Legal heavyweight Alan Dershowitz is joining “Gossip Girl” star Kelly Rutherford’s battle to keep her kids in America, and tells us “it’s just the beginning” in what could be a “precedent-setting case.”
Rutherford recently lost an appeal to keep her two young kids — Hermes, 5, and Helena, 3 — on US soil instead of being raised in France by her ex-husband, German businessman Daniel Giersch.
“The children have constitutional rights as Americans,” Harvard law professor Dershowitz told us yesterday. “They have the right as Americans to be educated in American schools.
“Wouldn’t children born in America strongly prefer [being brought up] in America than in France with a father who speaks German?”
Dershowitz — whose clients have included Mia Farrow, Mike Tyson and Patti Hearst — says he wasn’t familiar with Rutherford as a TV star when he was approached for legal advice.
“This is not about celebrity justice, this is about the rights of the children,” he said. “I was asked to do this, and I was very intrigued. I met with [Rutherford], and [her case] suggested there was an additional dimension about the constitutional rights of children.”
Dershowitz has been successfully involved in two similar cases dating back to the ‘60s, and was a legal adviser in the Elian Gonzalez custody battle in 2000 that pitted the US against Cuba.
“And I would say that Elian would’ve been better off being brought up in Miami than Havana, Cuba, and being paraded around by Castro,” said Dershowitz yesterday.
Rutherford’s rep David Goldin said: “Kelly is gratified that such a distinguished legal mind shares her outrage that American citizens who’ve grown up only in New York are being ordered to live in France.”
Dershowitz — whose defense of Claus von Bülow was dramatized in the Jeremy Irons 1990 movie “Reversal of Fortune” — added that Rutherford’s next step will be to bring a constitutional trial lawyer onto her team, which Dershowitz would then advise.