David Boies

David Boies (born March 11, 1941, Sycamore, Illinois) is an American trial lawyer who founded Boies Schiller Flexner in 1997 and chaired it until 2024. He was Special Trial Counsel for the Justice Department in its antitrust suit against Microsoft and lead counsel for Al Gore in the litigation over the 2000 Florida vote count.¹ In 2016 and 2017 his firm contracted and paid the Israeli private intelligence company Black Cube on behalf of Harvey Weinstein; Ehud Barak had given Weinstein the company's contact information. On November 8, 2017, two days after the arrangement was reported, Jeffrey Epstein asked Barak by email whether Boies had reached "the mossad guys" through him.²³⁴ His firm represented Virginia Giuffre in litigation against Ghislaine Maxwell, and in 2019 it produced the confidential discovery from that case to federal prosecutors in response to a grand jury subpoena.⁵⁶

Career

Boies attended the University of Redlands, took a B.S. from Northwestern University in 1964, an LL.B. from Yale in 1966, and an LL.M. from New York University in 1967. He was chief counsel and staff director of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1979 and its antitrust subcommittee in 1978, and from 1991 to 1993 was counsel to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, recovering 1.2 billion dollars from companies that had sold junk bonds to failed savings and loan associations. He founded Boies Schiller Flexner in 1997, served as its chairman from 1997 to 2024, was Special Trial Counsel in United States v. Microsoft from 1998 to 2000, and was co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs in Perry v. Brown, the challenge to California's Proposition 8.¹

Black Cube and Weinstein

On October 28, 2016 Boies Schiller Flexner wired Black Cube the first 100,000 dollars toward what became a 600,000 dollar invoice; the firm and Black Cube signed a contract that month and several others later. A contract dated July 11, 2017 and bearing Boies's signature listed as its "primary objectives" to "provide intelligence which will help the Client's efforts to completely stop the publication of a new negative article in a leading NY newspaper" and to "obtain additional content of a book which currently being written and includes harmful negative information on and about the Client," identified as Weinstein. Boies signed while his firm was also representing The New York Times, including in a libel case.²

Boies told Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker, whose report appeared on November 6, 2017, that his firm had contracted with and paid two of the agencies, that investigators from one of them sent him reports which were passed to Weinstein, and that he had not selected the firms or directed their work. "We should not have been contracting with and paying investigators that we did not select and direct," he said. "At the time, it seemed a reasonable accommodation for a client, but it was not thought through, and that was my mistake." He denied that the work on the Times story was a conflict of interest, saying he had advised Weinstein "that the story could not be stopped by threats or influence and that the only way the story could be stopped was by convincing the Times that there was no rape."²

On November 8, 2017 a spokesman for Barak confirmed that Weinstein had asked Barak "if he knew an Israeli company he had heard of" capable of helping him with business issues, that Barak had confirmed "the company he heard of was likely Black Cube" and "gave Weinstein its contact information," and that Barak "was not aware until this morning of the fact the company was hired by Weinstein, or for what purposes or operations." The spokesman placed the referral more than a year earlier.³

At 15:54 GMT the same day Epstein wrote to Barak: "boies said he got to the mossad guys through you? true?" Fifty-five minutes later he wrote again: "Did Boies ask you to help Obtain former mossad agents to do dirty investigations. ? this is getting a lot of press, ." Barak replied the next morning: "Call me.. [number redacted] in Paris."⁴

Giuffre, Maxwell, and Dershowitz

Boies represented Virginia Giuffre in her litigation arising from Epstein's abuse.⁵ In the spring of 2019, months before Epstein's July arrest, prosecutors in the Southern District of New York served a grand jury subpoena on Boies Schiller Flexner for the confidential discovery in Giuffre v. Maxwell, which Giuffre had brought against Maxwell in 2015; an order of April 9, 2019 in In re Grand Jury Subpoena, No. 19-MC-149 (CM), permitted the firm to comply, and the material was produced. On August 11, 2026 Judge Loretta Preska authorized the government to release the material under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, over Maxwell's objection.⁶

After Giuffre accused Alan Dershowitz of abusing her, which he denied, she sued him for defamation in April 2019 and he countersued; Boies sued Dershowitz over Dershowitz's claims that Boies had pressured Giuffre to lie as part of an extortion plot, and Dershowitz sued Boies in turn. On November 8, 2022 all the suits were dismissed with prejudice under a global settlement that the parties said "does not involve the payment of any money by anyone or anything else." Giuffre stated that she "may have made a mistake in identifying Mr. Dershowitz"; Dershowitz said his allegations "that David Boies engaged in an extortion plot and in suborning perjury were mistake[n]"; Boies said he appreciated Dershowitz's acknowledgment and that Dershowitz had "consistently, and vehemently, denied" the abuse allegation.⁵