MANHATTAN (CN) — Virginia Giuffre has recanted her longstanding allegation that Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz was one of the men whom pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein forced her to have sex with.
“I have long believed that I was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein to Alan Dershowitz. However, I was very young at the time, it was a very stressful and traumatic environment, and Mr. Dershowitz has from the beginning consistently denied these allegations,” Giuffre wrote in a statement. “This litigation has been very stressful and burdensome for me and my family, and we believe it is time to bring it to an end and move on with our lives.”
The letter is part of a 3-page notice of voluntary dismissal made public Tuesday afternoon, which states that Giuffre and Dershowitz have agreed that her 2019 defamation suit shall be "dismissed with prejudice and without costs or award of fees to either party."
In a joint statement on Tuesday, the parties claim the resolution “does not involve the payment of any money by anyone or anything else.”
Back in 2008, Dershowitz's efforts had been key to helping Epstein negotiate a guilty plea to state sex charges in place of the more serious federal charges hanging over him.
Dershowitz, 84, has always denied ever having sex with Giuffre and brought counterclaims against her suit, which depicted her allegations as part of an elaborate plot to extort money from billionaire Lex Wexner, the Victoria’s Secret retail tycoon whose fortune Epstein managed.
Giuffre, now 39, said she now recognizes she “I may have made a mistake in identifying Mr. Dershowitz.” She resides in western Australia and is a founder of the nonprofit Speak Out, Act, Reclaim (SOAR) helping sex-trafficking victims.
During pretrial proceedings, Dershowitz often referenced the existence of a recording in which Giuffre's lawyer David Boies stated that he did not believe Giuffre had sex with Dershowitz. He also publicly declared: “The villain here is David Boies, who is exploiting a crazy woman in order to get revenge against me.
Dershowitz commended Giuffre on Tuesday for admitting her mistake and walked back his accusations against her prominent New York attorney.
“I also now believe that my allegations that David Boies engaged in an extortion plot and in suborning perjury were mistaken,” Dershowitz said in a statement.
Boies, chairman of the Boies Schiller Flexner firm that represented Giuffre pro bono, writes: "I accept each of their statements in the spirit in which they are made, and I wish each of them well."
Giuffre and at least a hundred other victims of Epstein have brought numerous lawsuits over the years against Epstein and his associates, including his former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, who was sentenced this past June to 20 years in prison for her role in recruiting and abusing teenage girls into Epstein’s predatory orbit.
A year after Maxwell reached a 2017 settlement to Giuffre's defamation claims, the Miami Herald published a scathing investigative report that ultimately led to the rearrest of Epstein in July 2019 on federal charges.
One day after the Second Circuit unsealed thousands of pages of incriminating evidence from Giuffre's civil litigation, Epstein was found hanging in his Manhattan federal jail cell. Maxwell was arrested a year later and convicted in late December 2021.
Giuffre sued the Duke of York in August 2021, claiming that he abused her on multiple occasions in 2001 when she was a 17-year-old victim of the sex trafficking ring Epstein ran for decades with the help of Maxwell. She has since settled that civil suit against Prince Andrew for a reported $16 million.
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