.

00:11:47.400 Every American should be watching that trial and seeing what's going on.

00:11:53.180 Instead, he's in a courtroom.

00:11:55.580 He has a gag order.

00:11:56.620 And we have to get the information about the case through the prism of CNN and the New York

00:12:02.220 Times.

00:12:03.880 And who no one trusts anyway.

00:12:05.760 Nobody trusts anybody anymore to give them the information.

00:12:09.540 So distrust is a good thing. 0.88

00:12:11.820 It's gotten to the point where it's kind of dangerous because there is no institution in

00:12:16.480 America today that's trusted.

00:12:17.760 It used to be the Supreme Court.

00:12:19.040 No more.

00:12:19.720 That's now regarded as highly politicized, particularly since the case of Bush versus

00:12:25.140 Gore, when the Supreme Court five to four, five Republicans to four Democrats gave the

00:12:30.360 presidency to the man who probably lost the election.

00:12:33.360 So we don't have trust in the system.

00:12:36.200 Having too little trust is safer in a democracy than having too much trust.

00:12:40.900 But if you don't trust the institutions at all, there is also a problem.

00:12:46.320 And right.

00:12:46.920 And who do you think is at fault for the fact that we've come to this point where the public

00:12:52.660 has such fundamental distrust in the institutions?

00:12:55.260 Because if you look at, for instance, the black community, I mean, Rodney King was that was

00:13:00.540 a horrible, horrible, horrible moment.

00:13:04.140 Is it a series of events like that?

00:13:06.460 Or was there something else that happened?

00:13:08.160 No, I think it's the social media that amplifies the extremes and create silos so that people

00:13:17.760 get only the information they want to get.

00:13:20.880 They want to see confirmation of their views.

00:13:23.860 They want to watch television like this, shaking their heads.

00:13:26.840 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:13:28.080 Thank you.

00:13:28.480 Yeah, yeah.

00:13:29.080 I really enjoy hearing that.

00:13:31.320 You know, they don't want to hear contrary views.

00:13:33.440 When I used to teach my students, I would start the first day, 18-year-old college students,

00:13:39.940 I would say, this is going to be a very difficult class for you.

00:13:42.920 Because every one of your views, everything you hold sacred, I'm going to challenge.

00:13:48.320 If you want to feel good, there's a spot down the road, go get them, you know.

00:13:52.600 But if you want every one of your views challenged, this is the class for me.

00:13:56.680 And occasionally, two or three students would drop out.

00:13:59.920 And then the students at the end of the class, they would be yelling at each other.

00:14:03.660 They'd be sweating.

00:14:04.780 Because I made them challenge every view that they had.

00:14:09.940 And that's what teaching should be about.

00:14:12.040 I never wanted to teach my students what to think.

00:14:14.560 I wanted to teach them how to think, how to be critical thinkers.

00:14:17.260 You don't see that today in many universities.

00:14:19.420 Today, universities, people major in their own ethnicity because they want to be confirmed.

00:14:29.220 You know, there is no, I guess, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant department.

00:14:34.860 But every other group has a department.

00:14:37.580 And you go to the department to be confirmed.

00:14:40.820 Yeah, we're great people.

00:14:42.080 We've done wonderful things.

00:14:44.020 Critical thinking is just not part of education today.

00:14:47.300 But exploring further, I want to come to university campuses because I think that we definitely need to talk about that.

00:14:52.320 But just finishing on what Francis is talking about, do you think that part of it is, yes, social media amplifies people's echo chamberiness and all of that.

00:15:01.500 But part of it also is this is the first time where the general public have had access to the inside of these institutions, which, as I'm sure you'll agree, have always had the level of corruption within them because this is human nature.

00:15:15.940 And now we have been able to see just how corrupt they are and have been.

00:15:21.260 And we are therefore quite disillusioned simply because of the truth that's been revealed here.

00:15:27.020 Yes, but that's a process that's been ongoing during the entire last century.

00:15:32.280 We started seeing institutions exposed in the early part of the 20th century.

00:15:38.000 And it was a developing concept.

00:15:40.700 It's become because of and that's a good thing that the social media does and the media in general does.

00:15:47.860 It gets to the inside of institutions.

00:15:50.280 It shows people eating the sausage, how it was made.

00:15:53.340 And you don't want to eat it when you know how it was made.

00:15:57.520 And so but I think also we used to have institutions that were above reproach of the church.

00:16:04.100 Look at what happened to the church, particularly the Catholic church.

00:16:07.380 Right.

00:16:07.680 And look at what's happened to the media.

00:16:10.300 We have all kinds of corruption and scandals about the media, the courts.

00:16:16.800 So every institution now is subject to challenge.

00:16:22.560 When done in proportion, it's a very healthy development.

00:16:27.240 Do you think that the way ultimately that this lack of trust and the way I see, I don't see any other way to get trust back into institutions other than for the institutions really to focus on being whiter than white, purer than pure, making sure there is as little corruption going on as possible.

00:16:45.020 I don't see any other way.

00:16:46.780 I don't think that's going to work.

00:16:48.180 I think people today want the institutions to serve their own parochial interests.

00:16:52.740 And the last thing people want is fairness.

00:16:56.100 The last thing people want is justice.

00:16:58.820 They want to win.

00:17:00.460 Donald Trump is the perfect example of that.

00:17:02.880 Does anybody think he wants fairness or justice?

00:17:05.660 He only wants to win.

00:17:07.120 He writes about that in his books.

00:17:09.260 And I think that approach has become very, very common.

00:17:15.200 What worries me so much is I see, I don't see the 1940s being replicated at all.

00:17:21.600 I see the 1920s and early 30s being replicated.

00:17:26.220 Remember in the 20s and 30s, all through Europe, the world was divided into communists and fascists.

00:17:31.780 The center really was squeezed out.

00:17:34.980 We're beginning to see that in the United States today.

00:17:37.880 The right is moving further right.

00:17:40.140 The left is moving further left.

00:17:41.980 The center is disappearing.

00:17:44.480 And people aren't talking to each other.

00:17:47.720 I don't know if the name William Buckley is well known in Great Britain,

00:17:51.200 but he was one of the great conservatives in modern American history.

00:17:54.640 And he and I used to have a series of debates.

00:17:56.520 We debated at Harvard.

00:17:57.900 We debated on television.

00:17:59.160 We debated in various forums.

00:18:01.200 And we disagreed about everything.

00:18:03.760 And then we had a drink afterward.

00:18:06.520 And I would say to him, you know, I really learned something from that point, but not that point.

00:18:10.760 You don't hear that anymore.

00:18:12.260 I am no longer invited to debate great issues as I was for many, many years.

00:18:18.860 People aren't interested in hearing both sides of issues.

00:18:22.900 Broadway's smash hit, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.

00:18:28.540 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love,

00:18:33.820 including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.

00:18:37.820 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here.

00:18:41.880 The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.

00:18:44.520 Now through June 7th, 2026, at the Princess of Wales Theatre.

00:18:48.840 Get tickets at Mirbish.com.

00:18:52.020 Do you think part of it as well is touching on the justice point?

00:18:55.740 And I'd be interested to hear what your opinion on this is.

00:18:58.420 It seems to me people don't want justice.

00:19:00.700 They want to win, but it goes deeper than that.

00:19:03.100 They want revenge at some perceived slight that they have been dealt.

00:19:08.080 Well, certainly Donald Trump is the master of that.

00:19:10.960 He has stated if he's elected, he's going to take revenge.

00:19:14.800 He said that, and people love it.

00:19:18.000 And so I think you're onto something, Francis, very much.

00:19:20.800 I think people have a lust, a deep sense.

00:19:24.760 They've been wronged.

00:19:26.340 They call it reparations sometimes.

00:19:28.840 But, you know, from a primitive point of view, it's revenge getting even.

00:19:34.620 Rodney King and O.J. Simpson.

00:19:37.740 Why was O.J. Simpson acquitted?

00:19:41.640 Well, at least in part because some black jurors, I was one of the lawyers in the case,

00:19:47.620 so I'm aware of all the facts in it, were saying, we don't care if he's innocent or guilty.

00:19:53.460 He deserves to be acquitted on behalf of all the black people who have been wrongly convicted.

00:19:59.220 There were other reasons.

00:19:59.960 The prosecution screwed up the case and made all kinds of mistakes and planted a piece of evidence

00:20:04.580 and we caught them.

00:20:05.460 But you cannot eliminate race and revenge from the equation.

00:20:10.960 That's it.

00:20:11.500 Did you?

00:20:12.480 Sorry, just to finish this point, because I saw this in the documentary, in the ESPN documentary,

00:20:18.560 after one of the jurors stood up and literally did a Black Power salute.

00:20:22.080 But we also had a juror named Anissa Aschenbach, who was a white woman who had previously been 0.56

00:20:29.080 on a jury and the original vote was 11 to 1 for acquittal.

00:20:34.260 And she turned them around and made them go 12 to nothing for conviction. 0.97

00:20:39.560 So the race alone didn't justify it.

00:20:42.960 Race alone probably would have produced a hung jury.

00:20:45.380 It was race coupled with the inadequacy of the prosecution that gave us a surprising 12 to

00:20:55.020 nothing victory in the case.

00:20:56.840 Do you know, and because you made the point, Alan, about that there should be cameras in

00:21:01.900 the Trump trial.

00:21:03.680 But if you think about it, the Simpson trial had cameras in it.

00:21:08.520 And what actually happened in that is that there were a lot of people who started to play

00:21:13.400 to the cameras.

00:21:14.280 And one of the criticisms about it was that it stopped being a court of law and started

00:21:18.740 to be something else more like.

00:21:22.360 Jerry Springer.

00:21:23.420 Yeah, exactly.

00:21:24.200 A soap opera.

00:21:25.980 Well, it's a reality, a reality TV program.

00:21:28.580 Part of the time.

00:21:29.620 I mean, I argued a number of motions there.

00:21:31.660 I didn't think about the camera.

00:21:32.760 I didn't even remember.

00:21:33.880 There was a camera.

00:21:34.680 I'm intensely focused on the judge.

00:21:37.160 But there was an interesting poll that was taken.

00:21:38.980 People who actually watched the trial on television were not surprised at the verdict.

00:21:44.620 The people who read about it in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times were shocked

00:21:49.020 because they didn't see, for example, the man who wrote the script for the TV show about

00:21:56.860 Simpson, a former student of mine, Jeffrey Toobin, left out the most important part of the case

00:22:03.360 that they took a sock and they poured, literally poured O.J. Simpson's blood on the sock and

00:22:10.240 the blood of one of his victims.

00:22:11.980 And the policeman who did it didn't realize that the blood from the test tube had EDTA,

00:22:17.280 a chemical not found in the human body, but found in test tubes.

00:22:20.420 We caught them.

00:22:21.860 And six of the jurors in post-interview said that was the reason they acquitted.

00:22:26.600 Jeffrey Toobin didn't even put that in his book or his reporting.

00:22:30.140 And so if you don't know that, then you say, my God, how could they have acquitted?

00:22:34.680 There was a mountain of evidence.

00:22:35.660 Yes, there was a mountain of evidence.

00:22:37.340 But one piece of that mountain was framed up by the government.

00:22:42.200 And jurors will say to themselves, if they could do that to one critical piece of evidence,

00:22:48.220 who knows what the rest?

00:22:49.320 I was in the courtroom.

00:22:50.640 I was sitting as far away from O.J. Simpson as I am from you when he tried on the glove.

00:22:54.720 And that was the most important moment at the trial.

00:23:00.020 It didn't fit.

00:23:00.980 He walked right up to the jurors and he said, it's too small.

00:23:04.200 Now, maybe it shrunk.

00:23:05.640 Maybe it's because it was gloves.

00:23:07.080 But he was able to look the jury in the eye and say, now, the prosecution could have easily

00:23:12.800 had him try the glove on outside of the courtroom, outside of the jury room, to see whether it

00:23:18.040 fit first and then make the decision.

00:23:20.020 They were so arrogant, they didn't do it.

00:23:21.500 So those issues, if you saw it on television, would at least explain how a jury might come

00:23:28.480 to a verdict of acquittal.

00:23:30.140 Remember, they didn't find him innocent.

00:23:32.280 They found that the government failed to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

00:23:35.540 And there's a difference.

00:23:36.380 And Alan, reading between the lines, it sounds to me like you think he was guilty.

00:23:39.880 I can't comment as to whether he's guilty.

00:23:42.600 I can tell you a funny story about it.

00:23:44.200 Tell us a funny story.

00:23:45.340 OK, Benjamin Netanyahu gets elected prime minister in 1995.

00:23:49.080 I knew him when he was a student at MIT.

00:23:52.580 So my wife and I happened to be in Israel.

00:23:54.600 I was writing a book.

00:23:55.860 And he calls me and says, bring your wife, your daughter over.

00:23:58.140 We'll say hello.

00:23:59.080 I'll take some pictures.

00:23:59.960 You know, new prime minister.

00:24:01.420 We go there.

00:24:02.820 We talk for a little while.

00:24:04.020 And he takes me into his own private little room and says, Alan, there's a question I've

00:24:08.160 just been dying to ask you.

00:24:09.860 I thought he would ask me about Iran, about, he said, did OJ do it?

00:24:13.400 So I said, Mr. Prime Minister, you know, I can't tell you that.

00:24:17.440 But I have a question I want to ask you.

00:24:19.680 Does Israel have nuclear weapons?

00:24:21.860 He said, no, you know, Alan, I can't tell you that.

00:24:24.800 I said, uh-huh.

00:24:26.400 So we both couldn't tell each other something.

00:24:28.940 Well, Israel's position in nuclear weapons, as I understand it, is we don't have them.

00:24:32.540 But if the state of Israel is a threat, then we will definitely use them. 1.00

00:24:36.000 We'll get them.

00:24:36.440 Yeah, right.

00:24:37.240 We'll definitely use them.

00:24:38.180 So OJ Simpson aside, we talked a little bit about what's happening on campus.

00:24:45.920 And I want to talk more about this.

00:24:47.980 We have had guest after guest on the show, from the Chris Rufus to James Lindsays, to

00:24:52.860 all kinds of people, explaining what's been happening on university campuses around the

00:24:58.100 West for the last 60 years.

00:25:01.460 What do you think has been happening?

00:25:03.700 You've been teaching there.

00:25:05.100 You see what's happening now.

00:25:06.640 Yeah.

00:25:06.800 The American public, I put it to you, are sort of waking up out of a bit of a stupor

00:25:11.700 and slumber about this and kind of going, we've got people chanting death to America.

00:25:15.480 That seems to be a problem.

00:25:17.640 How did we get from the places like Columbia and Harvard and other Ivy League?

00:25:22.320 Two words.

00:25:23.900 George Floyd.

00:25:25.540 The George Floyd killing was the single most important transformative event of the 21st century.

00:25:32.660 It changed everything.

00:25:34.540 Forget about whether he was murdered, I think he was.

00:25:37.260 Forget about whether the sentence was just, whatever.

00:25:39.440 It caused every major American institution to do a reckoning.

00:25:43.880 And it invented, or at least it expanded on, the concept of DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion,

00:25:52.380 intersectionality, black studies, a range of issues that divided the world into two, oppressors

00:26:01.020 and oppressed.

00:26:01.540 And now that's what's taught in many American universities. 0.99

00:26:05.120 If you're Jewish, you can be the poorest Sephardic, dark-skinned Jew in the world, you're an oppressor. 1.00

00:26:10.200 If you're an Arab, you can be the Amir of Qatar, you're oppressed.

00:26:14.660 And it really creates that zero-sum game division.

00:26:20.920 And I don't think you can understand what's going on on college campuses without that.

00:26:25.420 And, you know, there'll be, the pendulum swings widely and it will swing back a little bit.

00:26:29.240 But these demonstrations have not particularly enamored the demonstrators to many people

00:26:36.080 because they've gone too far in their violence, trying to, you know, intrude on Christmas celebrations,

00:26:43.660 trying to intrude on the Met Museum's gala, trying to do all those things.

00:26:49.600 But as long as the universities retain their commitment to this phony notion of diversity, equity, and inclusion,

00:26:58.080 why is it phony? Diversity under this concept means only skin-deep diversity.

00:27:02.820 It means only more blacks. 1.00

00:27:04.140 It doesn't mean diversity of opinion.

00:27:06.160 It doesn't mean diversity of views.

00:27:08.360 Equity is the opposite of equality.

00:27:10.740 It means you're not judged based on your ability or meritocracy.

00:27:14.000 It's the Martin Luther King nightmare.

00:27:16.780 The dream is a dream of a day when my children will be judged, not by the color of their skin,

00:27:21.140 but by the content of their character.

00:27:22.840 Equity, no. 0.94

00:27:24.120 You must be judged by the color of your skin.

00:27:26.080 We must get revenge.

00:27:28.060 We must get reparations.

00:27:30.300 So everything is a group decision.

00:27:32.620 And inclusion explicitly excludes Jews and Asians.

00:27:36.600 So, you know, the DEI bureaucracy, which is now billions of dollars on university campuses,

00:27:45.180 will never be dismantled.

00:27:47.720 And it's been the breeding ground for a lot of this division and a lot of this anti-Semitism.

00:27:53.140 Well, I'd agree with you about George Floyd being a huge catalyzing moment.

00:27:58.640 But I would put it to you that DEI oppressor oppressed, which is just Marxist, you know,

00:28:04.820 I come from the Soviet Union, so it's very easy to recognize once you've seen it before.

00:28:09.200 It's been taught on university campuses for 60 years now, isn't that?

00:28:13.100 It's been taught, but it's been largely not mainstream.

00:28:17.240 And now it's become mainstream.

00:28:20.480 And, you know, I spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union.

00:28:23.860 I defended dissidents.

00:28:24.980 I defended Natanzaransky. 0.77

00:28:26.500 I was there in the 1970s defending people on death row who were...

00:28:31.280 So I'm very familiar with the Soviet Union.

00:28:33.920 My family obviously comes from what would have been the Soviet Union.

00:28:39.740 And there's great similarities going on.

00:28:44.900 In Russia, even before the Soviet Union was established, there was what we'll call the

00:28:48.600 numerous classes.

00:28:49.620 That is, you were allowed to attend university in proportion to the number of people your

00:28:54.280 ethnic group had in the society.

00:28:56.620 So if you were Ukrainian, you could get in with this percentage. 0.89

00:28:59.940 If you were Jewish, 2%. 0.94

00:29:01.840 And they're returning to that now.

00:29:04.720 So that, for example, Jews at Harvard, when I was teaching there, 23% of the student body

00:29:09.600 was Jewish.

00:29:10.160 Now it's 9%.

00:29:11.260 Because they want to reduce the number of groups.

00:29:15.100 That's all part of DEI.

00:29:18.040 They want to reduce the numbers of every group to the number in the population itself.

00:29:22.740 And so that was borrowed from czarist Russia.

00:29:27.400 And it was one of the things that communists continued discrimination against various groups

00:29:33.360 and in favor of other groups.

00:29:34.680 And we're seeing that now.

00:29:36.360 The distinction now is between the privileged and the unprivileged.

00:29:39.660 And if you're privileged, you get no rights.

00:29:43.380 And if you're unprivileged, then you get all the rights.

00:29:46.980 And there's something to that.

00:29:49.060 We should give affirmative action to people who have made it individually by hard work.

00:29:55.020 But I would be included in that.

00:29:56.980 I grew up in a very poor family.

00:29:58.720 First person in my family ever to go to college.

00:30:01.260 And I made it based on my own abilities.

00:30:05.580 But I wouldn't get any.

00:30:06.760 I wouldn't ask for it.

00:30:07.780 But I wouldn't get any privileges.

00:30:09.460 And it's interesting, too.

00:30:10.760 Women were very much discriminated against, probably more than any other group.

00:30:16.120 And they just eliminated the discrimination without affirmative action.

00:30:20.080 And women have thrived. 1.00

00:30:22.800 You know, they've done better than men.

00:30:25.160 All you had to do was eliminate the discrimination when it came to women. 0.65

00:30:28.560 That hasn't been true of other groups.

00:30:31.000 And why do you think that nobody has pushed back on it?

00:30:35.780 Why do you think that we colleges and the administrators and the people in charge of these colleges haven't had the backbone to go, hang on a second.

00:30:46.800 Yeah.

00:30:47.040 This is insane.

00:30:47.880 Well, thank you for calling me nobody.

00:30:50.140 I have fought back since the 1970s.

00:30:53.160 I was the most liberal person on the law school faculty when I was appointed at age 25 in 1964.

00:31:00.680 And I fought against race-based affirmative action right from the beginning, even though I was the most liberal person on the faculty.

00:31:07.700 That was one thing.

00:31:08.920 Maybe it's because of my Jewish heritage and my recollection of the numerous classes and the discrimination that Jews suffer.

00:31:16.780 I fought back very much against that, but it was always a losing battle because the powers that be very much wanted more, quote, diversity.

00:31:28.760 I wish it were more diversity.

00:31:30.420 But when's the last time an American university recruited fundamentalist Christians, evangelical Christians, people who have a different view of abortion, different view of gay rights?

00:31:41.220 These are all views, you know, I'm very strongly supportive of gay rights and women's rights and all that, but there are people with different views, different views on guns.

00:31:50.480 And that's the kind of diversity universities lack and won't have.

00:31:55.100 And I have a friend who was the president of George Washington University, and he said to me the other day, the one criteria that doesn't exist for being president of a university is courage.

00:32:06.400 And 50 years of teaching at Harvard, I've never met a less courageous group of people than tenured faculty.

00:32:14.240 Alan, the question I think that's very important and very interesting in this situation is obviously a lot of the things that we're seeing at these protests are really pushing the boundaries of what some people might call acceptable speech.

00:32:26.500 And you have this interesting position where obviously this country is built on the First Amendment.

00:32:33.620 And yet at the same time, what do you do with people who burn the American flag, who chant death to America, who demand an intifada and all of these things?

00:32:42.800 How do people who really, truly are committed to the principle of free speech reconcile that kind of speech?

00:32:49.740 This is a testing time.

00:32:51.560 I am completely committed to free speech.

00:32:53.480 I think you can burn your own American flag.

00:32:55.420 You can't burn somebody else's American flag.

00:32:58.100 You can burn your own Israeli flag. 1.00

00:33:00.680 You can chant death to America. 0.93

00:33:04.180 But you can't incite people to do things right now, immediately.

00:33:09.140 The line between incitement on the one hand and advocacy on the other hand is a very difficult one.

00:33:15.360 Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, every idea is an incitement.

00:33:18.080 Of course, you know, Karl Marx caused many deaths.

00:33:22.520 So did the Bible.

00:33:23.200 But you can't ban Marx and you can't ban the Bible.

00:33:27.040 So you have to tolerate a lot of really, really bad free speech.

00:33:31.120 But you have to answer it.

00:33:33.100 You have to respond to it.

00:33:35.000 Universities shouldn't be engaging in speech that's negative to students.

00:33:41.600 Now, there are limits.

00:33:43.660 I'll give you an example.

00:33:44.940 There's a professor at Columbia University.

00:33:47.520 His name is Joseph Massad.

00:33:49.860 And before he got tenure, he had the following exchange with a student.

00:33:54.040 Called on the student.

00:33:54.800 He's teaching a course in the Middle East politics.

00:33:57.180 The student started answering.

00:33:58.180 He said, I sense an Israeli accent.

00:34:00.540 Yeah.

00:34:00.840 He says, I'm Israeli. 0.92

00:34:01.940 I will not allow you to speak in my class unless you admit you're a war criminal. 0.50

00:34:06.300 Now, a teacher should not be allowed to do that.

00:34:09.860 And I have a rule, a test.

00:34:12.860 I call it the Ku Klux Klan test. 0.95

00:34:14.620 That is, if you're a First Amendment believer, then anything you think is okay for Hamas supporters has to be okay for Ku Klux Klan supporters. 0.74

00:34:22.780 You can't make a difference between the Qiyafah and the hood. 0.99

00:34:26.580 The Constitution doesn't permit that.

00:34:28.820 Would you permit, as a university, a teacher to advocate lynching of blacks?

00:34:33.140 No, you never would under any circumstances. 0.99

00:34:36.460 So would you then permit a teacher to advocate the raping of Jewish women in Israel? 0.99

00:34:43.420 You have to have the same rule. 0.71

00:34:45.620 Universities are not as bound by the absolutes of the First Amendment.

00:34:50.580 There are time, manner, and place restrictions.

00:34:53.960 For example, you're not allowed to walk into a church and yell, scream in the middle of the sermon, God is dead, God is dead.

00:35:00.860 You can say that outside the church, but you can't disrupt.

00:35:04.560 And in universities, there are certain things that maybe you can't say. 0.95

00:35:08.120 If you're a Klansman who believes in lynching, and you're a student, and you come into class wearing a hood, and you're sitting next to a black kid, that kid can't learn. 0.71

00:35:19.040 So there are reasonable restrictions that universities can place on faculty and on students, but they're very, very limited.

00:35:28.180 Well, very much within that conversation, can Jewish students learn while their fellow students are chanting for an intifada right next to them? 0.61

00:35:36.620 They have to learn to have a thick skin.

00:35:40.800 Freedom of speech requires a thick skin of everybody. 0.94

00:35:45.480 Now, if somebody is leaning over you and harassing you and surrounding you, no.

00:35:51.500 But if somebody is holding a sign, intifada, I think you have to tolerate that.

00:35:57.500 Yeah, it's a very principled approach because there's a lot of people who would actually vehemently disagree with you.

00:36:03.700 Yes, they do.

00:36:04.380 They do when they write to me all the time.

00:36:05.900 And they say, I'm a sellout.

00:36:07.920 Remember, I also defended the right of Nazis to march through Skokie, Illinois, even though the neighborhood was a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors.

00:36:17.500 The First Amendment is very difficult.

00:36:20.100 And it's very hard to live with.

00:36:22.360 I know I've been defamed, attacked, libeled, slandered all over the place for my views and my actions.

00:36:33.560 And, you know, you take appropriate action when you have to and when you can.

00:36:37.640 But mostly you just develop a thick skin.

00:36:40.780 I'm used to it.

00:36:42.100 My family is not so used to it.

00:36:44.340 And, you know, they are often the victims of this kind of defamation.

00:36:47.860 But that's what makes America so special, is that you have this First Amendment.

00:36:53.100 Because I look at what's going on in the UK regarding speech.

00:36:56.980 Scotland, I don't know if you've been following this, introducing hate speech laws, criminalizing public performance.

00:37:03.200 And you go, we wouldn't have these problems in the UK if we had what you had in this country.

00:37:09.500 Oh, you'd have variations of the problems because most people in America don't believe in the First Amendment.

00:37:15.280 It's free speech for me, but not for thee.

00:37:17.000 And even in Israel, they now banned Al Jazeera.

00:37:21.240 That was a terrible mistake.

00:37:22.920 You come up with an alternative newspaper that answers Al Jazeera, but you don't ban it.

00:37:28.880 And so I am a strict First Amendment advocate.

00:37:34.000 And almost there are very few people who will apply the First Amendment to their enemies.

00:37:40.340 They really love the First Amendment when it protects their speech, but they don't love it when it protects their enemy's speech.

00:37:46.200 And it's always been the case.

00:37:48.040 Look, you know, human beings have always been biased.

00:37:50.260 We always have confirmation bias.

00:37:52.080 That has always been the case.

00:37:53.920 But do you think that people's faith in free speech and belief in free speech has been degraded over your lifetime?

00:38:00.360 Without a doubt.

00:38:01.220 Without a doubt.

00:38:01.840 And the reason is because free speech has become much more dangerous and much more horrible and the Internet.

00:38:10.500 And so when I grew up, free speech wasn't a big deal.

00:38:13.720 You know, it meant some nut in the street corner or somebody, you know, in Hyde Park holding a sign.

00:38:21.860 Who cares about that?

00:38:23.480 But today with social media and this university, you know, you cannot get a university.

00:38:32.560 You can't get 10 people today to protest what China is doing to the Uyghurs.

00:38:36.840 You can't get five people to protest what Syria did when they gassed their own people. 0.98

00:38:41.680 You can't get one person to stand up on behalf of the Kurds, the statelessness. 1.00

00:38:46.220 You can't get many, many people to protest Russia in the Ukraine.

00:38:50.480 But you mentioned Israel and Jews.

00:38:52.160 10,000 students who don't know anything about the Middle East will come out and join the chants

00:38:58.040 and become zombie-like lemmings who are joining the cult of their professors.

00:39:03.720 How do you explain that?

00:39:04.640 Well, it has to do with over 2,000 years of history of Jew hatred.

00:39:10.500 Jews are successful and they fit into everything that DEI hates. 1.00

00:39:15.840 Jews have succeeded through meritocracy.

00:39:18.500 And the opposite of DEI is meritocracy, making it on the merits.

00:39:23.440 You don't want people to make it on the merits.

00:39:25.700 Jews are the poster children for now it's called, you know, privilege, meritocracy, success,

00:39:32.060 Nobel Prizes, all of that.

00:39:34.480 I wrote an article recently and I said, what happened in the Soviet Union is going to happen 0.98

00:39:38.760 in America.

00:39:39.320 What happened to the Soviet Union is Jews couldn't succeed when they had to be picked by somebody 1.00

00:39:43.720 else to do something.

00:39:45.140 But if they could do it on their own, play the violin, play chess, develop mathematical

00:39:49.960 theories, they were incredibly successful.

00:39:53.440 The same thing is going to happen in the United States.

00:39:55.880 Jews are not going to be picked to be admitted to Harvard Law School and Harvard College.

00:39:59.100 They're not going to be picked to work in, you know, fancy, fancy jobs, but they'll still

00:40:04.540 be able to succeed at things that the free market economy allows them to succeed in.

00:40:09.640 So that's one reason.

00:40:11.100 Jews love the free market economy.

00:40:13.240 And of course, people from the other side hate the free market economy.

00:40:17.980 They'd much prefer the Soviet-controlled economy, which imposes restrictions.

00:40:24.380 We're talking about the free market economy because you look at universities.

00:40:27.740 The Ivy Leagues and also the other ones, you know, Yale, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

00:40:34.980 Do you think that these institutions can be saved or do we need a free market solution

00:40:41.980 like the University of Austin and others to come and challenge them?

00:40:46.400 Absolutely.

00:40:47.280 We need new institutions.

00:40:49.600 I think that Ivy League universities will never be the same.

00:40:52.980 Um, I, I know lots of young people who are now applying to great universities, you know,

00:40:59.580 Emory, Duke, um, uh, universities in the South, University of Florida, University of Miami.

00:41:06.180 They are becoming for many first choice universities over Harvard and Yale.

00:41:11.840 Look, I was educated in a free college, City University of New York, um, which provided education

00:41:18.660 for immigrant kids.

00:41:20.420 Almost everybody in my class was first generation.

00:41:23.160 We got as good an education at Harvard, but we didn't get the elite status.

00:41:27.120 And I think the elite status is disappearing from many American universities.

00:41:31.220 And I think we're going to see, um, um, excellence in universities spread more widely around the

00:41:38.320 country instead of being in any way limited to a few elite colleges and universities.

00:41:43.420 Because it's going to be a case, you know, if people, if these elite colleges, uh, colleges

00:41:48.300 are churning out a certain type of person with a certain type of political view, with a certain

00:41:54.180 type of attitude, there's going to be a lot of people going, well, look, if you're ultra

00:41:59.600 left wing and you believe in the oppressor oppressed dynamic, I don't really want you

00:42:05.040 working at my bank.

00:42:06.480 I think that's happening already.

00:42:08.220 Just the other day, I saw 13 federal judges wrote a letter to Columbia Law School saying

00:42:13.040 we're no longer hiring law clerks from Columbia.

00:42:15.960 We don't like what you're teaching your students.

00:42:18.700 That may be an overgeneralization because there are some kids who are rebelling against what's

00:42:22.920 being taught at Columbia and they should be hired.

00:42:25.800 But I do think that we're going to see, um, some second hard looks at some of these universities.

00:42:33.380 And I think here I'm in conflict with some of my civil liberties friends.

00:42:37.920 I want to see the protesters, even those who are perfectly exercising their first amendment

00:42:43.800 rights, I want their names published.

00:42:46.080 I don't want them to be able to wear masks unless they're afraid of COVID.

00:42:49.920 But if they're just afraid of being identified, I think we, the public have a right to know

00:42:54.300 who you are.

00:42:55.040 If you support rape, if you support Hamas, if you support death to America, I want to 1.00

00:43:00.960 know that. 0.96

00:43:01.540 And I think every, for example, law firm should know that because would you, if you were a

00:43:06.400 client, want to be represented by somebody who supported Hamas rapes?

00:43:10.780 No.

00:43:11.060 So I think transparency cuts both ways and it should be required of protesters that they

00:43:18.080 identify themselves.

00:43:19.120 I must say, I find that thing about law for the judges not hiring clerks very, very troubling.

00:43:26.920 Me too.

00:43:27.520 Because it's a scattergun approach.

00:43:29.620 You're punishing people who haven't done anything wrong.

00:43:31.700 And in many cases, probably are horrified by what other students in their classes are doing

00:43:36.020 in this blanker way.

00:43:37.320 That seems to me completely out of order.

00:43:38.720 No, I completely agree with that.

00:43:40.320 But I can understand the judge asking a law clerk, are you a member of the National Lawyers

00:43:46.580 Guild, second largest bar association in America?

00:43:49.120 On October 7th, not October, even 8th, they issued a statement supporting what Hamas had

00:43:54.720 done.

00:43:55.420 And then they went on and on and on and days later.

00:43:58.520 I would, if I were a lawyer, a client, a judge, ask an applicant, do you support the National

00:44:05.100 Lawyers Guild approach to Hamas?

00:44:07.360 And if he said yes, I would say, I wish you great luck to getting a job with some, you

00:44:13.040 know, left wing or whatever, but I'm not hiring you.

00:44:16.180 So I think I have a right to know that.

00:44:17.600 That's an individual approach.

00:44:18.840 That's exactly right.

00:44:19.420 The blanket approach worries me tremendously.

00:44:21.160 I agree with you.

00:44:21.560 Just banning people from certain institutions.

00:44:24.240 I understand why people are thinking about it, because they're going, well, these institutions,

00:44:27.960 I mean, what the hell is going on in there?

00:44:29.400 Yeah.

00:44:29.920 But even so, there will be lots of perfectly talented, capable students.

00:44:33.840 But let me tell you where I might disagree with you.

00:44:35.820 For example, I used to contribute to Harvard, where I taught for years, to Yale, where I went

00:44:40.520 to law school, and to Brooklyn College.

00:44:41.840 But I no longer contribute to any of those institutions.

00:44:45.380 Now, you might say, but it hurts students who are on the good side of those issues.

00:44:51.680 But how else do I do this?

00:44:53.320 That's different.

00:44:53.760 Yeah.

00:44:53.920 So I think there are matters of degree.

00:44:56.640 Of course.

00:44:57.100 Of course.

00:44:57.540 But there's also the other side as well, which would say, maybe it is a responsibility for

00:45:04.560 people who want to challenge this system to go into it and work from it in the inside.

00:45:09.660 And so many people are doing that.

00:45:11.360 Many of the large contributors to University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, MIT, are conditioning

00:45:18.040 their grants to the school doing something about making it safe for people with opposing

00:45:24.920 points of view.

00:45:25.880 And that's a point that I agree with that.

00:45:28.920 The problem is, fighting from inside is very difficult.

00:45:33.020 I taught at Harvard Law School for 50 years.

00:45:35.120 There are 100 professors at Harvard Law School.

00:45:36.980 I do not know of a single one, not a single one who has stood up for the Jewish students 1.00

00:45:42.640 against these attacks, including a physical attack by a member of the Harvard Law Review.

00:45:48.440 And a lot of these professors call me and they say, they whisper, Helen, thank you so much

00:45:53.320 for speaking out.

00:45:54.340 Why don't you speak out?

00:45:55.520 Well, I don't want to lose, you know, my peers and my students.

00:46:00.220 I don't want to divide students.

00:46:01.780 So you can't count on inside change.

00:46:05.640 For example, when Claudine Gay was being charged with plagiarism and all of that, law school 1.00

00:46:11.240 faculty stood behind her.

00:46:12.720 They didn't want to rock the boat.

00:46:16.060 They have a good job.

00:46:16.940 They have sinecures.

00:46:17.740 They have tenure.

00:46:18.780 So fighting from within requires courage.

00:46:23.040 And courage is not a qualification for being a professor at Harvard University.

00:46:27.040 Does that piss you off, the lack of backbone with some of these people?

00:46:30.680 It pisses me off, but I can't say it disappoints me only because I know them and I'm not at

00:46:38.640 all surprised.

00:46:40.580 But I think often of, I just bought a letter from Albert Einstein, written by Albert Einstein

00:46:47.120 in 1945.

00:46:48.520 I own it.

00:46:49.080 It's a great letter.

00:46:49.880 And in it, he says, the finer people, the better, oh, he used the word, the better people

00:46:57.820 of Germany are as responsible for Nazism as the Nazis themselves because of their silence. 0.79

00:47:05.220 And I often think of my friends and colleagues and what they would do if we ever got a return

00:47:12.240 to those horrible days.

00:47:14.300 How many of them would stand up?

00:47:15.760 How many of them wouldn't?

00:47:17.080 I'm not comparing where we're at now with Nazism at all, but I am comparing it to the 1.00

00:47:22.700 20s and 30s.

00:47:24.120 Well, right.

00:47:24.380 You're not comparing it.

00:47:25.320 In fact, I would argue it's a lot easier to stand up and say something now than it would

00:47:29.420 have been in Germany under Hitler.

00:47:31.120 And yet people aren't doing it.

00:47:32.500 There's no question.

00:47:33.180 I went to see, with my wife the other day, we went to see a revival of Cabaret.

00:47:36.960 Oh, great.

00:47:37.840 Wonderful.

00:47:38.500 Yeah.

00:47:38.580 It could have been written today because it's all about what happens when the mood of

00:47:45.300 a country changes and how many people go along with it.

00:47:49.580 I'm seeing a lot of people going along uncritically with some awful things today.

00:47:55.300 You make it sound as if Harvard is doomed, Alan.

00:47:58.460 If you're talking about, you know, what's happening in the legal faculty, the people who run this

00:48:06.140 not having a backbone, the first prerequisite for change is the desire for change.

00:48:12.860 And if there is no desire for change...

00:48:14.960 I disagree with you.

00:48:16.800 Desire for change is meaningless unless there's action.

00:48:20.140 I think a lot of the faculty at Harvard desires change.

00:48:24.180 They're just not willing to put their bodies on the line to bring it about.

00:48:27.360 All that's necessary for evil to prevail, said Burke, is for good people to remain silent.

00:48:32.940 And a lot of good people at Harvard are remaining silent.

00:48:36.620 So, yeah, there's the desire to change, but there's not the willingness to sacrifice,

00:48:42.100 to put things at risk to change.

00:48:44.140 That's what's necessary for change.

00:48:45.940 Well, speaking of evil thriving when good men do nothing, there was one other subject

00:48:50.980 we wanted to talk to you about, which is a former client of yours, Jeffrey Epstein.

00:48:55.160 And this guy, he never got a trial in which he was properly convicted of all the things

00:49:00.180 of which he was accused, but I think it's widely accepted now that he was a pretty evil

00:49:04.040 man who got up to some terrible things.

00:49:06.460 And you were his lawyer.

00:49:07.520 I was.

00:49:08.160 I was his lawyer before it was known how many terrible things he had done,

00:49:11.940 but I would have been his lawyer even in the face of all the terrible things.

00:49:15.340 For me, the more terrible the charges against you, the more unpopular you are,

00:49:20.340 the more likely I will be to take your case.

00:49:22.820 Can I take your number?

00:49:26.120 You remember there's a scene in the film Reversal of Fortune about my representation

00:49:33.340 of Klaus Mambulo, where I say, you have one thing going in your favor.

00:49:38.720 Everybody hates you.

00:49:39.980 And he says, well, that's a beginning.

00:49:41.500 And of course, as a tenured professor who has no economic concerns and not worried about

00:49:51.680 my life, and I was teaching my students over and over again, you have to defend the most

00:49:58.460 deplorable, always using John Adams' defense of the people accused of the Boston Massacre,

00:50:04.880 which was so unpopular. 0.98

00:50:06.180 How could I be a hypocrite and not do it? 0.96

00:50:09.700 I can't just preach it. 0.82

00:50:11.240 So I do defend people like that, whether they be Nazis or whether they be Jeffrey Epstein,

00:50:16.480 whether they be Donald Trump.

00:50:18.320 I'm going to continue to do that as long as the good Lord gives me the strength and the energy to do it.

00:50:24.100 Well, just coming back to Jeffrey Epstein himself,

00:50:27.780 what did you know and what did you believe about what he was up to?

00:50:33.120 He called me.

00:50:34.740 I didn't know anything about anything like that.

00:50:37.720 My wife knew him.

00:50:38.960 She had no suspicion.

00:50:40.180 She didn't like him because of his sexist attitudes.

00:50:43.340 And my children didn't like him.

00:50:44.700 And I didn't love him.

00:50:46.340 But he was a bright guy.

00:50:47.960 But we knew nothing.

00:50:49.300 In fact, I allowed my grandchildren and us to stay in his house in Palm Beach a year before all of this

00:50:57.140 stuff came out.

00:50:57.960 And there were no pictures of young women or anything like that.

00:51:01.740 It was an ordinary house.

00:51:03.200 So we knew nothing. 0.88

00:51:04.320 And then he called me one day and said, I've been accused of having sex with two underage, 0.82

00:51:09.800 having massages and two underage girls.

00:51:12.380 And so I represented him at that point and tried to negotiate a deal.

00:51:16.340 At that point, there were only three potential victims, one above age and two who were 17.

00:51:22.300 In that area, I could be wrong about, it may have been one underage and two, 18 or 19.

00:51:29.000 But they were young women in that period.

00:51:31.320 And I defended him.

00:51:32.340 And what I did is I put together research on what people got sentences for that kind of thing

00:51:39.120 all through Florida and presented it to the state attorney.

00:51:42.500 I had no idea of the multiples that were involved.

00:51:45.800 And I ended up representing him in that case only.

00:51:50.360 And then I terminated my representation and my friendship with him once he served his term.

00:51:55.620 Have you ever been on his island?

00:51:56.980 Yes.

00:51:57.440 My wife and I were invited to his island when he first bought it.

00:52:00.880 We were vacationing in the Caribbean in St. Thomas or somewhere.

00:52:06.700 No, no, no.

00:52:07.200 In Martinique.

00:52:08.840 And he said, I just bought an island.

00:52:11.500 And he sent a small plane over.

00:52:13.740 And my wife and I and Professor Porter at Harvard Business School and his wife and one

00:52:20.440 other couple went and had dinner on the island.

00:52:23.240 There was nobody there.

00:52:24.240 And it was mostly not even built up.

00:52:26.920 And that was the only time I was ever on the island.

00:52:29.260 I was never on the island with any young people or anything like that.

00:52:33.780 But I was on the island.

00:52:35.020 Yeah.

00:52:35.700 Alan, what type of man was he?

00:52:38.220 Because you look at, you know, you look at his crimes and what he did.

00:52:42.920 But you also look at the company he kept.

00:52:45.380 Now, this must have been a man who was incredibly successful and highly charismatic.

00:52:50.700 There must have been, for want of a better term, something special about this man.

00:52:54.880 There was.

00:52:55.360 He was very clever.

00:52:57.980 Clever and shrewd.

00:52:58.920 I'll tell you a story that will give you the whole...

00:53:02.380 This is a name dropping story.

00:53:04.100 So I'm on Martha's Vineyard.

00:53:05.140 I was very popular on Martha's Vineyard.

00:53:06.920 And so I'm invited to have dinner with Caroline Kennedy and her husband and President Bill

00:53:12.040 Clinton and Hillary Clinton and another couple.

00:53:15.600 And we were having dinner at Caroline Kennedy's home.

00:53:18.980 And he's president.

00:53:20.100 And the Secret Service comes over to him and puts a phone next to him and says, call.

00:53:23.220 And he walks away for about 10 minutes, 15 minutes, maybe.

00:53:28.180 And he's on the phone jabbering away.

00:53:29.540 I don't know who he's on the phone with.

00:53:30.800 And then he turns the phone to me and says, somebody wants to talk to you.

00:53:35.700 And it's Jeffrey Epstein, who had been talking to President Clinton for 15 minutes.

00:53:41.440 And he just wanted...

00:53:42.340 He heard I was there.

00:53:42.980 He wanted to say hello.

00:53:44.920 Clinton knew him.

00:53:47.320 Everybody knew him.

00:53:48.960 Bill Gates knew him.

00:53:51.080 He helped people get rich.

00:53:52.980 Not me.

00:53:54.220 But he gave advice to people.

00:53:58.340 He met Fidel Castro.

00:54:01.320 And he was zealot from the Woody Allen movie or whoever else you might think about from literature.

00:54:10.400 He did have some special qualities.

00:54:15.160 He introduced me to the Minister of Treasury in Great Britain, whose name I don't remember.

00:54:24.740 And other people from Great Britain.

00:54:27.660 He introduced me to, obviously, Prince Andrew and to Lady Rothschild and to Lord Rothschild.

00:54:35.300 And he introduced me to Harvard professors who I didn't know.

00:54:39.800 For example, the church, the man who decoded the genome.

00:54:44.020 So he was somebody you really wanted to get to know and join his soirees, his dinner.

00:54:51.500 Nobody knew about...

00:54:53.120 I mean, not the president of Harvard who asked me to meet with him.

00:54:56.360 Nobody knew about his extracurricular activities.

00:54:59.240 He kept them completely, completely secret.

00:55:02.880 Does it surprise you, though, that as a result of what happened to him, the fact that he committed suicide, you know, allegedly?

00:55:11.940 Did he?

00:55:12.500 Well, no.

00:55:12.920 That's what I was going to ask you.

00:55:14.020 Did he kill himself?

00:55:14.820 He certainly didn't commit suicide alone.

00:55:17.480 Certainly there was government involvement.

00:55:20.120 There was people who were guards facilitated the suicide.

00:55:26.340 My theory is he probably paid them off.

00:55:28.600 But I'm still suspicious because he had a chance of getting out.

00:55:31.520 He had a chance of getting bail.

00:55:33.360 He had good lawyers at that point.

00:55:36.380 And he killed himself, if he killed himself, before the court had made decisions that might have freed him.

00:55:43.920 So I am a little suspicious, but I don't know how they could have gotten to him.

00:55:47.680 But it's possible.

00:55:48.300 Do you think that whether he killed himself or whether, as you put it euphemistically, he killed himself with other people involved,

00:55:56.000 he did so because the people whose dirty laundry would have been aired had he gone to court, they didn't want that?

00:56:07.360 I'll tell you why I don't think so.

00:56:09.140 You don't think so?

00:56:09.740 I don't think that's right because he had no credibility.

00:56:12.640 Nobody would believe him.

00:56:13.960 And in any event, whatever credibility he had were in his documents.

00:56:17.180 So we know that who was on his airplane.

00:56:20.420 We know who was in his home.

00:56:21.960 I don't know what more he could have said that would have endangered other people.

00:56:27.320 But it's possible.

00:56:28.420 Alan, with all respect, that is the first thing you've said where I cannot possibly believe that you believe that. 0.91

00:56:33.560 Because if Jeffrey Epstein went on the witness stand and said, I don't know, Prince Andrew is a pedophile or Bill Clinton is a pedophile.

00:56:41.880 You think anybody would have believed that? 0.80

00:56:43.240 I think a lot of people would have believed it.

00:56:45.080 They would have printed it, but I'm not sure.

00:56:46.520 I think there are a lot of people who would have believed that.

00:56:49.600 But even if you say, like, oh, they got off, the reputational damage from that is huge. 0.93

00:56:55.680 If he had gone on the stand and said, Bill Clinton is a pedophile who sleeps with underage girls, that's it.

00:57:04.260 Clinton's reputation is finished. 0.95

00:57:06.320 So, look, that happened to me.

00:57:07.760 I had one woman who accused me of I never met, never heard of, and finally admitted that she, you know, may have misidentified me and confused me with somebody else.

00:57:15.940 But it hurt my reputation, even though it was completely uncorroborated and one person with a long, long history of.

00:57:24.660 Accepted.

00:57:25.100 But that's not Epstein.

00:57:26.220 Yeah, no, I understand that.

00:57:27.300 That's a different thing.

00:57:28.120 But it was an Epstein person.

00:57:29.620 It was an Epstein person.

00:57:30.480 What we're getting at is your argument that nobody would have believed him had he accused very famously.

00:57:35.620 It doesn't matter whether you believe it or not.

00:57:37.260 It's just if you're accused.

00:57:39.080 That's certainly a plausible point.

00:57:40.680 But, boy, when you think of all the people that were accused, the former majority leader of the Senate, George Mitchell, the former ambassador to the United Nations, Cousteau's granddaughter, they were all accused of sexual misconduct and Prince Andrew.

00:58:01.360 But, of course, Prince Andrew was his own worst enemy.

00:58:04.440 That interview that he gave, I just don't understand why he gave it and the circumstances under which he gave it.

00:58:13.080 And then he settled the case.

00:58:14.600 In my case, I obviously refused to pay a nickel.

00:58:18.440 And the woman backed down eventually and said she may have mistaken me for somebody else.

00:58:23.300 But you're right.

00:58:24.280 It does reputational damage whether you're guilty or not.

00:58:28.640 I wrote a book by that title called Guilt by Accusation.

00:58:32.360 And today in America, if you're accused, you're guilty.

00:58:36.900 Interestingly enough, the Me Too movement, which is such a part of that, has disgraced itself recently because their motto now is Me Too, except if you're a Jew.

00:58:47.080 Believe every woman who says she was raped, except for the women who claim they were raped by Hamas, even though there's massive physical evidence. 0.75

00:58:57.580 So many people from the Me Too movement are saying, well, where's your evidence?

00:59:01.740 She's dead.

00:59:02.560 How can she testify? 0.97

00:59:03.900 We don't believe her.

00:59:05.160 You know, show the evidence.

00:59:06.620 The Me Too movement has exposed itself as politically corrupt.

00:59:10.080 And yeah, and touching on Me Too, that is another movement which it started off and it seemed incredibly noble.

00:59:18.160 Right.

00:59:18.500 And, you know, the first few people it went after, you were like, good, I'm glad.

00:59:22.440 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:59:22.880 Now, how much of that do you think is as a result of social media and the urge and the lust to kind of get justice or revenge, as it were?

00:59:34.520 And how much of that is due to the fact that when it comes to sex-based crimes, they are very difficult to prove and most of them don't result in a conviction?

00:59:43.820 All of that.

00:59:45.020 You're absolutely right.

00:59:46.100 Sex-based crimes are the hardest to get a conviction.

00:59:48.480 But what happened to the Me Too movement has happened to many movements.

00:59:53.060 I think it was Eric Hoffer, the philosopher, who once said, starts as a movement, then it becomes a cause, then it becomes a business, then it becomes a racket.

01:00:03.640 The Me Too movement has become a racket.

01:00:05.440 It's now a vehicle for extortion.

01:00:07.580 And you see it over and over and over again.

01:00:10.240 And so one has to look at the good things, and people who make false accusations of sexual misconduct are destroying the credibility of people who are genuine victims.

01:00:22.820 And so they are the enemies of truth and justice.

01:00:26.640 And one has to make sharp distinctions between those who are telling the truth and those who are using the Me Too movement to extort money.

01:00:35.100 I have a friend who's a lawyer in Hollywood, and she said for a period of time she was writing $100,000 checks once a week on behalf of famous people who were being falsely accused.

01:00:46.340 But their publicist said, write the check, pay the hush money, better than having an article in the newspaper.

01:00:53.840 And so that was spreading and spreading and spreading.

01:00:56.000 So both are evils, and both have to be constrained.

01:00:59.320 I'd love to get your opinion, actually, on what's happening with Weinstein at the moment.

01:01:03.800 Because obviously, the allegations were awful.

01:01:07.180 There were convictions.

01:01:08.580 Now, what's happening at the moment with the case?

01:01:10.300 I've seen some of the convictions be overturned or quashed.

01:01:12.780 Yes, I was a consultant on the case.

01:01:15.320 I've known Harvey Weinstein since before he was Harvey Weinstein.

01:01:18.380 He retained me to represent his film clerks, I think, in some of the early case, 1990s.

01:01:25.480 The early days of Miramax.

01:01:26.820 Yeah, Miramax.

01:01:27.940 So I was his lawyer.

01:01:29.080 I've never been his friend, but I was his lawyer.

01:01:31.460 And so he asked me to consult on this case, and I consulted with the lawyers who just won the appeal, 4-3 verdict,

01:01:39.280 because what happened was they allowed evidence to be introduced in the jury by women who were not part of the accusation. 1.00

01:01:48.560 But they could testify that he did something similar to them.

01:01:52.020 And the court threw that out.

01:01:53.380 So the New York conviction has been reversed.

01:01:55.220 This California conviction is still valid, but it's being appealed as well.

01:02:01.040 So it's a case in progress.

01:02:04.180 I have to tell you, I don't think Harvey Weinstein ever had to rape anybody.

01:02:10.340 I think these were transactional.

01:02:13.360 You know, these were the casting couch.

01:02:15.380 Hollywood has been infamous for the casting couch for years.

01:02:18.020 If you want to be in my film, perform.

01:02:21.780 Terrible, horrible.

01:02:23.240 And it should be made a crime.

01:02:24.640 But right now it's not a crime. 0.75

01:02:25.980 But I would push back on you there when you say you didn't have to rape someone.

01:02:30.180 But there have been numerous people in show business, particularly they don't have to.

01:02:34.820 But it's a different urge, Alan.

01:02:37.960 I know I agree with you.

01:02:39.100 Look, what happened with Bill Cosby. 0.98

01:02:42.680 Again, he could have had voluntary sex with so many people.

01:02:46.460 But you must have, if the evidence is true, if it's to be believed, there must have been something about giving them drugs or something.

01:02:53.840 But it's so interesting how different people are treated differently.

01:02:57.620 Roman Polanski is accepted more in society, and yet the allegations against him are much more serious. 0.57

01:03:04.560 You know, drugged and had sex with a young teenager.

01:03:08.960 But he's not placed in the same category as Weinstein or Epstein. 0.84

01:03:13.940 Look, sex is so complicated and so difficult and so emotional that Oliver Wendell Holmes once said,

01:03:21.600 hard cases make bad law, and I think that's true of sexual cases too.

01:03:26.400 Many of them make very bad law.

01:03:28.000 Which brings me, we need to wrap up, but the one thing I was going to ask you about Epstein,

01:03:33.220 and this speaks to the conversation you've just had with Francis about Weinstein as well,

01:03:38.360 is sex is often not just about sex, it's also about power.

01:03:43.460 Sure, of course.

01:03:43.880 And so I don't know about Weinstein in particular,

01:03:47.380 but one of the things that I've heard kind of people talk about is one of the reasons that there are these super rich people

01:03:55.280 who are often involved in cases of sex with underage people, minors, etc.,

01:04:02.220 is that it's the last taboo that this person actually has existing.

01:04:08.300 Because if you're a billionaire, you can break any rule, you can break any law,

01:04:11.700 you can do whatever the hell you want, you can park your car in the middle of a busy New York street,

01:04:15.260 no one's going to do anything, you can go to any restaurant, eat anything, throw any play anywhere,

01:04:20.440 be as a route, you can do anything.

01:04:22.040 Yeah.

01:04:22.580 Except this.

01:04:23.700 And that's why they find it so good.

01:04:24.820 That's a very, very interesting point.

01:04:26.500 I hadn't thought about that.

01:04:27.680 I have often said that many of my clients who are wealthy and powerful

01:04:31.180 were willing to give up what they had limited amounts of, freedom, life, health,

01:04:36.320 in order to get more of what they had unlimited amounts of, money, sex, etc.

01:04:41.380 And so you may have a point about that, that it is the last taboo, but it's a serious and important taboo.

01:04:53.460 I debated, what's his name, Ginsburg, the poet.

01:04:59.300 Alan Ginsburg.

01:04:59.820 Alan Ginsburg.

01:05:00.600 We once had a debate about whether pedophilia should be legal.

01:05:05.360 I said, no, it shouldn't be legal.

01:05:06.880 That it's a horrible thing to have sex with young people who are incapable of consenting,

01:05:12.000 although I think the age of consent is far too high in many American states. 1.00

01:05:16.420 18 is ridiculous. 0.93

01:05:17.860 So many people are having sex at 15 or 16 that it gives enormous discretion to prosecutors 0.96

01:05:23.360 to decide which ones to prosecute.

01:05:26.020 And they do it often on racial grounds, for example. 0.95

01:05:28.560 For the most part, people who are charged with statutory rape in the South were black men 0.97

01:05:33.540 who had, say, 19-year-old black men who had had sex with 17-year-old white girls. 0.90

01:05:39.660 And so there should be more reasonable.

01:05:42.500 That has nothing to do with pedophilia.

01:05:44.280 That's just racial discrimination.

01:05:45.800 Yeah, yeah.

01:05:46.500 And that's racial discrimination.

01:05:47.720 But the laws were used in that discriminatory fashion.

01:05:51.560 But you have an interesting point.

01:05:53.000 I think that wealthy people don't think they should be.

01:05:57.960 I mean, it's Nietzsche.

01:05:59.320 It's the Ubermension.

01:06:00.520 It's, you know, it's people think they are above the law.

01:06:05.360 But, you know, you can be accused of that.

01:06:07.500 I'm a man who never has had sex with anybody but my wife.

01:06:13.360 I've been totally faithful to her since the day we met.

01:06:17.240 And yet I was falsely accused.

01:06:18.800 And everybody who knew me knew it was totally false because I don't flirt.

01:06:23.240 I don't hug.

01:06:23.760 I don't do anything.

01:06:24.720 But in the interest of getting money, I was falsely accused.

01:06:28.840 But I fought because the difference between me and Prince Andrew, I wasn't worried about

01:06:34.260 a deposition.

01:06:35.000 I couldn't wait to be deposed because I did nothing wrong ever in my life.

01:06:38.700 Whereas Prince Andrew was Randy Andy.

01:06:40.580 And his mom wouldn't allow him to be deposed where he'd be asked about other things.

01:06:47.500 So even if he were completely innocent, he couldn't be deposed.

01:06:51.760 And that's where extortion works the best.

01:06:54.800 When you get people who are vulnerable.

01:06:58.760 I'm not talking about the Prince Andrew case in particular.

01:07:00.760 But if you get people who are otherwise vulnerable, who have done terrible things in their life,

01:07:06.780 those are the easiest people to extort because they can't submit to a deposition.

01:07:12.620 Whereas people like me, we have nothing to hide.

01:07:14.940 Yet, if you're accusing me, it hurts my reputation.

01:07:19.540 So people ask me all the time, is there any case I wish I hadn't taken?

01:07:23.060 And the answer is yes, Jeffrey Epstein.

01:07:24.620 I wish I hadn't taken the Jeffrey Epstein case, not because of what I did in court,

01:07:28.980 but because of what I was accused falsely of doing out of court.

01:07:33.460 I wish that part of my life hadn't existed.

01:07:36.400 I got a call from the obituary writer from the Washington Post not so long ago in his obituary

01:07:44.080 voicing.

01:07:44.980 Alan, I need to tell you that I'm writing your obituary.

01:07:49.660 And he said, you know, when we write your obituary, it means you're going to live a long

01:07:54.020 time.

01:07:54.440 Ha ha.

01:07:54.800 That's an obituary joke.

01:07:56.300 He said, but I have to tell you that I must include in your draft obituary the claim against

01:08:02.480 you, even though you've denied it and even though it's been disproved and even though

01:08:06.440 the woman has admitted that she may have mistaken you for somebody else, I have to include it.

01:08:14.160 Well, that tells you something, that here I've had this rich life in which I've defended

01:08:18.580 so many people.

01:08:19.400 I've done so many good things, written so many books, and in my obituary will be the

01:08:23.540 false accusation.

01:08:24.860 So the power of a false accusation explains why people are prepared to pay hush money

01:08:31.820 to avoid even a false accusation from coming out.

01:08:35.060 We really need to wrap up, but I have to ask you this question before we ask our last one

01:08:38.520 and go to locals.

01:08:40.140 Do you think that there should be some kind of criminal punishment for making false accusations

01:08:45.040 against people?

01:08:45.720 Absolutely.

01:08:46.560 It goes back to the Ten Commandments.

01:08:48.640 And under Ten Commandment law, you got the punishment that the person would have gotten

01:08:54.660 had he been truthfully accused.

01:08:57.080 Absolutely.

01:08:58.020 I believe firmly that people who make false accusations must be tried, must be imprisoned,

01:09:04.180 not only for the sake of those who are falsely accused, but for the sake of those who are

01:09:09.680 true victims who are hurt by false accusers.

01:09:12.820 So I am absolutely committed to seeing prosecution of people who make false accusations, deliberately,

01:09:19.300 willfully false accusations.

01:09:20.820 I'm not talking about mistakes.

01:09:22.480 It'll never happen because the public doesn't care about false accusations in the sex area.

01:09:29.300 They only care about diminishing the reputation of people who are accused.

01:09:34.140 It's one of the worst scandals that I think we have going today, and it's something I've

01:09:39.620 been victimized by.

01:09:40.600 So I care about it deeply, and I'm committed to seeing that people who make false accusations

01:09:45.920 are accurately investigated and adequately punished.

01:09:49.500 This has been such a brilliant conversation.

01:09:51.940 Thank you very much for coming on the show.

01:09:53.600 Well, you know, when a British person says anything about me brilliant, I totally discount 1.00

01:09:57.860 it.

01:09:58.160 When somebody calls me on the phone and says, could you have an interview at nine o'clock?

01:10:01.900 And I say, no, 10 o'clock, she'll say, brilliant.

01:10:04.960 So the word brilliant has lost its meaning from Britain.

01:10:09.540 Yeah, like a lot of things, unfortunately.

01:10:12.400 But before we head on over to our locals, where our supporters get to ask you questions,

01:10:17.340 we finish our interviews with the same question, which is, what's the one thing we're not talking

01:10:21.760 about as a society that we really should be?

01:10:25.920 There's so many things where we're not talking about.

01:10:29.020 I would say, until recently, we hadn't been talking about anti-Semitism.

01:10:34.120 We're now, obviously, talking about it.

01:10:36.760 That's a good thing.

01:10:41.020 I don't think we're talking enough about the quality of education, of what's happening to

01:10:47.560 colleges and universities, and how they become politicized.

01:10:55.700 You know, I think we have to think hard about why so many less than excellent people are running

01:11:06.720 for office, why today the leaders of so many other areas, business, the military, are better

01:11:15.820 than leaders of government, that most highly qualified people are staying away from government,

01:11:22.400 and why we've ended up with a choice in America between Donald Trump and Joseph Biden.

01:11:29.720 Alan Dershowitz, thank you so much.

01:11:31.600 Head on over to Locals, where we ask Alan a few of your questions.

01:11:37.180 Should he be deported for lying on his visa application?

01:11:42.420 Her taking an awful lot of prison time to stay silent, people will say, some smoke there. 0.99

01:11:49.100 Oh, there's smoke, and there's certainly some fire as well.

01:11:52.400 The question is, how much fire?

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TRIGGERnometry - May 15, 2024

Alan Dershowitz Tells Truth About Trump Trial, Epstein, OJ & Harvard

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