Ron Charles writes about the latest bit of legal silliness to come out of the country’s elite in WaPo:
In a letter sent to CBS and made public by Variety, Dershowitz’s lawyer claims that this episode is defamatory and constitutes “a direct attack on his professional reputation as an attorney and professor of law.” Dershowitz wants CBS to delete the offending dialogue and issue him a public apology.
A real-life lawyer for CBS responded with all the pluck and wit you would expect from a character on “The Good Fight.” “Benjamin Dafoe is not a real lawyer,” wrote attorney Jonathan Anschell. “. . . In other words, as one might explain to a small child, the Series, its characters and the things they say are all make-believe. People don’t watch the Series for factual information about Professor Dershowitz or anyone else.”
In other words, if Dershowitz isn’t mentioned in a fawning manner by the writer, he objects and will take him to – and intimidate him in – court.
Given Dershowitz’s embarrassing version of logic he employed as a defense lawyer during Trump’s impeachment trial, he has quite the gall bladder, and it probably needs a good squeeze right about now.
The use of reality-based incidents in a story is at least as old as the hills. The verisimilitude they lend to the story is a tool that can be used by the fiction writer to convince the reader that their story has something of salutary value. That’s the point of most story-telling: here’s a story that illustrates a bunch of points about how people function, and how actions have consequences. But to accomplish that task, the characters have to be believable. If a well-known person appears in a fictional story and it is suggested that they have indulged in something vastly improbable, the audience will shake its head and put the book down.
Perhaps the opposite is what worries Dershowitz – his recent lawyer performances have been such as to suggest he has a less than savory background.
But this worries me even more:
Dershowitz’s position could possibly jeopardize such creativity — and generate a host of lawsuits. By way of example, he wrote: “If Walt Disney had Donald Duck falsely accuse a living person of being a murderer or bank robber, that person should be able to sue Disney or the writer. It’s worse when the writer puts defamatory accusations in the mouth of a realistic lawyer character.”
No, they shouldn’t. Perhaps they could force the addition of a note stating this is a fictional character – maybe. But, generally, the audience should be responsible for understanding that fiction means lies. It may be, as V says in the movie V for Vendetta (2005, and I cannot believe I have not yet reviewed this movie, which I’ve watched several times), paraphrased, Stories are a collection of lies, used to tell the truth, and I agree, but any individual incident, unless otherwise researched, should be assumed not to be true.
I believe Dershowitz is getting a little high and mighty, especially for someone who foisted off such garbage reasoning during the Trump impeachment trial.
