The 58-year-old lawyer with the Einstein haircut, the Harvard professor whose surname has become a generic term for glamorous counsel, is emphatic. 'Yes, I can talk about Woody and Mia,' he said.
These days kids from lousy backgrounds who want to break free do not just dream of becoming a lawyer, but of becoming a Dershowitz. For this is the man who defended OJ Simpson in the criminal trial, and famously got him off that first time. The man whose client-list - Claus von Bulow, Mike Tyson, Michael 'junk bond' Milken - makes Bluebeard sound like just a person with adjustment problems.
When Mia Farrow found the nude pictures of her adopted daughter Soon-Yi on Woody Allen's mantelpiece, she called Alan Dershowitz. Woody Allen kept a copy of Dershowitz' autobiographical book Chutzpah on his bedside table and Farrow thought here was the man who could talk to her erstwhile lover, who could salvage some sanity from the nightmare. Farrow called Dershowitz in to mediate, not to prosecute.
'In fact I used to be Woody Allen's biggest fan,' said Dershowitz, from his book-strewn third-floor office at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 'My sons and I were always the first in line for every Woody Allen movie. That was our thing, the boys cut school for it - yes, I took them out of school to see his films.' He does not go to Woody Allen movies any more, a principled stance as fierce as his advocacy. 'I'll tell you exactly what happened. I phoned him straight away. I really tried to talk to him, to get some sense into him.' He still sounds perplexed at his failure. 'The idea was to protect the children, not to make this a public issue. I wanted a world-class psychiatrist to see all of them and to make the decisions about the best thing to do for the children.
'But he wouldn't have it, he went and called a press conference - he was the one who did that. In the end he got hurt the most; every single court decision went her way.' Dershowitz is a man who seems to see his clients in black and white. His advice to Mia Farrow was to avoid all publicity and yet she has recently published her account of the breakdown of her family, giving graphic and lurid details. What does he think of that? 'I haven't read the book, though I look forward to it. I love Mia. She has become a friend and I think her family is the most incredibly special thing. I love going to her house. I love to take my family there, you have all these kids from all types of racial backgrounds, and some with disabilities, it's a wonderful household.' So he doesn't think there is anything odd about the way Farrow has relentlessly adopted children? 'No, 100 per cent not. She is a wonderful woman. She simply does it because she feels she's been given a good deal, and she wants to return some of that.
'She is the least selfish person I know. The only part I can't understand is how she ever got involved with the most selfish person. Any person having an affair with a young girl, it's incredibly selfish, it's the definition of selfish, no matter what the sexual urge was.
'And to this day, Woody does not understand what he did. He destroyed every rule of family, he broke any sense of faith, of confidence.' Dershowitz' credo as a lawyer is that everybody deserves the best defence. 'If Hitler came out of the jungles of Brazil today, I'd defend him,' he said. Would he therefore, have defended Woody Allen? He stutters and coughs. Then, 'Yes, him too, if he came to me in a criminal case, I'd have defended him - I would have been unhappy to do it, but I would have taken it.