Could someone on Martha’s Vineyard please buy Alan Dershowitz lunch? Or a drink? Or some Beluga caviar?
The 80-year-old Harvard Law professor emeritus, who now makes his home on the island and has been summering there for a quarter century, has been bemoaning his apparent ostracism among the social set because of his willingness to go to bat for President Trump. Because it clearly couldn’t be because of his propensity to wear thong bathing suits or go naked on the nude beaches. Or his desire to Alansplain things to everyone. It has to be Trump, he says.
For those caught up in the heat and the holiday, Dershowitz wrote an oped for The Hill last week saying his forecast of being shunned on the liberal enclave has come to fruition.
“I never thought I would see McCarthyism come to Martha’s Vineyard, but I have,” Dershowitz wrote. “I wonder if the professor who refuses to listen to anything I have to say also treats his students similarly.”
Dershowitz says his liberal creds are fully intact because all he is doing is defending Trump’s constitutional rights and not his policies. But you’d have a hard time convincing his former friends and neighbors on the rock.
“You defended and gave cover to this president who relentlessly disrupts and destroys all that we value and causes massive and lasting damage to our political system, our courts, our standing in the world, the environment and more,” Walter Teller, a prominent Hollywood lawyer and longtime Vineyard vacationer, wrote in an email to his one-time friend sent out to a wide network on the Vineyard and obtained by the Boston Globe. “In all of that, you are complicit.”
Despite Dershowitz’s insistence that he’s more simpatico with Hillary Clinton than Trump, Teller and others say his constant appearance on Trump-favored Fox News, his frequent calls and dining with the president at the White House and Mar-a-Lago, and his emergence as a “Trump whisperer” on Israeli policy undermine his civil liberties claim.
Dershowitz, though, is having none of it, saying he “could not care less” and writing 1,000-word opeds and talking to any and every reporter who calls to tell them how much he could not care less. Dershowitz insists his dance card is full, which makes his claim to be shunned somewhat curious.
“I’ve gotten invited to like 25 4th of July parties,” Dershowitz told the Boston Herald. “I have more people welcoming me now than ever before.”
Dershowitz has become the target of mocking near and far for his “fine Vineyard whine” about his Scarlet Letter treatment.
“EXCLUSIVE: My niece, spotted yesterday on Martha’s Vineyard shunning Alan Dershowitz,” WGBH contributor David S. Bernstein posted on Twitter beneath the picture of the young girl playing on a beach.
“Socrates was forced to eat hemlock,” Jeet Heer of The New Republic tweeted. “Ovid, Dante, & Emma Goldman were sent into exile. Margaret Sanger was jailed. Rosa Luxemburg, Gandhi and Martin Luther King were killed. Spinoza was excommunicated. Alan Dershowitz can’t find anyone to dine with at Martha’s Vineyard.”
But at least one notable Islander and high profile Trump supporter is putting out the welcome mat. Car-dealing billionaire
Ernie Boch Jr. says the famed lawyer
is always welcome at his casa to break bread.
“Tell Alan if he needs a friend, he can call me,” Boch told the Herald.
Dershowitz says this has shown him who his friends are. He said he would rent a hall in Chilmark and set up chairs for anyone to come debate him on civil liberties. And even if the chairs are empty, he will not be silenced.
Meet the Author
Senior Investigative Reporter, CommonWealth
About Jack Sullivan
Jack Sullivan is now retired. A veteran of the Boston newspaper scene for nearly three decades. Prior to joining CommonWealth, he was editorial page editor of The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, a part of the GateHouse Media chain. Prior to that he was news editor at another GateHouse paper, The Enterprise of Brockton, and also was city edition editor at the Ledger. Jack was an investigative and enterprise reporter and executive city editor at the Boston Herald and a reporter at The Boston Globe.
He has reported stories such as the federal investigation into the Teamsters, the workings of the Yawkey Trust and sale of the Red Sox, organized crime, the church sex abuse scandal and the September 11 terrorist attacks. He has covered the State House, state and local politics, K-16 education, courts, crime, and general assignment.
Jack received the New England Press Association award for investigative reporting for a series on unused properties owned by the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, and shared the association's award for business for his reporting on the sale of the Boston Red Sox. As the Ledger editorial page editor, he won second place in 2007 for editorial writing from the Inland Press Association, the nation's oldest national journalism association of nearly 900 newspapers as members.
At CommonWealth, Jack and editor Bruce Mohl won first place for In-Depth Reporting from the Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors for a look at special education funding in Massachusetts. The same organization also awarded first place to a unique collaboration between WFXT-TV (FOX25) and CommonWealth for a series of stories on the Boston Redevelopment Authority and city employees getting affordable housing units, written by Jack and Bruce.
About Jack Sullivan
Jack Sullivan is now retired. A veteran of the Boston newspaper scene for nearly three decades. Prior to joining CommonWealth, he was editorial page editor of The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, a part of the GateHouse Media chain. Prior to that he was news editor at another GateHouse paper, The Enterprise of Brockton, and also was city edition editor at the Ledger. Jack was an investigative and enterprise reporter and executive city editor at the Boston Herald and a reporter at The Boston Globe.
He has reported stories such as the federal investigation into the Teamsters, the workings of the Yawkey Trust and sale of the Red Sox, organized crime, the church sex abuse scandal and the September 11 terrorist attacks. He has covered the State House, state and local politics, K-16 education, courts, crime, and general assignment.
Jack received the New England Press Association award for investigative reporting for a series on unused properties owned by the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, and shared the association's award for business for his reporting on the sale of the Boston Red Sox. As the Ledger editorial page editor, he won second place in 2007 for editorial writing from the Inland Press Association, the nation's oldest national journalism association of nearly 900 newspapers as members.
At CommonWealth, Jack and editor Bruce Mohl won first place for In-Depth Reporting from the Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors for a look at special education funding in Massachusetts. The same organization also awarded first place to a unique collaboration between WFXT-TV (FOX25) and CommonWealth for a series of stories on the Boston Redevelopment Authority and city employees getting affordable housing units, written by Jack and Bruce.
“I’m going to continue to do this,” he said. “I’m going to continue to be controversial. I’m going to continue to provoke people. That’s what I do.”
Yes, it is.
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