Episode Information

America’s best known attorney fights to salvage a reputation built on controversial clients, extraordinary courtroom triumphs and a 50-year teaching career at the world’s most illustrious law school. As the youngest professor in Harvard’s history, Alan Dershowitz became a liberal icon in the 1970s and ‘80s. He was a champion of free speech, a saviour of Soviet Jewry and a ferocious opponent of the death penalty. He helped negotiate a spy exchange in Berlin that saw Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky released from prison. And he saved two innocent boys from near certain death in an Arizona gas chamber.

But by the 1990’s Dershowitz was also gaining a reputation as the ultimate celebrity lawyer. In two of the most sensational trials of the 20th century he got socialite Claus von Bulow acquitted of trying to kill his wife and helped OJ Simpson walk on a double murder charge. He was legal counsel to Patty Hearst, Michael Milken, Leona Helmsley and Mia Farrow in her battle with Woody Allen. More recently the self-styled “attorney for the damned” raised eyebrows when he negotiated a sweetheart plea deal for notorious American pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. It was a case that would come back to haunt him. The final straw for many of Dershowitz’s admirers was when the lifelong Democrat joined President Donald Trump’s legal team during his first impeachment trial. Dershowitz was shunned and ostracized by friends, neighbours and the liberal media. Even some of his own family refused to speak to him.

Will history remember the Brooklyn-born attorney as a legal legend who sold his soul to a president and tarnished his legacy? Or as a brilliant and principled civil libertarian who, in the Age of Trump, kept his head while all about him were losing theirs? Dershowitz is a complex and ambiguous anti-hero still writing his own final act.