President Donald Trump’s sometime-attorney and longtime-friend, lawyer Alan Dershowitz, is reportedly urging the Republican leader to pardon two leaders of a sex-focused women’s wellness company accused of abusing their customers.
“I believe this is a miscarriage of justice,” Dershowitz said in an interview with NBC News. “I intend to present the case for clemency directly.”
The Harvard law professor is referring to OneTaste founder Nicole Daedone and former executive Rachel Cherwitz, both of whom were convicted in June of forced labor conspiracy and are held at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center for sentencing on March 30. They could receive as much as 20 years in prison for their convicted crimes. In addition to being convicted of forced labor conspiracy, Daedone and Cherwitz are accused of running a company that regularly inflicted emotional and physical abuse on its members. The former OneTaste executives adamantly deny all claims of abuse.
When it comes to at least the crimes for which they were convicted, Daedone and Cherwitz have a supporter in Dershowitz.
“As soon as I saw the indictment, I realized that with a few changes of words, this indictment could have been directed against Mormon groups, against Hasidic groups, against various Protestant or Catholic sects,” Dershowitz told NBC News. “There are so many people who join ideological or religious groups, volunteer their time and later become disillusioned. The idea that prosecutors can later say that voluntary participation must have been coercion is extremely dangerous.”
This does not mean that either Dershowitz or the OneTaste legal team has abandoned their hope in overturning the conviction on appeal. That said, they hope a pardon from Trump will make all of that unnecessary.
“We will seek every possible remedy, legal and political,” Dershowitz explained. “This is a federal case, and the president has the ultimate authority. President Trump has uniquely viewed the pardon and commutation power as part of the system of checks and balances.”
Certainly Dershowitz has the access to Trump to make such a plan theoretically possible. In December it was reported that Dershowitz loaned Trump an advance copy of his upcoming book, “Could President Trump Constitutionally Serve a Third Term?”, which offers the inaccurate advice that a president can ignore the 22nd amendment’s plain text and seek an illegal third term in office.
"I said ‘it’s not clear if a president can become a third term president and it’s not clear if it’s permissible,'" Dershowitz told The Wall Street Journal about his conversation with Trump regarding the book.
Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2019, Dershowitz infamously denied the reporter’s claim that Trump was planning on refusing to accept the result of the 2020 presidential election if he lost.
“No president will refuse to step down if his opponent is elected in his place,” Dershowitz told Salon at the time. “It just will not happen, and the American public would never tolerate it.”