Sue Barlach Dershowitz - Alan's "hidden" wife

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Sue Barlach Dershowitz - Alan's "hidden" wife

Post by Strelnikov » 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."
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

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Re: Sue Barlach Dershowitz - Alan's "hidden" wife

Post by ericbarbour » Tue Jul 10, 2018 2:55 am

Strelnikov wrote: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.

I can believe this. Dershowitz is a successful publicity hound lawyer because he's a raging sociopath, and because the New York Times thinks he's a "great American patriot", they would be most willing to hide his failures. And to delve any more would drag us into the pro-Israel scene, AIPAC, and the "BDS" issue, which would distract from the main subject. Just say this: The Donald has made many pro-Israel noises over the last few years, and that means the attack dogs feel compelled to support him. No matter how embarrassing it is.

JPost article about Trump before the election:
https://www.jpost.com/Jerusalem-Report/ ... ews-438335
Mike Pence blubbers at an AIPAC meeting:
https://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/201 ... s-history/

A 2009 Usenet thread about Sue, which unfortunately also uses the Rense article:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/a ... ultaJnft0J
This subject is routinely discussed on anti-semitic websites, which REALLY doesn't help:
https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t748689/

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Re: Sue Barlach Dershowitz - Alan's "hidden" wife

Post by Strelnikov » Tue Jul 10, 2018 6:41 am

ericbarbour wrote:
Strelnikov wrote: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.

I can believe this. Dershowitz is a successful publicity hound lawyer because he's a raging sociopath, and because the New York Times thinks he's a "great American patriot", they would be most willing to hide his failures. And to delve any more would drag us into the pro-Israel scene, AIPAC, and the "BDS" issue, which would distract from the main subject. Just say this: The Donald has made many pro-Israel noises over the last few years, and that means the attack dogs feel compelled to support him. No matter how embarrassing it is.

JPost article about Trump before the election:
https://www.jpost.com/Jerusalem-Report/ ... ews-438335
Mike Pence blubbers at an AIPAC meeting:
https://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/201 ... s-history/

A 2009 Usenet thread about Sue, which unfortunately also uses the Rense article:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/a ... ultaJnft0J
This subject is routinely discussed on anti-semitic websites, which REALLY doesn't help:
https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t748689/


Jeff Rense and Don Black of Stormfront are friends/co-propagandists so that's why there is overlap in where this story has appeared online.

Supposedly if you find the Who's Who in America for 1972, Sue Barlach is listed as spouse to Alan Morton Dershowitz with the two sons listed as well.

The Jeffery Epstein affair is instructive because Dershowitz rigged it so that he could not be dragged into court over those flights he took on Epstein's plane. He always tries to find an out....if there was a table for scummy famous guys at every event, it would be Dershowitz, Harvey Weinstein, and Woody Allen. And let us not forget that Trump was also a passenger on Epstein's flights - it's like that old James Burke column "Connections" in Scientific American, except for Hell, because this is "the Hell around us" to quote Hans-Jürgen Syberberg.
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

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Re: Sue Barlach Dershowitz - Alan's "hidden" wife

Post by AndrewForson » Tue Jul 10, 2018 7:03 pm

There's ample evidence for the first marriage, not least in Dershowitz's own memoir. The catastrophic end, not so much. But I see that the Wikipedia article infobox mentions her even if the article doesn't.

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Re: Sue Barlach Dershowitz - Alan's "hidden" wife

Post by Strelnikov » Wed Jul 11, 2018 2:49 am

AndrewForson wrote:There's ample evidence for the first marriage, not least in Dershowitz's own memoir. The catastrophic end, not so much. But I see that the Wikipedia article infobox mentions her even if the article doesn't.


We've established that - that's why I put the word "hidden" in quotation marks in the subject line. Online all she is a name: we have no photos, no grave location, etc. It's an open secret that A.M. Dershowitz and Sue Barlach were married, it's what happened to her and who kept it out of the press that is murky. If everybody has been lying and she still is out there, why hasn't she come forward? I can give examples of ex-wives of famous people coming forward after a divorce with a book or a series of interviews recounting what actually happened: Barbara Branden, who had been married to Ayn Rand protege Nathaniel Branden (Blumenthal) wrote The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986) which laid out how a married Rand had seduced her husband and they had an open "logical" affair, even though it drove Frank O'Connor (Ayn Rand's husband) to drink himself to death, and the ten year scheme imploded when it turned out that Nathaniel was cheating on both Rand and Barbara in 1968; it destroyed the first Randian ("Objectivist") promotional group, the Nathaniel Branden Institute, and Rand smoked herself to death twelve years later.

Unless the victim is dead, the truth usually comes out in some form.
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Re: Sue Barlach Dershowitz - Alan's "hidden" wife

Post by Strelnikov » Sat Aug 10, 2019 3:27 am

Thanks to the Jeffery Epstein debacle we now know that Sue Barlach died in 1983, from drowning in the East River on New Years Day.

This means that the Rense.com story is utter nonsense, or it happened later then they said it did, or the facts have bent to fit a narrative. From the Vox story linked to:

...Bruck also reports that in the 1970s, Dershowitz’s marriage to his first wife, Sue Barlach, fell apart. A judge in the divorce proceedings wrote that Dershowitz’s behavior toward Barlach “negatively affected the plaintiff’s health to the extent that she required medical treatment and briefly some psychiatric therapy.” Dershowitz denies mistreating her.

He sought custody of the couple’s children, and, Bruck reports, gave an expert witness tapes of his phone calls with Barlach to bolster his case (Dershowitz told Bruck he did not recall taping the calls). Ultimately, he was awarded full custody. In 1983, Barlach died.

In an initial version of the New Yorker story, Bruck wrote that Barlach had jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. Dershowitz told Vox this was inaccurate, and charged that the anecdote had been sourced from Rense.com, an anti-Semitic website.

A spokesperson for the New Yorker told Vox in an email that “Rense.com formed no part of the sourcing of this story” and that “the article has been updated to better reflect the circumstances under which Sue Barlach died: ‘On New Year’s Eve, 1983, she drowned in the East River, in an apparent suicide.’”
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Re: Sue Barlach Dershowitz - Alan's "hidden" wife

Post by ericbarbour » Thu Aug 15, 2019 12:16 am

And this is still all Wikipedia says about her.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Ders ... sonal_life
Dershowitz's first wife was Sue Barlach.[116] Barlach and Dershowitz separated in 1973 and divorced in 1976. Dershowitz was awarded full custody of their children.[117]

Reference 116 is Dershowitz's own book Chutzpah. (If egotistical long-winded lawyer-jabbering drives you crazy, don't read that book. I speak from experience.) Reference 117 is the New Yorker article which seems to mostly reference the same book. Which was revised when someone complained, as you noted. Funny how that "works".
This article has been updated to better reflect the circumstances under which Sue Barlach died.


If none of this is an "issue", then why is it all being brought up over and over, now that Epstein is all over the news? This is a bad-publicity storm the Mighty Lawyer-Hero of Yale will not be able to bullshit or sue his way out of.

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