Alan Dershowitz:
the agreement, and after

He is the only figure in this archive still visibly practising the method, under his own name, in public.

What he built in 2007 is the foundation of everything else on this site. Thirty-six identified child victims. A sixty-count federal indictment drafted and never filed. Immunity for four named women and for “any potential co-conspirators” — requiring nothing in return. A federal court later found the agreement violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act because the victims were never told it existed.

Every absence of consequence this archive documents runs back through that document. He has never disowned it. He defends it publicly and has said the prosecution was overreaching.

And he is eighty-seven and still working, which is why this is a current-affairs page rather than a historical one.

He is on Netanyahu’s legal team challenging the ICC — “Look, I’m one of Bibi Netanyahu’s lawyers” — having recruited two former US attorneys general, a former FBI director and a former governor of New York.

In July 2026 he said New York’s mayor “will be arrested” if he interferes with Netanyahu’s arrival. He identified no criminal charge and did not say who would order it. And he announced he intends to organise a rally of “100,000 New Yorkers” in Central Park to welcome Netanyahu during the September General Assembly. As of late August 2026 no such rally has occurred; it remains a stated intention.

The reason this belongs here is not the politics of it. It is that the same practitioner who negotiated an agreement the courts found unlawful is now running, openly, the exact fusion of legal work and public-opinion management that this archive spent forty pages documenting as a covert industry. He is not hiding it. He is advertising it.

This archive documents an industry that depends on nobody knowing it is operating.

Crisis firms sold “untraceable” campaigns. A team in Manila stripped words from search suggestions without anyone asking Google. Reputation work carries no disclosure obligation anywhere. Concealment is the product.

Dershowitz does the opposite, and it is worth being precise about what that means.

Announcing a legal team and saying in the same breath that the defence will be conducted “in the court of public opinion” is disclosure. Everyone can see who is arguing, for whom, and by what means. By the standard this archive actually proposes — say who paid you — that is the compliant version.

Which produces an uncomfortable but honest conclusion. The objection to him cannot be that he combines advocacy with opinion campaigning, because that is what lawyers with public clients have always done, and he does it in the open. The objection is to a specific document he negotiated in 2007, and to what it cost.

And on that he is consistent rather than evasive. He has defended the agreement, argued the prosecution overreached, and never suggested he was misled about his client. That is more than the prosecutor on the other side of the table has managed.

The open question is the one he has never had to answer. Not whether he was entitled to negotiate hard — he was, and that is the job. But whether a defence lawyer who obtains immunity for people he cannot name, in a deal the victims are never told about, has done something the profession should permit. No bar association has examined it.