Alan Dershowitz has fought many battles over the course of his legal career. He has fought on behalf of O.J. Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein, and Donald Trump. Now he will fight for himself—against a pierogi seller at a Martha’s Vineyard farmers market who was mean to him.
During Wednesday’s episode of the Dershow podcast (that’s what it’s actually called), the constitutional attorney announced his intent to sue a pierogi vendor at the West Tisbury Farmers Market in Massachusetts after the man refused to fork over the dumplings.
“I don’t approve of your politics, I don’t approve of who you’ve represented, I don’t approve of who you support,” Dershowitz recalled the man saying.
Dershowitz recounted that he’d earned strange looks from the same man when he’d visited the stall the week before wearing a T-shirt identifying him as a “Proud Zionist.”
“The clear implication was that he opposed me because I defended Donald Trump and because I was a Zionist,” Dershowitz claimed.
In a video of the incident posted to social media, a police officer informed a distraught Dersh that private establishments have the right to refuse service. While private establishments are barred from discrimination on the basis of sex, race, or religion, political affiliation is not a protected attribute, and neither is defending an alleged sex trafficker with ties to the president.
Three different vendors had made complaints about Dershowitz, the officer said.
On his podcast, Dershowitz said that he would sue the farmers market to adopt a policy to sell to everyone.
He also explained that the insidious bigotry he’d experienced had spread even beyond the farmers market stall: His books had been banned from the libraries, and he’d been blacklisted from speaking at the synagogue.
“It’s worse than McCarthyism of the 1950s, because McCarthyism of the 1950s went after the people themselves—the communists, the lawyers who represented the communists,” he said. “In Chilmark, they go after my wife, they go after my children, they go after my grandchildren, and they take it out on everybody.”
This isn’t the first time that Dershowitz has claimed McCarthyism has come for Martha’s Vineyard. In 2018, he penned an op-ed for The Hill claiming that he had been shunned from the island’s social scene.