Alan Dershowitz, the 83-year-old Jewish-American lawyer who represented sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, had lobbied then-US president Donald Trump in his administration's final days to give a pre-emptive pardon to Epstein's convicted associate Ghislaine Maxwell, the Times has reported.
Dershowitz had represented Epstein in the early 2000s and represented Trump during the former president's first impeachment trial. According to the Times, Dershowitz had spoken to Trump about the possibility of pardoning Maxwell after speaking to her family. He had spoken to Maxwell's brother, Ian, about the "generic issue of pardons."
However, Trump ultimately did not pre-emptively pardoned Maxwell, who was convicted in late 2021 of recruiting and grooming underage girls for Epstein, following a five-day-long jury deliberation in a widely reported-on sexual abuse trial.
Dershowitz was heavily involved in the scandal surrounding Maxwell and Epstein, having been among the many accused of partaking in sexually abusing minors through the late Jewish financier.
In the 2020 Netflix mini-series Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, Virginia Giuffre claimed that Epstein trafficked her to Dershowitz for sex at least six times, and that he had been an eyewitness to other abuses.
The lawyer has continuously denied all allegations made against him.
Following Maxwell's conviction, Dershowitz was given airtime by the BBC in an interview to give impartial analysis on the trial, though he used this time to attack his accuser and made several allegations against British royal Prince Andrew.
This interview sparked backlash, as Dershowitz had been involved in the allegations surrounding the trial and thus many thought he could not serve as an impartial analyst.
Following the interview, the BBC released a statement through its press team's Twitter account, stating that the interview "did not meet the BBC's editorial standards."
"Dershowitz was not a suitable person to interview as an impartial analyst and we did not make the relevant background clear to our audiences," the statement read.
Reuters contributed to this report.