He was once pornography’s fiercest advocate — so why does Alan Dershowitz downplay his legal efforts on behalf of Penthouse magazine in his recently released memoir?
The lawyer swears it’s not because he’s embarrassed. He just didn’t have room in “Taking the Stand: My Life in the Law.”
“I left out a lot,” Dershowitz told me. “If I had put in everything, it would have been 10,000 pages long.”
The Harvard Law professor, best known for helping Claus von Bulow, O.J. Simpson and Patty Hearst avoid jail, represented the late Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione for many years.
Dershowitz testified for Guccione before the Meese Commission on Pornography in 1985, and he wrote a column about the law for Penthouse for almost 20 years.
“I’m very proud of my role representing Bob Guccione,” Dershowitz said. “He pushed the limits of free speech, which is what I do.”