(Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images for Hulu)
If you didn’t think the ongoing defamation suit between Harvard Law’s Alan Dershowitz, Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, and Giuffre’s now-disqualified former attorney David Boies couldn’t get any more dramatic, there’s now a computer guy who’s maybe a hacker and almost certainly a con man that no one can identify smack in the middle of it all.
For some reason, Dershowitz wants to make this guy’s role a tentpole of his case.
At a hearing yesterday, Alan Dershowitz’s attorney Howard Cooper told Judge Preska that they intend to use discovery to explore the relationship between Boies, a different Giuffre attorney named Stanley Pottinger, and this unknown, now disappeared, computer guy.
While not making any hard-and-fast decisions on the issue, Judge Preska seemed less enthusiastic about an open-ended expedition:
“We are not doing all this stuff. This is not going to be a book for my dear friends the reporters to write on this whole matter. We need to narrow it down and get to the issues quickly,” Preska said.
This whole computer affair came to light over the weekend, when the New York Times told the story of a guy calling himself Patrick Kessler. Kessler — which is what we’ll call him even though the Times was unable to confirm his identity — apparently presented himself as having gained access to Jeffrey Epstein’s video records when he was hired to encrypt them. He claimed that he had secured photographic evidence of prominent men taking part in Epstein’s underaged sex-trafficking operation and tried to present his supposed evidence to Boies and Pottinger, who hoped to use the evidence to support legal claims brought by victims they represented.
According to the Times article, after being unveiled as a possible source in the case, Kessler told reporters privately that he’d grown disillusioned with the Giuffre team, believing that it wouldn’t use the evidence to expose the perpetrators publicly — supposedly Kessler’s paramount interest as a means of preventing future abuse — and that he wanted to work with the media instead. The article asserts that Pottinger had made a series of sketchy statements to Kessler that led Kessler to believe the attorney wasn’t on the level, including statements about securing settlements to pay Kessler out of legal fees and agreements to become attorneys for the alleged abusers.
Of course, the NY Times source on this was… Kessler. That means the guy the paper ultimately suggests was a con man was also their source? That doesn’t raise any red flags?
Non-lawyers jump to conclusions about how lawyers are paid all the time, imagining every agreement to be some sort of corrupt bargain instead of just how the industry works. And representing the other side after a settlement — something the Boies firm attests in a statement was never considered — isn’t unheard of as a settlement condition. If a non-lawyer heard that and didn’t know any better they could easily assume it’s a shady double-cross of the victim instead of functionally a retainer not to sue the defendant again post-recovery. Maybe Pottinger did say and mean some crazy stuff, but years of reading non-lawyers report on the legal industry makes me skeptical, especially when they’re just reporting based on the tale of someone they openly doubt throughout the rest of the piece.
It’s almost as though the Times tried to connect dots that weren’t there, trying to draw parallels with the infamous Trump Tower meeting, suggesting that trying to secure evidence in a civil lawsuit is the same as entertaining kompromat from a foreign power in an election. They are, you know, different.
For its part, BSF released a statement addressing the Times narrative that Boies or any of his partners were trying to keep Kessler’s revelations secret:
By way of example, the NYT knew all of the following: David Boies only attended two meetings with the NYT’s source (on September 9 and September 14, the latter of which was also attended by the NYT reporters), nothing was said at either meeting that supports the NYT’s narrative, no one from BSF had any other communications of any kind at any time with the NYT’s source, and no one from BSF participated in, or was contemporaneously aware of, the text messages exchanged between other parties that the NYT references. The NYT also selectively elided or omitted from its reporting key facts, documents, and interviews inconsistent with its chosen narrative. The fact that the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office were informed of these contacts belies the NYT’s assertions of wrongdoing.
Informing the authorities would make for a really difficult blackmail operation, which after all, is Dershowitz’s claim. And obviously the lawyers brought in the FBI and prosecutors because if this Kessler person was telling the truth, he had access to images of child exploitation which the government would absolutely need to know about.
But the craziest part of the Times article is when it explains that Kessler then went to Dershowitz and told him, in a recorded conversation that the reporters suggest may have been rehearsed, that none of Kessler’s supposed evidence showed Dershowitz. It’s not particularly clear why someone trying to publicly expose people would ever go to another guy accused of this stuff. Even if he had no evidence showing Dershowitz involved, this Kessler guy would have no reason to think that was dispositive. He couldn’t have believed he had the entire universe of every Epstein encounter ever, so under the most generous theory, Kessler’s basically telling Dershowitz, “I can’t prove you definitely did anything, so I’m assuming that my not having a photo of it is more believable than a woman’s testimony.”
That’s… not particularly compelling.
What is the point of dragging Kessler into this case? Does Kessler’s statement supposedly exonerate Dershowitz? Because that would involve believing Kessler was the genuine article. Or did Boies taking a meeting with Kessler support the claim that people are trying to blackmail Dershowitz with false claims? Because that would involve believing Kessler was a con man. If Kessler was a fraud then the lawyers got duped but that also means everyone’s back at square one. If Pottinger crossed the line in the stuff he told Kessler — which we can only really back up with Kessler’s story to reporters — it may be unethical but also not end up having much bearing on the truth of the claims at hand.
The only thing more astounding than the fact that a random mystery man has managed to troll a high-profile litigation is the altogether depressing idea that we may still be talking about him for months on end.
Jeffrey Epstein lawyer Alan Dershowitz hopes to use N.Y. Times mystery man to help his case [Miami Herald]
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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.