Alan Dershowitz has spent decades as one of the most recognizable lawyers in America — a Harvard Law emeritus who turned courtroom celebrity into a media franchise, defending O.J. Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein, and ultimately Donald Trump in his first Senate impeachment trial. That last engagement, more than any other, is what got him uninvited from the summer parties.

Martha's Vineyard operates on a specific social physics. The island draws a liberal elite — the kind of people who donate to the ACLU, read long-form, and consider themselves connoisseurs of principled dissent right up until someone they know actually dissents. When Dershowitz mounted a constitutional argument on the Senate floor in January 2020 that a president could not be impeached for an act he genuinely believed was in the public interest, the island's social machinery quietly spun up against him.

The most famous episode came from Larry David — the comedian and co-creator of Seinfeld who lives, seasonally, in the same ZIP code of tasteful wealth. David reportedly confronted Dershowitz at a supermarket on the island, making clear he wanted nothing to do with him anymore. Dershowitz has recounted the story multiple times since, in interviews and in writing, with a consistency that signals it has not healed cleanly. He has framed it as a parable about liberal intolerance — the very people who championed civil liberties unable to endure a defense lawyer doing what defense lawyers exist to do.

There is a genuine civil-liberties argument buried in there, and Dershowitz is not entirely wrong to make it. The proposition that a defense attorney is morally contaminated by the client he represents is one that, applied consistently, would gut the Sixth Amendment. Dershowitz spent years making that exact argument on behalf of people the left was more sympathetic about — and nobody shunned him at the fish counter then. The selective outrage is real.

What complicates his martyrdom narrative, though, is the Epstein matter. Dershowitz negotiated the infamous 2008 non-prosecution agreement that allowed Epstein to plead to a single state charge and serve thirteen months in a county jail with work-release privileges — a deal that federal prosecutors later described, in court filings, as a violation of the Crime Victims' Rights Act because victims were never notified. Dershowitz has denied more serious allegations made against him in civil litigation connected to the Epstein case, and no criminal charges have ever been brought against him. But the Epstein association is not a detail that gets footnoted and forgotten, and many of his former Vineyard companions are aware it is woven into the same tapestry as the Trump work.

Nonetheless, Dershowitz insists his social calendar has recovered. He has said publicly that he has made new friends on the island — people less ideologically rigid, or simply newer arrivals less plugged into the old network's blacklist. He maintains a Substack newsletter that keeps him visible and unbeholden to any editorial gatekeeper, and cable television, particularly at the right-leaning end of the dial, still considers him a reliable booking. The cancellation, in material terms, has been partial and permeable.

What lingers is the psychological texture of the thing. A man who built an identity around contrarianism and intellectual combat finds that when the combat turns personal, when it's not a courtroom but a grocery aisle, the usual defenses don't quite hold. Dershowitz keeps telling the Larry David story because it captures something specific: the moment the liberal world he had always moved in decided he was not just wrong but untouchable. For someone whose professional brand is built on the principle that everyone deserves representation and no one should be rendered an outcast without due process, to be rendered an outcast informally — no charges, no jury, just a comedian's cold shoulder in the produce section — has an irony he cannot seem to stop turning over.

The Vineyard, for its part, has not issued a statement. It doesn't need to. The mechanism of social exclusion that Dershowitz has made a minor literary project of documenting is precisely effective because it is wordless, deniable, and operates through the aggregate of a thousand small decisions not to wave back. He is free to be there. He is simply not, in certain rooms, particularly welcome. That distinction — technically tolerated, socially diminished — is one his clients have sometimes faced in far graver forms. The recursion is uncomfortable and probably intentional to no one, which somehow makes it worse.