A BBC News interview with a lawyer accused of the sexual abuse of a minor after Ghislaine Maxwell’s conviction “did not meet the BBC’s editorial standards”, the corporation has said.
The broadcaster has been inundated with complaints about the interview with Alan Dershowitz, which was broadcast on the BBC News channel shortly after Maxwell was found guilty of sex trafficking in a New York court on Wednesday.
Dershowitz, who was previously Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyer, has been accused of sexual abuse by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who has made similar claims against Prince Andrew. Both men deny the allegations.
When interviewed on the BBC News channel on Wednesday, Dershowitz was introduced simply as a “constitutional lawyer”. He was then allowed to attack Giuffre’s credibility, without challenge from the presenter.
A BBC spokesperson said on Thursday that Dershowitz “was not a suitable person to interview as an impartial analyst, and we did not make the relevant background clear to our audience. We will look into how this happened.”
In the interview, Dershowitz congratulated the prosecution in the Maxwell case for not calling Giuffre as a witness, “because they ultimately didn’t believe she was telling the truth and they didn’t believe a jury would believe her and they were right in doing so”.
The BBC did not mention that Dershowitz and Giuffre are locked in lawsuits over the veracity of her claims that he was part of a group of powerful men to whom Epstein offered her for sex....
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