Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard University professor accused alongside Prince Andrew of having sexual relations with a teenage associate of their friend Jeffrey Epstein, was also involved in an effort to discredit a teenage girl who accused Epstein of rape.

Dershowitz, who strongly denies the allegations about his own conduct, recruited private investigators to carry out inquiries on the girl while acting for Epstein’s defence team and sent police printed copies of her MySpace page, claiming it displayed a “fascination with marijuana”.

The professor also suggested, in a letter obtained by the Guardian, that the girl may be pursuing Epstein, a wealthy banker, for his money, and that as a drama student, she was an expert in misleading people.

The Guardian is aware of the identity of Epstein’s accuser, who is now 28, but is not naming her due to the nature of the alleged incident. She is referred to in police files as AH. She did not respond to a voice message and an email requesting comment on Tuesday.

According to police files, she told investigators that when she was 16, Epstein forcibly had sex with her on a table at his mansion in Florida while she screamed at him to stop, after she had given him a massage. She alleged that Epstein went on to make her have sex with Nada Marcinkova, another female Epstein associate.

AH told police that she suffered intimate injuries due to Epstein’s actions and that “she had difficulty walking to the car after leaving the house”. She said that Epstein paid her $1,000 and gave her a car soon after the alleged assault. A high school transcript for AH was found by police during a raid of Epstein’s mansion in Florida after allegations of abuse first surfaced.

Amid allegations from dozens of girls and women, Epstein was eventually jailed for 13 months after agreeing to plead guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor, in a controversial agreement with US government prosecutors. Police and court files that have been made public do not make clear what was the investigators’ final assessment of AH’s claims.



Attorneys for Epstein did not respond to an email this week about the woman’s allegations.

Dershowitz wrote to Detective Joseph Recarey of Palm Beach police in 2006 after AH alleged through her attorneys that one of the defence legal team’s private investigators had impersonated a police officer while carrying out their inquiries. Denying that claim, Dershowitz complained that when they confronted AH, the investigators in fact received a “barrage of profanity” from “what initially appeared only to be a young woman of slight build and soft demeanour”.

He claimed that the private investigators, Bill Riley and Steve Kiraly, were instructed beforehand to take a verbatim statement from AH “because we feared that she, an accomplished drama student, might try to mislead them as successfully as she had misled others”.



The professor, who was assisting Epstein’s defence team, also enclosed a printout of AH’s MySpace page, noting to the detective that she had “chosen to go by the nickname of ‘pimp juice’” and made reference to a marijuana habit. He wrote that the private detectives had also been asked to confirm what were “the extreme lengths she would go to, as she put it, ‘to be rich, no, I mean really, really rich.’”

Dershowitz’s role in sending posts from MySpace by Epstein accusers to the authorities was first reported by New York magazine.

Guy Fronstin, an attorney who was working with Dershowitz on the case, wrote his own letter to a state prosecutor, alleging that AH had been fired from her job at a Victoria’s Secret store for shoplifting and including a personnel file obtained from the company. Fronstin and Dershowitz had met the prosecutor the day before to discuss the case.

Dershowitz said on Wednesday that he was right to send the letter. “The prosecutors found her to be non-credible,” he said in an email. “The job of a defense lawyer is to provide all relevant information regarding the lack of credibility of alleged witnesses against his or her client. Our legal team did what all good defense lawyers should do.”

In a statement following the release of police files, Roy Black, an attorney for the investigators, said: “Mr Riley and his partner, Mr Kiraly, are seasoned investigators who adhere to the highest professional standards and I have every confidence that they conducted themselves appropriately when they interviewed this witness”.