In a dramatic scene from the new Netflix series "Filthy Rich," the director interviews a man named Steve Scully who worked on Jeffrey Epstein’s Island until 2005.
Scully vividly describes a scene that he personally witnessed in 2004, in which Prince Andrew engaged in "Foreplay" with Virginia Guiffre, who was topless near the swimming pool.
A serious allegation.
Netflix could easily have asked Giuffre, who is a central figure in the series whether the accusation is true. Had they done do, she would have told them that in 2004, she was married, living in Australia and having babies. She had left Epstein and the United States in 2002 and could not have been on the island when Scully claimed he saw her with Prince Andrew.
So, either Netflix didn’t bother to ask Giuffre whether the accusation was true, or they did ask her and ignored her answer.
Why such irresponsible journalism?
Because to reveal the truth — that there are blatant contradictions between the accounts of their major "witnesses" — would undercut the credibility of their one-sided narrative.
This shoddy approach to truth is typical of the entire series, and especially to the accounts of their two primary" survivor" witnesses, Virginia Giuffre and Sarah Ransome, both of whom have long and documented histories of falsely accusing prominent public figures.
Netflix went out of its way to suppress these histories of false accusations. You certainly wouldn’t know that from watching the selectively edited interviews in the series.
Let’s begin with Sarah Ransome, who is presented by Netflix as a credible person, despite the director’s knowledge that Ransome has admitted making false accusation against Hillary Clinton and other prominent public officials.
Ransome says she met Jeffrey Epstein when she was 22 years old.
Years later, in the run up to the 2016 election, she decided to go public because she believed that both candidates — Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump — were "pedophiles" who were corruptly associated with Epstein. She wrote a series of emails to a New York Post journalist named Maureen Callahan in which she claimed to have sex tapes of Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Richard Branson and other public figures.
When Callahan asked her to produce these tapes, she said they had been sent to Europe to protect them because Hillary Clinton has arranged for The CIA to kill her and she was under the protection of the KGB.
Ransome urged Callahan to publish the emails containing these bizarre allegations but Callahan refused finding her to be non-credible.
Eventually Ransome admitted to a reporter named Connie Bruck of The New Yorker that she had "invented" — her word — these false accusations and there were no sex tapes.
She had simply made up the entire story.
Netflix was aware of this entire sordid episode, yet they put her forward as a credible source without disclosing to their viewers the indisputable evidence that her word could not be trusted.
Even if Netflix believed parts of her story, they were obliged to give their viewers the evidence of her documented false claims so that they could judge for themselves whether to believe her. Instead they deliberately suppressed it.
I know that Netflix had the evidence of Ransome’s admitted fabrications because I gave it to them and they promised to use it. But they deliberately censored the parts of my interview in which I provided the evidence of her lack of credibility, precisely because they didn’t want their viewers to know the truth about Ransome’s questionable history.
The same is true of the second survivor whose credibility is central to the Netflix series.
Virginia Giuffre has accused me of having sex with her on numerous occasions, even though I never even met her. In a draft manuscript of a book about her sexual experiences she acknowledges that she never met me.
In a series of emails which she and her lawyers tried to suppress, she also makes it clear that she didn’t even know who I was. Her own lawyer has admitted, in a recorded conversation, that I could not possibly have been in the locations she says she met me.
In addition, she has also accused such prominent people as George Mitchell, Lesley Wexner, Bill Richardson, Ehud Barak, Marvin Minsky and others of having sex with her.
Each have categorically denied the accusation.
One of the most easily disprovable claims she made — as part of a tell-all story for which she was paid $160,000 — was that she met Al and Tipper Gore on Jeffrey Epstein’s island.
She described the encounter in great detail, including observing Gore and Epstein walking together on Epstein’s private beach. The problem is that Gore has never met Epstein, doesn’t know him and was certainly never on the island. She has now admitted that her account is untrue and was fabricated.
I provided Netflix with Giuffre’s emails, manuscript, her lawyer’s recording and other evidence that conclusively proves that she has made up numerous stories about sex with prominent people.
They again promised to include this documentation, but willfully edited my interview deliberately to exclude it.
Why then did Netflix go out of its way to deprive its viewers of the whole truth?
Because it had a narrative whose flow would be interrupted by inconvenient truths about the mendacity of their primary witnesses.
This is not journalism, this is not honesty, and it's not integrity.
It's the deliberate suborning of falsity in the interest of ratings and ideology.
Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School and author of "Guilt by Accusation" and "The Case Against the Democratic House Impeaching Trump." Read Alan Dershowtiz's Reports — More Here.
Follow Alan Dershowitz on Twitter: @AlanDersh and Facebook: @AlanMDershowitz
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