Former Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz is planning to sue ViacomCBS and the producers of “The Good Fight” after the legal drama called him a “shyster” and implied he had participated in illicit sexual conduct during the season four finale on the Jeffrey Epstein case, according to a report.
On July 17th, Dershowitz’s lawyers sent a letter to “The Good Fight” showrunners demanding they remove the content and issue a public apology, according to Variety.
In the letter, Dershowitz’s attorney, Imran Ansari, wrote of the May 28 finale — titled, “The Gang Discovers Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein:
“Clearly, the dialogue and the context in which it is made, with words loaded with innuendo such as ‘massage,’ ‘Epstein,’ the ‘Virgin Islands,’ in combination with the word ‘shyster,’ falsely suggests that Professor Dershowitz engaged in sexual conduct, i.e. a ‘massage,’ with an underage girl associated with Epstein, and is crooked, unscrupulous and lying about it, i.e. a ‘shyster.’ ”
Jonathan Anschell, general counsel to ViacomCBS, fired back with a July 28 letter saying the series is fictional. People “don’t watch the Series for factual information about Professor Dershowitz or anyone else,” he wrote.
Still, the episode referred to Dershowitz by name.
Dershowitz told Variety, “The idea that a fictional character can get away with defaming somebody is really a new one. You either have to have an entirely fictional account in which they make up the names of everybody or a truthful account. You can’t mix the genres. When you do mix the genres, the law of defamation applies.”
By Friday, CBS had neither taken the episode down nor issued an apology.
The dialogue Ansari referred to was between fictional lawyer Benjamin Dafoe (David Alford), Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) and Liz Reddick (Audra McDonald).
On Friday, Dershowitz again defended his name in connection to Epstein, after his name appeared in a document dump relating to a defamation case involving the pedophile’s accused madam, Ghislaine Maxwell.