- Alan Dershowitz said Chris Cuomo was likely to win if he sues CNN over his firing.
- Reports say Cuomo plans to sue for the remaining value of his CNN contract, which the firing ended.
- Dershowitz is hardly a neutral party, since he is suing CNN himself.
Famed lawyer Alan Dershowitz said he believes Chris Cuomo would win a lawsuit against CNN in the wake of his firing.
Reports have suggested that Cuomo is considering pursuing CNN for $18 million, said to be the remaining value of his multi-year contract with the network.
Dershowitz, a Harvard professor emeritus, said in an interview on right-leaning network Newsmax that Cuomo, CNN's former top anchor had not misled anyone during his time there.
Cuomo was fired Saturday over the help he gave his brother, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, in sexual harassment allegations.
Cuomo apologized on air in May for coaching his brother and his political team through the allegations, saying he had never hidden it.
However, legal filings released by the New York Attorney General's office in November indicated that he also leveraged his position as a powerful journalist to assist his brother.
In its announcement on the firing, CNN cited "additional information" that preceded it — a possible reference to sexual harassment allegations against Chris Cuomo, which the former anchor has denied.
On Monday, the New York Post and Puck News reported that Chris Cuomo plans to sue the network, with the Post saying he would seek the roughly $18 million remaining on his contract. Cuomo did not respond to Insider's request for confirmation of this.
Following those reports, CNN CEO Jeff Zucker told employees the network would not be paying Cuomo any severance, The Week reported.
Speaking to Newsmax Tuesday, Alan Dershowitz said he was confident that Cuomo would win any litigation.
"I think he's going to get his $18 million and I bless him for going forward and trying to hold CNN responsible for malpractice reporting, breaking contracts, and applying a double standard," he told Newsmax's Sean Spicer.
He did not fully explain the details of the alleged wrongdoing by CNN.
CNN did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
Dershowitz has his own fight with the network: a long-running $300 million defamation lawsuit in which Dershowitz said CNN misleadingly edited his statements on former President Donald Trump's legal position when he was representing him in 2020.
Dershowitz told Newsmax's Sean Spicer that Zucker is the person who should be fired, and that he hoped Chris Cuomo wins.
Zucker, he said, encouraged Chris Cuomo's "love fest" with his brother on CNN when ratings on the network were falling. This is a likely reference to the fawning interviews of Andrew Cuomo by Chris Cuomo in the summer of 2020, held before Andrew Cuomo was accused of sexual assault.
"There's no way that Chris Cuomo misled CNN," Dershowitz continued. "CNN was responsible for the decision to keep him on the air."
"If they thought that the viewers would be misled they should have said 'look, you're going to be off the air during the time of the investigation.' It was Zucker's decision to make, not Cuomo's decision."
He said "they might not have known a detail here and there, but that's not enough to fire somebody."
In March after Andrew Cuomo's sexual assault allegations broke, Chris Cuomo said he would not cover his brother's case, saying he would not be able to do so objectively. CNN's chief media correspondent Brian Stelter later said that CNN had instructed him not to mention his brother.
Morality clauses are vague, Dershowitz said, in reference to the clause CNN is said to have cited in Cuomo's firing.
Dershowitz doubled down on his views in a written op-ed for the network also published Tuesday.