Somewhat incredibly, it admits of no significant prosecutorial, judicial, or law enforcement wrongdoing, except for a brief acknowledgment that claims by police that as many as five hundred children may have been abused were overstated. It also implies that Jesse Friedmans attorney, Ron Kuby, behaved dishonestly and unprofessionally over the course of Nassau Countys reinvestigation. ", Watch the full story on "Nightline" tonight at 12:35 a.m. Jesse pled guilty. I was forced to pose with my penis against their anus. Mr. Goldstein, a talented musician, was the only person charged other than the Friedmans. They refer to the inherent unreliability of recantation testimony on two separate occasions, and in a third instance they put gratuitous quotation marks around the word recantation in recantation testimony. Elsewhere, they quote an unrelated New York judicial opinion that says, There is no form of proof so unreliable as recanting testimony. Twenty-eight pages later, they repeat the quotation. They note that although the transcript of the interview with Detective Anthony Squeglia runs more than fifty pages, Jareckis film excerpts only a single short clip. That, of course, is the clip that contains the damning quotation about not giving children options when you interview them. In a strongly worded ruling, the court asked the Nassau District Attorney's office to re-examine the case, saying, "there is reason to believe Jesse Friedman may have been wrongly convicted.". The joke is that everybody yells everything in stupid voices. You know, we knew this was a film about the family. Arline Epstein, whose son Michael attended classes in which some of the most frequent abuse was said to have occurred, kept detailed notes during that period. He confessed to abusing other boys as well. During the investigation, 14 young boys, mostly between the ages of 8 and 10 at the time, told police lurid accounts of Arnold and Jesse Friedman committing sodomy and rape. Social consciousness has become the new beauty. The . Elaine Friedman in Florida. They also raise the issue of Squeglias reliability, writing that Jarecki interviewed him informally, on the detectives front lawn, fifteen years after the investigation concluded. ", Another, known as Stephen Doe, told Jarecki in an audio-taped conversation, "I don't want to be a perjurer or anything but I can't even say that anyone was hit in all honesty they were asking me a lot of questions trying to get something and I just wanted to give them something.". Before he decided to enter his guilty plea, he regularly speculated at home about trying the case in the media. Once he decided that he could not possibly come out of a trial with an acquittal, he decided to play the media in a different way, and in the months after his guilty plea, he sank deeper into his adopted role of traumatized abuse victim turned abuser. The most dramatic recent development is the statement of Mr. Goldstein, the friend of Jesse Friedman, who was one of a trio of high school students who became suspects. The District Attorney had already filed a second, thirty-seven-count indictment against Jesse, and within six months of his fathers guilty plea Jesse would be facing an additional 302 counts of sexual abuse. "I'm standing strong, and I'm-- I have more fight in me than I've ever had before. Some children said the Friedmans compounded their abuse by taking pictures and making pornographic videos. About one third of the way in, the reports authors pause to mention the various difficulties they encountered in reinvestigating Jesse Friedmans conviction; one, in particular, stands out. Jesse Friedman and his wife, Elisabeth Walsh. The investigation into the Friedmans began in 1987 when Arnold Friedman was caught ordering a child pornography magazine through the mail. The DA convened a committee to review the case and included on that panel Barry Scheck, director of the Innocence Project. In other child-care sex panic cases around the countryin Manhattan Beach, California; Maplewood, New Jersey; Jordan, Minnesota; and elsewherethe fact that the defendants maintained a stance of outraged innocence helped them during the trial and during the appeals process. Jesse Friedman is 100% guilty of sexually abusing children, Issue 18 : Good News, From My Diaries (200610) in Alphabetical Order, Toward an Index of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture, Richard Beck, Kelley Deane McKinney, Rachel Riederer. Jesse Friedman, who along with his father, Arnold, pleaded guilty to sexually abusing children in the 1980s. But I know something happened to you, so I want you to tell meif you can. I felt at the time I was getting so much information from so many places, from parents, from the newspapers, from police, from psychologists, but it was just an echo chamber coming from one source, the police, and no one stopped and asked if it was true., But both Arnold and Jesse Friedman signed detailed confessions, and after his plea, Jesse Friedman did a television interview with Geraldo Rivera reiterating his confession. And the kids likewise with myself. Speaking to the Review Team, however, Howard said that he had in fact been molested and, whats more, that Arnold had confessed to him, before going to prison, that he and Jesse had misbehaved in the basement with the children. It appeared in cities, suburbs, and small townsin wealthy enclaves and working-class neighborhoods alike. She is predeceased by her parents, Hannan and Sadie Young; her brothers, Howard (Mardelle) and Kenneth (Ruth); and her brother-in-law, Allen Friedman and survived by her sister I said, No, I feel calm. Thats when I really started becoming a person. In 2003, she remarried and moved into a small house with her new husband. Officers found a list of the names of 81 students enrolled in computer classes. Oh fuck, I dont care about my mother, thats for sure. View the profiles of people named Elaine Friedman. On the other hand, the Review Team also talked to Arnold Friedmans younger brother, Howard. I know my friends said to me, Dont you feel, like, terrible being alone in such a big house? she says in Capturing the Friedmans. It was these more elaborate allegations, and the methods that had elicited them, that made the circuit court so uncomfortable, and that prompted Nassau County to undertake a complete reconstruction and reinvestigation of Jesse Friedmans case. This is Andrew Jareckis documentary film Capturing the Friedmans, released in 2003, which over the last ten years has forced a number of impossible problems on the legal apparatus that is trying, and failing, to bring the Friedman case to some kind of a conclusion. As I [sic] result, I guess I just folded so they would leave me alone. Andrew Jarecki, the director of the documentary Capturing the Friedmans.. We know that there was a good chance that he touched you, or Jesse touched you or somebody in that family touched you in a very inappropriate way. As a result, his letter said, I guess I just folded so they would leave me alone.. The Conviction Integrity Review is almost three times as long as it should be, and I had to read the whole thing twice, getting oddly upset as I went along, before I managed to place the nagging familiarity of its tone. A key participant in the criminal investigation said that despite the showmanship and marketing by Mr. Friedmans defenders, the case was based on real-time interviews, not on memories recovered under hypnosis, and reflected the long history of sexual abuse that played out in Arnold Friedmans life and should stand. Elaine Friedman, 84, of Cape Coral, FL passed away on January 14, 2019 at American House Coconut with her family by her side. He has maintained his innocence all along, and now Jarecki is leading the fight to have Jesse's verdict reversed. The police, prosecutors, and the judge did everything they could to coerce a guilty plea and avoid a trial, the appeals court concluded. reestablished that with the kids that I . For those women who were also mothers, that often meant leaving their children with strangers during the day. In the end, 17 students, boys mostly between 8 and 10, testified before a grand jury of abuse that was said to have taken place in front of other students. . The movie incorporates extensive video footage that Arnold shot of the family all through the years. The opposite happened with the Friedman case. A video explaining the case is available on The Huffington Post. Around the country in the 1970s and 1980s, the nuclear family was dramatically and irrevocably changing. In 1994, Susan Orlean wrote a long New Yorker profile of David called Seriously Silly.) It took a little longer still for Jarecki to learn that David had a closet full of home moviesa couple dozen hours worththat he had made during the police investigation. . Mr. Kuby and Mr. Jarecki said Mr. Goldsteins statement was critical, not only undercutting the centerpiece of the case against Jesse Friedman but also corroborating the pressure on him to plead guilty. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. What is known is that his legal problems began in 1984, when postal inspectors intercepted a package containing child pornography, sent from the Netherlands and addressed to Arnold Friedmans home in Great Neck. We were abused, tortured, and humiliated by Arnold and Jesse Friedman in computer classes in Arnolds basement, it read. Again, Kuby cried foul. Allegations included a game of naked leapfrog in which children were sodomized as they leapt around the computer desks in a crowded room. 94 people named Elaine Friedman found in New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, Rochester and 2 other cities. In 2005, Arnold Friedman committed suicide in prison. Eight months into the investigation, Ross Goldstein, a teenage friend of Jesse's, who also occasionally helped in the class, was arrested and charged with over 300 sexual crimes against the children. In the next shot, each one, still stationary, has moved in by about six inches. . Because this was a hysteria, as opposed to a conscious, coordinated conspiracy to imprison the innocent, the allegations and the situations that produced them varied from case to case. CYNTHIA McFADDEN, NIKKI BATTISTE and GEOFF MARTZ. He has declined to comment publicly. What specifically changed the course of Mr. Jarecki's story was David Friedman's hostility toward his mother, Elaine. '' Prosecutor, filmmaker, and convict now have grievances that go years back, even through multiple generations of prosecutors, in the manner of a long-standing family argument. By November 1988, the district attorneys office had charged Jesse with 243 counts of sexual abuse. A certain lack of self-centeredness, belief in ones own innate genius, and faith in hard work, long hours. Free! Since then, the case has become a cause for Mr. Jarecki, who has continued his investigation long after his film was finished. So, well do you know what happened to me? No, I dont know what happened to you. It sits on the mantle over the course of a Passover Seder and watches everyone fight, except for Arnold, who sits mostly in silence at the head of the table, all but invisible. In psychoanalytic terms, hysteria refers specifically to a way for the unconscious to protect the patient from some kind of psychic stress. Start your family tree now. It wasnt a film about a phenomenon. . Have we proven that Jesses innocent? Until that night, Elaine -- who taught me Hebrew at our temple in Great Barrington -- had not had the courage to see the movie in a theater. Hysteria shifts blame and shields certain groups of people from the truth of their own situation. Although charges were filed against twenty-four people, only Rud was convicted. The Friedman family in the early 1970s, including, from left, Jesse, in front, Arnold, David, Seth and Elaine. "Jesse is guilty and you are going to ask me how I know," he said, according to the report. What ultimately makes this quality intelligibleit was also the impetus, in many ways, for the strong wording of the circuit courts decisionis a third document, one that has done more than any other to draw post-conviction attention to the Friedman case. The symmetry is a little awful to look at, partly because the scene that Arnold and his sons have dreamed up expresses their situation so elegantly. The Friedmans are Arnold, an erstwhile pianist and orchestra leader, and retired award-winning public-school teacher; his sons, David, Seth, and Jesse, who share his sense of Elsewhere in the transcript, Squeglia says that sometimes he would run into a child who persistently refused to disclose abuse, who would, in his words, just never give it up. In those cases, there was nothing else to do but leave. He assures the child that he knows that things happened. Theres nothing there! he said in a memorable scene from Capturing the Friedmans, eyes wide, touching his palm to the top of his forehead. He said that as far as he knew, no abuse had ever taken place, that his confession had been coerced by the police under threat of a significant prison term, and that he had not (as was alleged at the trial) been sodomized by an 8-year-old in Arnold Friedmans basement. Some time later, director Andrew Jarecki made a documentary film called Capturing the Friedmans which brought the family's dysfunction to the big screen. In El Paso, two middle-aged women who worked at a YMCA were convicted of molesting small children. He doesnt belong to you, Elaine yells at Jesse in a home audio recording, and Jesse yells back, Hes my father, he doesnt belong to you! Then Elaine pauses and says, her voice falling and softening, Well, he doesnt belong to anybody now. This, very simply, is the truth; but by this point the sons idolization of their father has linked up with their belief in his legal innocence, and Elaine cannot reach them at all. Part of HuffPost Crime. . My brain hurts! Jesse yells in the brothers video. That might have been the end of this story if Mr. Jarecki had not happened upon Jesses brother, David Friedman, a k a Silly Billy, while doing research for a film on childrens entertainers. We have proven beyond any reasonable doubt that it was a bad case, that it was atrocious police work, that the guilty plea was unequivocally coerced, and this isnt me saying it: its the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Mr. Jarecki said. 1. In the interview, Jesses voice is small and soft, and he glances around in a dazed way that appears nowhere in Capturing the Friedmans: I fondled them. . The police assured, through misinformation, through lying, through the pressure of the press, the threats of the judge, that there would be no chance of defense witnesses at the trial," he said. Wake up to the day's most important news. He was led to the Friedman story by an accidental chain of events. When "Nightline" first interviewed Jesse Friedman, he had been told the district attorney's office was due to issue its report any day. Jesses decision to incorporate his family habit of character acting into his public defense was very ill-advised. Arnold Friedman should never have pled guilty, at least not to the charges Nassau County levied against him. And it illustrates the black hole at the center of the case: What the defense has found to undermine the conviction has been made public; what prosecutors and the review panel have turned up over three years that could support it will not be known until the report comes out. "I was so tired of re-hashing it over and over again and I didn't think and I kind of gave up hope on everyone to convince them that nothing had happened because they believed in recovered memories so eventually I just consciously decided to lie and to say that I had been abused and repeat these crazy things I had heard. The Friedmans made a mess of things on their own, of course, with their reactions to the discovery of Arnolds pedophilia, but so did the other families involved. In Capturing the Friedmans and in the circuit courts ruling, the interviews went something like this: detectives swept across Great Neck, interviewed bewildered 8-, 9-, and 10-year-old children, and harassed them until they began to fabricate stories of abuse. He says what he really wants is the day in court he never had -- the chance to go to trial and let a jury decide what is justice. What began as a routine child pornography bust quickly fractured into many competing and completely irreconcilable accounts, and these fractures have only grown and multiplied over the last quarter century. Fran Galasso, head of the countys Sex Crimes Unit, began questioning children amid sensational press coverage and panic among parents. And, despite recent press coverage pointing toward a possible outcome favorable to Mr. Friedman, it is hazardous to have much certainty about how the plot unwinds from here. This was the clearest possible recantation.". Manhattan Beach was a white, wealthy, beachside town, and despite the long trial, nobody went to prison. This kind of reinvestigation is not quite a common occurrence, but it is no longer a particularly rare one, either. She had been ill recently with Vascular Dementia. McCarthyism emerged in a world that had millions of Communists in it, Americans among them, and widespread fears about nonexistent crack babies filled the airwaves at a time when crack really was hollowing out American cities. In one case, Jarecki notes, a successful doctor in his 30s told him: "As God is my witness and on my children's lives, I was never raped or sodomized, and I never saw a kid sodomized or molested. The observation is that pedophilia and hysteria over pedophilia are not mutually exclusive. "As anyone who saw the film 'Capturing the Friedmans' may have divined from watching the interview with Howard Friedman -- he is not a particularly credible person," Kuby said. During the time that I was present in computer classes, I did not observe Arnold or Jesse Friedman engage in anything even remotely akin to sexual conduct, and I have no reason to believe such events occurred. The camera follows Arnold Friedmans wife, Elaine, as she retreats down hallways, with David and his brothers screaming from behind. When asked for comment, Nassau County prosecutors told "Nightline" their report spoke for itself. I have no doubt about the case, this person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because it would be inappropriate to speak on the record before Ms. Rices report is released. His worst decision during this period was to appear on a Geraldo Rivera special, Busting the Kiddy Porn Underground, which aired in February 1989. I cant believe we live in such a cold society that no one could look at this man and understand that. After the hearing, Jesse went outside with his brothers and put on a bizarre and reckless performance, which many people around the courthouse witnessed and remembered years later. One example illustrates the Review Teams approach. When writing briefs, opinions, and other professional documents, lawyers and judges usually do not like to mention the social or political context that surrounds their work. And in the midst of the investigation, as Arnold is trying to figure out whether a guilty plea will improve or harm Jesses chances of acquittal, it watches the three boys try to cheer up their dad by outfitting him in a balloon animal costume. Several episodes end with Tom burdened by enormous debt, and one ends with Tom in Hell. Yeah, but still, you must have done it, David says, and then all three of them burst out laughing. He spent thirteen years in prison, he was paroled as a Level 3 sex offender, and then he filed an appeal to vacate his conviction. I never molested a child. Jesse Friedman said by this point he was convinced no jury would ever believe him. One clip included in Capturing the Friedmans is extraordinarily tender and brief. In so polarized a case, clarity may be too much to ask, but Ms. Rices office, obviously unhappy with the story line that has emerged, says that people should avoid judgment until its report comes out. In one case, the judges write, detectives visited a child fifteen times and assured the childs mother before the final visit that they were going to stay as long as it takes.. After Arnold went to prison, Elaine filed for divorce. Formal legal proceedings began in August 1984, and did not wind down for good until July 1990, making McMartin the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history. You are also agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. I . The news had been saturated with the story and the community was up in arms over it. My father and mother are not the only two people in the world who have that relationship. Capturing the Friedmans makes it difficult to gauge the accuracy of Davids claim, because the home movies record almost no interactions between Arnold and Elaine. This repeats until they are just slightly apart, nose to nose, and then they circle one another, and once they have rotated 180 degrees, changing positions as though in a stop-motion animation, they begin to back away from the center of the room, eyes always locked, until they back out of the frame entirely. Before he became a filmmaker, Andrew Jarecki founded the website Moviefone and became very wealthy. In addition to the children who testified in front of the grand jury, Goldstein accepted a deal to testify against Jesse and Arnold Friedman in exchange for six months in prison. I remember them talking to my parents about this within earshot of me, he said. The child-care sex abuse panic told a story about child abuse in which children were most threatened outside the homein day-care facilities, preschools, church basements, babysitters houses, and evening computer classes. He had never observed either of them engaged in anything even remotely akin to sexual conduct. He had no reason to believe any such acts occurred. I dont mean to say it cant happen, but I dont think that will be the case., For its part, the district attorneys office has offered few clues about its investigation. So, game on. The police repeatedly told me that they knew something had happened, and they would not leave until I told them. Jesse Friedman spent 13 years in prison for sexual crimes he says he didn't do. (Conservative family values politicians objected to day care as a form of communal child rearing.) Beloved wife of late Judge Sy Friedman. The Friedman case began with a crime no one disputes. Hes my husband! To say that the movie was disturbing doesn't begin to describe the whipsaw of emotions I felt that evening as Elaine and I watched the tragic and horrifying details of her family's misfortune splayed before us. This is especially significant because Witness 10 was the first child to say that Arnold Friedman sodomized him, as well as the first child to allege any kind of wrongdoing whatsoever by Jesse. . He committed suicide in prison in 1995. . The Review Team could have concluded that the police departments wild investigation was largely responsible for producing such a confused state of affairs in the first place, accepted the unknowability of certain facts twenty-five years on, and found that there did exist a reasonable probability that Jesse Friedman was wrongfully convicted. He was given a sentence of 6 to 18 years in prison and served 13 years before being released in December 2001. about burning down their homes and things like that and . Elaine has been found in 3 states including New York, "Because Arnold told me. Her first husband, Arnold, and her son, Jesse, went to prison in 1988 after authorities found them guilty of molesting children in an after-school computer class held in the family basement. Jesse Friedman maintained his innocence for a year. He served 13 months before being freed on appeal. Elaine Friedman. After all these years, most of the case has played out in shadows, a blur of changed stories, hidden accusers, findings kept private. Jesse eventually made the same mistake his father did and pled guilty, too. After the review was released, the New York Times ran a piece describing the review, with angry, pointed reactions from Friedmans lawyer and supporters, but with an emphasis on the distinguished panel of experts who provided oversight. Thirty-four of the accused eventually had their convictions overturned, and two others died in prison. In many criminal investigations, the passage of time is clarifying. When the guilty verdict comes in on Jesse, my father is gonna kill himself, Jesses gonna go away to jail for the rest of his life, Seth is gonna move West. The Review Teams ostensible goal was to end debate about the Friedman case, to analyze the facts from a disinterested standpoint, and to reveal Jesse Friedmans advocates, especially Andrew Jarecki, as wrong and emotionally overheated. One boy claimed 56 instances of sodomy in a 10-week class. I write to inform you that none of the events allegedly described by or attributed to Kenneth Doe ever took place, a man in his 30s wrote last month, referring to his role a quarter century ago as one of the children whose allegations of sexual abuse sent three men to prison, fueled a panic in hundreds of families and were later portrayed in the 2003 documentary Capturing the Friedmans.. "He is recounting something that Arnold Friedman -- who by all accounts was crazy -- allegedly said to him. Its very unlikely there will be a move to vacate the plea. Alarmed at the combination of child pornography and classes for children, the Nassau County police, under the direction of Sgt. But the claims Jesse makes in the interview are ridiculousno homemade pornography produced by Arnold or Jesse Friedman was ever found, anywhere. It walks through four separate issues raised by the circuit court, and it finds that the available evidence renders all of them not just insufficient for overturning the convictions, but absolutely baseless. Twin bombings at Jerusalem bus stops kill teen, injure 26. Our office has certainly listened to all of those questions and has confidence that the report will answer them.. ET, 24/7 coverage of breaking news and live events. We have 2 records for Elaine Friedman ranging in age from 56 years old to 79 years old. The authorities interviewed Ruds victim so many times that she eventually claimed to have witnessed not only sex abuse but also multiple homicides. In the wake of the circuit courts strong recommendation, and with oversight provided by a panel of experts that included Barry Scheck, a former member of O. J. Simpsons defense team and now the director of the Innocence Project, Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen M. Rice put together a team of investigators to reinterview many of the cases key participants, review evidence and documents, and analyze the actions of the detectives who interviewed the children. The married father of three later admitted he was sexually attracted to teenage boys, but denied having molested any of the boys in his computer classes. Jesse, center with Arnold in 1987, was granted parole in 2001 and is awaiting a review recommended by the United States Court of Appeals. "Instead of concurrent, the sentencing would be consecutive. Before he became a schoolteacher, Arnold Friedman made a brief go at a career in music, playing Latin jazz at resorts in the Catskills under the name Arnito Rey. He passed on his love of performance and theatricality to his three children. Maybe in childhood, maybe in adolescence; maybe it had something to do with his younger brother, Howard. In others, the interviewing process allowed prosecutors to file charges that grossly exaggerated what appears to have been real, actually occurringif not widespread, gothic, and ritualisticmolestation. Investigators re-interviewed old witnesses and examined new evidence. In addition, Geraldo Rivera was one of the most unreliable television journalists in the country, a man who made a career out of getting stories totally wrong and then making a show of atoning for his sins. I think we didnt think to ourselves, Well, its a documentary and therefore it needs to follow this structure thats based on historical information and putting it in the context of other cases like this. Subscribe online and gain access to the entire archive. Nurse! There is only one line in the brothers performance that isnt also in the original sketch, and it happens right after one of the brothers says to Jesse that his brain will have to come out. Jesse says, But Im using it!. Rather, her primary job was to reinvestigate the police investigation that resulted in Jesses guilty plea, as a means of assessing whether, in the Review Teams own words, there existed a reasonable probability that Jesse was wrongfully convicted. This would have made the conflicting statements of family members and witnesses easier, not harder, to incorporate into a coherent account of what happened in Nassau County in the late 1980s. They didnt even keep official records of how many times they visited particular children, or when. By the end of the investigation, more than a dozen boys had come forward, alleging a list of horrific sex crimes, including sexualized games. A right to indifference as well as to opinion. Jesse wasnt using his brain very well during this period. ", None of this shakes the confidence of Jesse Friedman or his team. Silent is what Arnold Friedmans computer students were said to have been for months or even years before the police came to ask whether anything had happened in the basement. An 8-year-old boy claimed he was forced to sodomize Jesse Friedman and a friend of Jesses named Ross Goldstein. They were all untrue. It also said that parents were not complicit in abuse, that they could not possibly have known anything was amissif they had, they obviously would have taken swift action to protect their kids.
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