Sue Barlach Dershowitz - Alan's "hidden" wife
Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2018 6:02 pm
So I was listening to Chapo Trap House this week and around minute 39 they start talking about Alan Dershowitz's "skeletons in the closet": the Jeffrey Epstein affair and his first wife (who they wouldn't name), because the latter seemed to overlay Dershowitz's later case defending Claus von Bülow. The Dry Boys (well Will Menaker, mostly) bring the subject up because the New York Times did a fluff piece on how Dershowitz is now shunned by the social scene on Martha's Vineyard because he speaks up for our first Dorito president, Donald John Trump. World's smallest violin, thunderstorm in a tiny tea cup. But please listen to the show from minutes 17 to 61.
So I started looking for this first wife, Sue Barlach, and the only references I could find in a Google search was an article from Rense.com. Jeff Rense is not somebody I would consider a trustworthy source, the Southern Poverty Law Center points out why. All we know is that Dershowitz married Barlach in June, 1959 before starting law school. Her occupation was listed as "student" and that she was from Bayonne, New Jersey. Dershowitz mentioned that he had married a woman before law school in his 1991 book Chutzpah. This woman gave birth to Dershowitz's two oldest children, Elon and Jamin, both sons. So what happened to Sue Dershowitz?
This is where it gets into "alleged" territory - the article on Rense.com is a replacement for a previous article that was deleted. Another website copied it, and you can only see it on the Wayback Machine. The claims are these: somewhere in 1974-75 Sue discovered that Alan was having an affair, and she took all the important papers from each of the cases he was handling and threw them into the street. He beat the snot out of her in a rage; she had to be hospitalized. Alan divorced his wife in 1975 and got custody of his sons, and would not pay his wife any financial support but the lowest level possible. Sometime in 1975 or 1976 she killed herself by allegedly jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge. "Somehow" the thing stayed out of the papers, and Dershowitz remarried in 1986 to Carolyn Cohen; they had a daughter, Ella.
You can't find a photo of Sue Barlach online, I've tried "Find a Grave" and nothing turns up. The only thing online beyond Rense's stuff is ancestry.com's copy of the NYC Marriage License Indexes (1904-1995), which confirms Sue Barlach and Alan Dershowitz married in 1959; they are marriage license number 7364. I would be willing to say that some of this was buried by Alan and the rest by the Barlach family, because suicide is frowned on in Judaism. I just can't see him bullying his inlaws into being silent, but I can see him lying his head off for "damage control."
So I started looking for this first wife, Sue Barlach, and the only references I could find in a Google search was an article from Rense.com. Jeff Rense is not somebody I would consider a trustworthy source, the Southern Poverty Law Center points out why. All we know is that Dershowitz married Barlach in June, 1959 before starting law school. Her occupation was listed as "student" and that she was from Bayonne, New Jersey. Dershowitz mentioned that he had married a woman before law school in his 1991 book Chutzpah. This woman gave birth to Dershowitz's two oldest children, Elon and Jamin, both sons. So what happened to Sue Dershowitz?
This is where it gets into "alleged" territory - the article on Rense.com is a replacement for a previous article that was deleted. Another website copied it, and you can only see it on the Wayback Machine. The claims are these: somewhere in 1974-75 Sue discovered that Alan was having an affair, and she took all the important papers from each of the cases he was handling and threw them into the street. He beat the snot out of her in a rage; she had to be hospitalized. Alan divorced his wife in 1975 and got custody of his sons, and would not pay his wife any financial support but the lowest level possible. Sometime in 1975 or 1976 she killed herself by allegedly jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge. "Somehow" the thing stayed out of the papers, and Dershowitz remarried in 1986 to Carolyn Cohen; they had a daughter, Ella.
You can't find a photo of Sue Barlach online, I've tried "Find a Grave" and nothing turns up. The only thing online beyond Rense's stuff is ancestry.com's copy of the NYC Marriage License Indexes (1904-1995), which confirms Sue Barlach and Alan Dershowitz married in 1959; they are marriage license number 7364. I would be willing to say that some of this was buried by Alan and the rest by the Barlach family, because suicide is frowned on in Judaism. I just can't see him bullying his inlaws into being silent, but I can see him lying his head off for "damage control."