Representative James Comer, the Kentucky Republican chairing the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said Wednesday that he will ask Alan Dershowitz, the prominent Harvard Law professor and former attorney for Jeffrey Epstein, to appear before the panel.
“I am going to ask Alan Dershowitz to come in, we will have questions for him and we will give him an opportunity to come in,” Comer said Wednesday morning.
Comer said his decision followed Tuesday’s testimony from Lesley Groff, Epstein’s longtime assistant, as well as what he described as a follow-up meeting with several Epstein survivors. “We will have questions for him and we will give him an opportunity to come in and answer several questions that arose yesterday based on Ms. Groff’s testimony and some things that someone of the Epstein survivors said,” Comer said.
The transcript of Groff’s testimony has not been released by the committee. In her opening statement, Groff told lawmakers she had no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes while working for him and called her former employer a “master manipulator and deceiver.” MSI previously reported on Groff’s appearance before the panel here.
Dershowitz defended Epstein after his first arrest and served on the legal team that negotiated the financier’s now-controversial 2008 plea deal. In 2014, Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein survivor, alleged that Dershowitz sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager as part of Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation. Dershowitz has strongly denied those claims and has never been charged with any wrongdoing related to Epstein. Giuffre sued Dershowitz in 2019 alleging defamation over his denials but dropped the lawsuit in 2022, stating that she “may have made a mistake” in accusing him. Giuffre died in April 2025.
In a telephone interview with the Guardian on Wednesday, Dershowitz said he had “volunteered to testify” before the committee, pointing to recent appearances on NewsMax in which he expressed willingness to appear.
“I can present a much more nuanced and calibrated description of the complexity of these things,” Dershowitz told the Guardian. He added: “I’m not a reluctant witness, I wanted to testify, as I said from day one, I want the truth to come out. Everything I did in relation to the Epstein case, I’m proud of.”
Dershowitz said the NewsMax host Greta Van Susteren told him that she had reached out to Comer’s office on Tuesday to inquire about his willingness to testify, and claimed that outreach, combined with his own public offer, led to Comer’s request Wednesday.
A spokesperson for Comer’s office told the Guardian that “the House oversight committee will speak with anyone who has information about the federal government’s handling of the Epstein and Maxwell cases and their crimes.” The spokesperson added that “yesterday Lesley Groff named, when asked who else should come before the committee, Alan Dershowitz” and that “Chairman Comer also met with survivors yesterday who also stated Dershowitz should be interviewed.”
Dershowitz told the Guardian that he “hardly knew” Groff and recalled seeing her “on a couple of occasions sitting behind the desk at Epstein’s office,” adding that she may have arranged some flights when he traveled to meet with prosecutors, but said he “never had any substantive conversations with her.”