Paul Cassell Joins Defense in Amen vs. Giuffre Libel Case

In October, 2021, Rina Oh Amen filed a lawsuit against Virginia Giuffre in the Southern District of New York. Oh Amen’s amended complaint, which uses her maiden name Oh, was filed in January, 2022 by Manhattan lawyer Ira Meyerowitz. The complaint alleges that Giuffre defamed Oh when she claimed that Oh had been a co-conspirator in Epstein and Maxwell’s trafficking enterprise, and denied that Oh was a survivor of Epstein, as Oh claims.

On June 30th, Giuffre filed papers asking for Paul Cassell to be admitted to practice pro hac vice in her defense. Pro hac vice admission allows lawyers not licensed to practice in a jurisdistion to practice there legally under the supervision of a local lawyer.

Cassell has represented many of Epstein’s victims before, including in the original case based on the Palm Beach police investigation. A former federal judge in Utah, he was once the Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, and clerked for former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia when Scalia was on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. He’s now a Distinguished Professor at the College of Law at the University of Utah. He worked with Florida lawyer Bradley Edwards, who pursued the late billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein for decades, on a 2014 lawsuit against the federal government which charged that the notorious non-prosecution agreement Epstein obtained in 2007 violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act when prosecutors kept the victims in the dark. Filings in that case by Virginia Giuffre led to the claim that she had been trafficked by Epstein to lawyer Alan Dershowitz being revealed on the court’s docket. Those claims in turn led to a defamation case filed in a Florida State Court by Cassell and Edwards against Dershowitz after Dershowitz attacked the two as “sleazy, unprofessional, unethical lawyers” in an interview on CNN International. The defamation case was later settled, with Giuffre’s lawyers agreeing to withdraw the filings but defending the validity of the claims, saying filing them was only a “tactical mistake.”

Below is a comprehensive overview of the state of the case to date.