Prominent attorney and former Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz said Sunday he may be called as a witness in President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal, stating he could help “prove malice” in the case.
Trump announced Friday that he had filed suit against the Journal and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, over an article alleging he sent disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein a lewd birthday letter. Speaking to Newsmax TV’s “Sunday Agenda” host Lidia Curanaj, Dershowitz revealed that the Journal also contacted him about a letter he supposedly wrote, one the outlet has been unable to produce.
“I’ll probably be called as a witness in the case, because they also called me, and they said that you wrote him a letter with a mock cover of Vanity Fair,” Dershowitz told Curanaj. “And I said, ‘I may have, I don’t remember, this was 23 years ago. Just send me a copy of the letter with my signature and I’ll tell you whether it’s authentic or not,’ and they said they couldn’t do it.”
“And so they published the story without authenticating it with me, and that will be an important point in trying to prove malice, so I suspect I will be a witness if this case ever goes to trial,” Dershowitz continued (see video below).
Trump secured a $15 million settlement from ABC in December 2024 after suing the network for defamation on March 19 over remarks made by “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos during a heated March 10 segment featuring Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina. CBS also settled a $10 billion lawsuit filed by Trump over its editing of an October 2024 interview with then–Vice President Kamala Harris, his opponent in the 2024 presidential election—a move that sparked internal backlash at the network.
Despite these legal wins, some of Trump’s supporters have criticized both him and Attorney General Pam Bondi over the handling of the Epstein files, with Newsweek reporting that the president was “ratioed” on Truth Social in response. Trump pushed back against the criticism in a Wednesday Truth Social post and issued a full-throated defense of Bondi in a detailed statement on July 12, the Daily Caller reported.
In a Thursday night post, Trump announced he had asked Bondi to petition the courts for permission to release the Epstein grand jury transcripts. Bondi later confirmed in a post on X that the Department of Justice would move to unseal the documents on Friday.
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