culture war

Larry David Beefs With Alan Dershowitz in Martha’s Vineyard Grocery Store

“Your whole enclave — it’s disgusting.” Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images

There are many reasons for members of polite society to avoid attorney Alan Dershowitz, whose scandal-stained client list includes Harvey Weinstein, O.J. Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein, and Donald Trump. And while Larry David hasn’t exactly made his career on being polite, the Martha’s Vineyard mainstay still tried to duck Dershowitz at a quaint grocery on the southeast of the island, according to a “Page Six spy” who caught their bizarre recent encounter on the porch of the Chilmark General Store:

Dershowitz: “We can still talk, Larry.”


David: “No. No. We really can’t. I saw you. I saw you with your arm around [Former Trump Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo! It’s disgusting!” 


Dersh: “He’s my former student [at Harvard Law]. I greet all of my former students that way. I can’t greet my former students?”


David: “It’s disgusting. Your whole enclave — it’s disgusting. You’re disgusting!”


Added the stunned source, “Larry walks away. Alan takes off his T-shirt to reveal another T-shirt [underneath it] that says, ‘It’s The Constitution Stupid!’

After Dershowitz “drove off in an old, dirty Volvo,” he spoke with “Page Six” to air his grievances with the king of grievances. The lawyer claimed that he and the Curb Your Enthusiasm creator were friends for years before the Trump era, and that he helped get one of David’s daughters into college and once represented him pro bono in a legal dispute on the island. “It’s typical of what happens now on the Vineyard,” he said. “People won’t talk to each other if they don’t agree with their politics.” As for the oddly specific T-shirt, he said his wife bought it for him because so many people misunderstood his decision to defend Trump in his first impeachment trial. Dershowitz added that he voted for Joe Biden and that the whole encounter “wasn’t funny at all.”

Whether or not Dershowitz is correct in that assessment, he has been complaining for a while that the elite on the Massachusetts isle haven’t been treating him nicely. In 2018, he complained in an op-ed in The Hill that “McCarthyism” had “come to Martha’s Vineyard” and that his friends are “trying to ban me from their social life.”

Larry David, unsurprisingly, seems like he would welcome such a ban. In addition to his refusal to speak with the celebrity attorney, David was delighted earlier this month when he got cut from the guest list at Obama’s 60th birthday bash. “When he told me I was eighty-sixed from the party, I was so relieved,” the Seinfeld co-creator told the New York Times. “I screamed, ‘Thank you! Thank you!’ [Obama’s assistant] must have thought I was insane. Then I hung up the phone, poured myself a drink, and finished my crossword puzzle.”

David Beefs With Dershowitz in Martha’s Vineyard Grocery