Former Jeffrey Epstein attorney Alan Dershowitz lobbied then-President Donald Trump to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell ahead of the high-profile sex trafficking trial in which she was convicted, Maxwell’s brother told the Times of London.
“There was one phone call between Professor Dershowitz and a family member during which the generic issue of pardons was touched on,” Ian Maxwell told the U.K. outlet.
Dershowitz, an 83-year-old lawyer who represented Trump during his first impeachment trial and has since been accused by one of Epstein’s victims of having sex with her when she was a teenager, purportedly pushed for a preemptive pardon on behalf of Maxwell.
A retired Harvard law professor, Dershowitz has denied claims he had inappropriate relations with the then-teenage victim. Virginia Giuffre has claimed Epstein trafficked her to Dershowitz at least six times, the first incident taking place when she was 16 years old.
Dershowitz also denied lobbying Trump for a pardon.
“I have no comment on what anybody else said,” he told Insider. “All I can tell you is that the [Times of London] story, the allegation of the story that I lobbied the president, is simply not true.”
GHISLAINE MAXWELL SEX-TRAFFICKING CONVICTION IN JEOPARDY OVER JUROR’S BEHAVIOR, SAY EXPERTS
Trump was one of many high-profile politicians who socialized with Epstein and Maxwell and seemed to show a “sudden interest” in her case as he was handing out pardons, biographer Michael Wolff claimed in Landslide, a book about the former president’s last days in office.
Wolff reported Trump would frequently interrupt conversations to ask who he thought should be pardoned. Of Maxwell, he asked, “Has she said anything about me? Is she going to talk? Will she roll on anybody?”
Maxwell, 60, was convicted late last month on five of six criminal counts that she helped recruit and groom young girls to be sexually abused by Epstein and his friends between 1994 and 2004.
She has not yet been sentenced, but her conviction may be in jeopardy after two jurors admitted to multiple media outlets that they used their personal experience as victims of sexual abuse to sway fellow jurors. The jurors purportedly did not disclose their personal ties to sexual abuse during a 50-question survey during jury selection. The omission could lead to a mistrial, Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor and president of West Coast Trial Lawyers, told the Washington Examiner.
“It’s a prosecutor’s worst nightmare,” he said.
Maxwell’s lawyers have already asked the court for a mistrial. The judge has given federal prosecutors until Feb. 3 to reply.
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Maxwell’s onetime boyfriend Epstein was arrested in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges. He was found hanging in his jail cell a month later.
Maxwell, the daughter of a British media mogul, was arrested a year later.
