Lawyer Alan Dershowitz thinks the jailers where Jeffrey Epstein was being housed while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges played a role in the disgraced financier’s death.
The notorious defense lawyer said in an interview with Real America’s Voice that he did not think Epstein was murdered—as many of President Donald Trump’s supporters have claimed—but suggested the death was indeed suspicious.
“He was in jail awaiting trial when he, I think, killed himself with the help of jailers,” Dershowitz told Real America’s Voice host Eric Bolling last week. “I don’t think he could have done it by himself.”
For weeks, the president has faced anger from his MAGA base over his administration’s failure to produce new information in the case.
The Trump administration’s probe ended up repeating the previous official position that Epstein died by suicide, and there was no client list.
Dershowitz—whose big-name clients have included O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, and Trump himself during his first impeachment trial—helped Epstein secure a sweetheart plea deal during a Florida state prosecution in 2008.
Under the terms of the deal, Epstein avoided federal charges and served just 13 months in a county jail and was allowed to leave during the day to work. Trump tapped the prosecutor who struck the deal, Alex Acosta, to serve as labor secretary during his first term.
He resigned after Epstein was arrested in July 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges in New York. That same month, Dershowitz told NPR that he no longer had a relationship with Epstein.
“I haven’t seen him in years and I haven’t spoken to him in months,” he said. “Occasionally, his lawyers—his current lawyers—will call to ask me questions about the plea deal. But I have no current legal relationship with him or personal relationship.”
Epstein was found hanging in his cell on August 10, 2019, at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City.
Officials said he was on suicide watch at the time, but the guards who were supposed to be checking on him didn’t make their rounds. His roommate had been transferred out of his cell—which was a breach of prison protocol—and the FBI found that the surveillance cameras directly outside his cell had malfunctioned the night he died.
All of that has fed conspiracy theories that one of Epstein’s powerful clients arranged to have him killed in his cell.
Dershowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week that he believed the anomalies were evidence that jail personnel had “likely” assisted Epstein’s suicide.
His editorial also tried to distance Trump from Epstein, despite the two being close friends for 15 years.
