This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normaleverything has become.

“The one point I do wanna make is that I understand all the feminist groups and radicals who think this is the worst thing in the world—that anybody ever had any contact with Jeffrey Epstein—where are all those radical feminists when it comes to the Hamas rapes of young Jewish girls, sexual abuse, beheadings?”—Alan Dershowitz responding, on Wednesday night’s Hannity, to the 137 mentions of his name in the recently unsealed Epstein court documents.

It was inevitable that Alan Dershowitz would play some role in the latest Jeffrey Epstein revelations. The famed lawyer was both a friend and attorney of Epstein’s, having visited the serial rapist’s Florida mansion and private island on multiple occasions, and having helped craft the 2008 plea deal that granted Epstein an unusual degree of freedom after Palm Beach County first prosecuted the financier on charges of sex crimes. But Dershowitz was also caught up in such legal tangles: Epstein survivor Virginia Giuffre repeatedly claimed, in filings, that she was recruited as a 16-year-old by Epstein’s partner Ghislaine Maxwell to have sex with Dershowitz and Prince Andrew, among others. Dershowitz consistently denied the allegations, and the two sued each other for defamation before settling in late 2022, with Giuffre claiming that she “may have made a mistake in identifying Mr. Dershowitz.” This was just one part of Giuffre’s litigation, however; her original 2015 defamation suit against Maxwell is the source for this week’s batch of publicly released Epstein documents, and is just the beginning of much more unsealing to come.

Dershowitz, for his part, is welcoming the disclosures. “I want everything out,” he told NewsNation on Tuesday, casting aspersions on the judiciary for its thus-far “selective” transparency pertaining to the Epstein story. Still, when the hundreds of pages from Giuffre v. Maxwellwent live on Wednesday, it quickly became apparent why Dershowitz went into damage-control mode, recording a half-hour episode of his podcast, The Dershow, where he reduced his association with Epstein to “an innocent relationship with a man who I didn’t know—nobody suspected—had done anything wrong.” Among Dershowitz’s appearances in this case:

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• A 2006 police report from the Palm Beach County charges against Epstein that mentions how Dershowitz, as part of Epstein’s legal team, “provided a package of material on the main victims in this case in which they appear on myspace.com and speak about alcohol use and some marijuana use,” which led the Palm Beach state attorney to delay a grand jury session for several months while reviewing said package.

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• Mentions of “sworn testimony” from separate Epstein household employees that allege “Dershowitz came ‘pretty often’ to Epstein’s Florida mansion and got massages,” and on other instances was present there “alone … in the presence of young girls.”

• Choices by Epstein and some of his associates to plead the Fifth when asked about Dershowitz’s involvement in their activities;

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• A rehash of the allegations against Dershowitz by Giuffre (identified in some of the documents as “Jane Doe #3”), including the claim that “Dershowitz was an eye-witness to the sexual abuse of many other minors by Epstein and several of Epstein’s co-conspirators.”

That was the context for Dershowitz’s visit to Sean Hannity’s broadcast on Wednesday, during which the clearly troubled Fox News host informed his guest that “you are mentioned repeatedly, and very specifically” in the Epstein document tranche before granting a smiling Dersh a chance to respond.

Dershowitz: I want to have a list of all the radical feminists who are pushing hard. I understand that, to get all these names revealed. I want to know, how many of them have ever actually condemned hamas for the rapes.. pic.twitter.com/68cxLccWUe

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 4, 2024

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The lawyer then pointed to his prior settlement with Giuffre (even though, as Axios noted, these filings “predate” the specific trafficking lawsuit that Giuffre later filed against Dershowitz), defended his travel on Epstein’s infamous private plane (“I was his lawyer, of course I was on his plane!”), and blurted that he’s “represented some of the worst people in the world” because “who else will?” Then came the lash-out against the “radical feminists,” which went on for quitea while even after he parroted the unconfirmed, unverified talking point about “beheadings” by Hamas:

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I wanna have a list of all the radical feminists who are pushing hard—and I understand that!—to get all these names revealed, and I wanna know how many of them ever actually condemned Hamas for the rapes that we now know occurred and the murders that occurred. How many of them silent, and how many of them at the National Lawyers Guild have actually approved of what Hamas did. So let’s put this in context.

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(Some other helpful context includes Dershowitz’s historic representation of accused rapists like Mike Tyson, his infamous 1997 Los Angeles Times column calling statutory rape an “outdated concept,” and the fact that the state of Israel may be looking to retain Dershowitz as its lawyer to counter charges of genocide against Palestinian Arabs, in a case to be heard at The Hague.)

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Beyond the Epstein of it all, the most telling thing about this bizarre outburst may be Dershowitz’s entitlement to a sense of overriding impunity. The famed attorney has been a controversial figure for decades—and his notoriety has increased in recent years, thanks to his Epstein ties and his continued support of Donald Trump against any and all legal charges (including E. Jean Carroll’s successful defamation suit). At this point, Dershowitz has ducked controversy long enough to know how to play the game; heck, he barely has to play anything. He’s long been a master of tweeting through it, whether “it” involves his feuds with Kathy Griffin, the FBI, or, well, age-of-consent laws. So now, he can claim he has nothing to hide and welcomes the Epstein documents—but even so, it’s clearlythe case that those pushing for the Epstein network to be made public are covering for the well-documented atrocities committed by Hamas. That’swhy they’re going after the Dersh! This isn’t even the first time he’s employed such an argument: In December, after Doctors Without Borders, UNICEF, and climate activist Greta Thunberg expressed concern over the damage done to Gaza and its inhabitants from Israel’s bombing campaign, Dershowitz dismissed them all as uncredible because they’re “part of Hamas.” (It should go without saying that this is false.)

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So, Wednesday was just another day of well-practiced bloviating. A lazy rhetorical tactic from Dershowitz, yes, but indicative of a classic means by which people in power can deflect from anything they may have done wrong with misdirection, no matter how absurd or nonexistent the connection to reality. The lawyer’s only innovation here is repurposing such dissembling for a moment when Hamas is the bête noirethat can be invoked in any controversy, no matter how unrelated. For Dershowitz to brush off the mass interest in Jeffrey Epstein’s case by pointing abroad is cheap. But it’ll work just fine for his audience, and he knows it.

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• Fox News
• Sexual Assault
• #MeToo
• Sean Hannity
• Jeffrey Epstein
• Totally Normal Quote of the Day