Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard Law school professor emeritus and frequent political commentator, says the backlash he’s received for his defense of President Trump’s civil liberties has proven worse than what he incurred during his tenure as O.J. Simpson’s defense attorney.
Dershowitz, who helped get the former football player acquitted in the 1995 trial for his ex-wife’s murder, has defended many accused of homicide and has subsequently weathered much outcry from the public — but told the New York Times that the pushback he’s received recently for his opinions has been “much worse.”
“Because in those cases people were critical of me, but they were prepared to discuss it. They were prepared to have a dialogue,” Dershowitz said. “Here, the people that I’m objecting to want to stop the dialogue. They don’t want to have the conversation. It will upset people at the dinner party or on the porch.”
Dershowitz likened these hostile environments to college “safe spaces,” another cultural aspect against which he has been vocally opposed, despite his status as a card-carrying Democrat.
“I’m a Hillary Clinton liberal Democrat who’s trying hard to restore Congress to the Democrats, who will help finance Democratic candidates all over the country. I’m a liberal Democrat,” Dershowitz said in the interview. “I haven’t changed one iota in 50 years. I am not a Trump supporter. I’m a supporter of civil liberties. Calling me a Trump supporter is like calling me a communist supporter in the 1950s. I was not a communist supporter. I defended the communists’ right to speak and to teach.”
Dershowitz said in an op-ed published last week that he has been shunned by his friends in Martha’s Vineyard for defending Trump’s “civil liberties.”
[Related: Alan Dershowitz claims woman at Martha’s Vineyard party fantasized about stabbing him]
