It had to be dozens [of tapes]," she said. And there is even discussion, according to one Nassau County, N.Y., official, of getting clearance to retrieve all documents and testimony in the case because of the renewed public interest in the story of the Friedmans. But my father was a pedophile, he bought child pornography. "To call Jarecki's work an investigation is ridiculous because he didn't speak to most victims. "The threats made a pretty good impression," he said, glasses askew and eyes darting. "But you don't necessarily have to buy the analysis" that he repeatedly abused children, undetected, over a period of years in his home, as charged. Friedman's attorney, Earl Nemser of Manhattan, said yesterday witnesses interviewed in the film indicated that "coercion and suggestive tactics," such as hypnotism, were used to question the alleged abuse victims. I think Arnold missed a chance to save him in the early going. his father's classes if the lessons were truly a Sodom of grotesque abuse: The retired detective who led the investigation, and appears in the film, now wishes she had never cooperated with Jarecki. Indeed, Goldstein's story parallels the pressure and intimidation placed on Jesse to plead guiltyas he ultimately did. Jesse Friedman emerges as the real victim. "I became afraid of everything beyond my control. Someone said this question is for both Jesse and for the co-producer and asked, ''What is the movie about?'' Mr. Jarecki discovered his eventual subject matter while interviewing people who worked as birthday party clowns in New York City. Arnold Friedman committed suicide seven years into a sentence that would have kept him in prison for up to 30 years. The three-count federal indictment against Friedman was filed on November 13, 1987. It is my hope that by presenting this information now, I will be able to overturn my conviction and clear my name. No one ever dropped out of [Arnold Friedman's computer] classes despite claiming to be sodomized after sessions. "Yes, my father admitted that he was a pedophile, [but] I am not a child molester, and I don't think it's appropriate for me to have to answer for the sins of my father," he says on camera. Subsequently, Judge Costantino ruled that the evidence of Friedman's sexual abuse of children, his collection of pornography, the seriousness of his federal charges and the erosion of support for him in the community justified detention prior to trial. Had I known of this information before, I would have been able to use it at trial and prove my innocence. I would like it to be as involving and revealing as this experience. ", The children whose parents deny what has happened and force them to suppress it often suffer the most, Kaplan said. Police detectives admit to having provided the students with incentives to encourage them to provide testimony, including in one case having pizza parties, and offering to deputize cooperative children. The police then offered the teenager a plea bargain: In exchange for testifying against Jesse, Goldstein would receive a mere six-month sentence. The 40-year-old Jarecki, who was in town recently to promote the film, stressed that "Capturing the Friedmans" is supposed to be about the Friedmans, a family whose lives were forever damaged when a battering ram broke down their door on Thanksgiving eve, 1987. Before accepting the plea, Onorato said, he pushed Jesse Friedman for leads to the photos and tapes. "The glassy eyes, I'd always remember," Gregory said. 2d 697 (1987). By all accounts, the documentary, which is the first full-length film by Jarecki, a multimillionaire entrepreneur, has been a critical and financial success. Nassau detectives have viewed pictures seized in other jurisdictions but have not yet turned up anything. Elli was born on February 28, 1931 and grew up in Samorin, Czechoslovakia, a small town near Bratislava. Galasso said "an enormous amount of child pornography" was found in the Friedman home. Yet the film takes a skeptical attitude toward believing children and misinforms the public about both the Friedman case and child abuse in general. Aug. 8, 2013 -- Jesse Friedman spent 13 years in prison for committing horrific sexual crimes against young children, and while he pled guilty at the time, he claims he is actually innocent. We put our memory in these memory banks and it sits there. His father, an admitted pedophile who also was convicted of sending child pornography through the mail, died in prison in 1995. Instead, they said some of the methods were used by mental health experts in therapy after the children had provided their statements of abuse. "There's no way to know if I'd gone to trial how believable the testimony would've been against me, or if I'd be one of the lucky ones whose case was overturned," says Jesse in his own defense. Sgt. The family's audiovisual documents imbue the movie with piercing intimacy. And all the cells in the organism are pretty much the same, except maybe over in the police department, where you get the white blood cells. Jesse is perhaps the healthiest Friedman, but he's not just well adjusted. His mother, Elaine Friedman, sat with her eyes closed or her gaze averted during most of the proceeding. Arnold admitted to being attracted to young boys, but denied molesting them. After molesting them, he threatened their families if they told. Using evidence uncovered during the making of film, he is trying to clear his name. See United States v. Salerno, 481 U.S. 739, 107 S. Ct. 2095, 2102, 95 L. Ed. The documentary examines the case of a father and son accused of molesting computer students in their Long Island home in the 1980s. In interviews Jesse Friedman has retracted his confessions, saying he pleaded guilty because he feared he could not get a fair trial and would get the maximum penalty. Students sent in search of computer manuals would stumble across the magazines. is not the question to ask. Strange that it would be more divisive than, say, "The Fog of War," Errol Morris' Vietnam War documentary nominated in the same Oscar category, but then "Capturing the Friedmans" is that kind of film. Jarecki offers virtually no cultural context for this tale and no talking He had all the evidence, and for some reason he chose not to use it. [This is false. But I would also be pretty happy with a wife and two kids and a lawn to mow and decent job, a barbecue on a Saturday afternoon. The evidence seems to be on his side, and yet if the film has shown us anything about this case, it's shown how truth can slip away so easily. Have you figured it out? He talked to the judge, the detectives, the prosecutor, some of the people who were in the computer classes, [and] once I knew that Andrew knew that I wasn't a child molester, I could trust him again - because I knew he wasn't going to make a movie that he thought was a lie.". The haunting tale of the Friedmans - The Hindu There was never any sense that anyone else was ever going to see these tapes.". . "I have none to sell but am interested in obtaining," Friedman responded three days later. And I'd say, 'Well, can I wait inside?' Finally, when his son told him what had happened, he came to understand his son's anger. It is difficult to believe that such degrading episodes could have happened without a single child out of more than 100 students telling anyone about it until after Detective Squeglia's interrogations. Then the authorities discovered Friedman ran after-school computer classes for boys from his home. But it's the footage of the family - unhinged by pursuit, notoriety and their already disturbed dynamics - that gives the movie its power. "Andrew was able to uncover a tremendous amount of information to prove what I always suspected was the case. A lost calculator, a misplaced page of algebra problems and a screaming bout with a younger brother left the boy on the verge of tears. Friedman's attorney, Mark Gimpel of Manhattan, would not go into specifics of the case but said, "There was a series of suggestive techniques, including hypnosis, that were consistently used by law enforcement during this investigation. This information should have been fact-checked before it was posted; most of these items are not matters of opinion and we have identified the correct facts, with citations, in Jesse's legal brief. "There are a lot of interesting things that could work out. What they capture is the aftermath of a 1988 criminal case that sent his father, the late Arnold Friedman, and his younger brother, Jesse, to prison on charges of sexual molestation. The effect is a complex story where truth appears ever elusive. The boy's mother remembered her son's reply. A neighbor, Goldstein, then 17, was charged with 118 counts of various sexual abuse charges and later pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree sodomy, and one count of using a child in a sexual performance, receiving a 2- to 6-year sentence. Postal Service over the past few years, federal agents have become major traffickers in kiddie porn, posing as sleaze merchants in order to break up a vile underground business. "In my family, everything got washed under the rug," Jesse said. So which is the truth -- his admission or his recent retraction? You were children when this started. You know we knew this was a film about the family. Because of the case, he said he still has trouble communicating with his son and sometimes blames himself for enrolling him in the classes. Subsequently, Arnold admitted that he was a furtive pederast of long standing. She said the boy "started out saying nothing happened. Ten people identified as relatives of the victims clustered in two front rows of the heavily guarded courtroom. Postal authorities were alerted and the investigation was launched. The occasion was Arnold Friedman's retirement after a 26-year career at Bayside High. During searches and subsequent investigations, agents looked for signs that their suspects had jobs or hobbies that brought them into contact with children. ", Some said they did not yet know what to make of the nuances. "If you murder someone, seconds later they're dead," says the father of one of the young victims. Jarecki shows off this footage as evidence of a truly dysfunctional family in various stages of denial. none of these children said anything about the sex and kept enrolling in Manhattan attorney Earl Nemser said Wednesday he's filing papers in Nassau County Court seeking a new trial for 34-year-old Friedman, the youngest member of the Great Neck, N.Y., family featured in the film. When he's confronted about the lack of physical evidence, he fumbles over how the abuse was more mental before claiming the Friedmans would always check the children before letting them go home. Sgt. ], 8. The best documentary of the year? What the new DVD materials elucidate is just how spurious the case against Goldstein was. I think it's clear. "Faced with the enormity of the evidence in this case, my client felt it was in his interest to take a plea of 6 to 18 rather than gamble," Panaro said. Arresting Images - Documentary Asks: Hysteria or Truth? But the movie goes beyond an examination of a pedophiliac personality and reveals as much about community, and about fraternal, parental and marital bonds, as the richest and most incendiary works of novelists such as Philip Roth. The witnesses' and victims' testimony of sexual abuse was "real evidence," she said. Although it has been 16 years, we live with the knowledge of these crimes every day of our lives.". Most of the audience's feedback was positive. these horrible things, reveals something so small, so indisputable and so He had pled guilty to child molestation. . Is it the oldest son, because of primogeniture, and because he is the most outspoken?". Criminal Law & Procedure > Preliminary Proceedings. In the movie Jarecki cuts to still photos of the living room showing no such thing. "We know he did order the magazine, and we found out later that he did molest these two children up at Wade River. He was also hopeful, having already been attacked while in jail, that this story might reduce the chances of his being killed in prison. His father, an admitted pedophile who also was convicted of sending child pornography through the mail, died in prison in 1995. As the boy waited in a courthouse corridor to be sworn to testify before one of three grand juries convened in the case, a prosecutor asked if he believed in God. "What that young man eventually revealed," Galasso continued, "was a pretty complete account of how he was seduced and then raped by Arnold Friedman and then Jesse Friedman." "I still think I knew my father very well," says Jesse in the film. The filmmakers unravelled the story of how Arnold Friedman (1931-1995), father to David, Jesse and Seth, husband of Elaine, came to commit suicide in jail after pleading guilty and being convicted for up to 30 years for child abuse crimes against boys. They're all grown up and many of them are out of state now. "I'm not a pedophile. What can I tell you? And that is something Jarecki is proud of: "Unlike some documentaries that underscore a point of view, 'Capturing the Friedmans' presents a variety of perspectives and allows room for audience members to draw their own conclusions," Jarecki wrote in an e-mail sent to Newsday on Thursday. "I thought it would be fun to follow one of these people into their lives," he recalled recently. "I would walk in and he'd be doing something technical. Law-enforcement agents believe that about 95 percent of the child porn in this country has been imported from abroad. He added more, talking about the DVD including more materials aimed at establishing his innocence, but it was perhaps his most pained moment in the whole interview. "When I saw that wasn't going to change anything, I stopped saying it," he claims. The government contends that Friedman presents a serious risk of flight because of the nature of the charges against him, the strength of the government's case, the long sentence of incarceration he may receive, his age and the obloquy that he faces in his community. But it might have been less believable if Jarecki had included the Geraldo Rivera interview in which Jesse sobs and says he was molested by his father for years. The best any of us can do, he says, is to "stand in the place where your personal convictions are, acknowledge that place, and try to give a truthful interpretation of the reality you see from there. And he has worn his electronic ankle bracelet, thus far, for a year and a half. We were never hypnotized to tell our stories. The academy acknowledged receiving an unsigned letter purported to have been written by two men molested as children by Arnold Friedman and his son Jesse during computer classes in the basement of their Great Neck, N.Y., home in the 1980s. The police questioned some of these kids 15 times before they were able to get statements out of them. She and her husband both asked that their identity be withheld to protect their son's privacy. Or was everything just cleaned up perfectly? She served and held leadership roles in several Jewish not-for-profit organizations over the course of her life. "This was like a prolonged torture they subjected the kids to." Then the clown film changed into something completely different. Do it. It was about clowns. That left police with the missing photos and tapes as their best remaining hope for making cases against the two suspects, Galasso said. Some child-abuse experts say the film hurts children by misleading the public about crimes against children and helping "create an environment that keeps victims silent.". An early newspaper report said "Talking Sam", in which a male figure exposes his genitals, was used to demonstrate and initiate touching games with the boys. In Arnold she found a man concealed within a similar emotional shroud. In 1989 some wet their beds, took baseball bats to bed, could not sleep. San Antonio Express-News - Feburary 23, 2004. Friedman, who now says he is innocent, was 19 when he pleaded guilty. In court papers filed Thursday, however, Jesse Friedman, now 34, is seeking to overturn the conviction, saying that neither he nor his lawyers were told before his plea that some children, at first, had denied being abused and were interviewed multiple times before they acknowledged it. And it said, 'A deeply religious person, I was brought up in the Jewish faith to believe that truth and justice were the most important things. Nemser conceded that Friedman "was not telling the truth" when he entered his guilty plea, admitting he abused children. The alleged abuse was reckless, occurring in front of groups of children. Fourteen of the victims' relatives, many of whom have come to court each time Friedman appeared, sat together in three front rows of the courtroom. -------------------------------------------------------. "But then Andrew did his homework. Sometimes they remember that "it" happened, sometimes not. When the authorities tell his landlords and building boards that he's a Level Three, they can throw him out. "I kind of broke down. I think we've done right by David's story. Jarecki insists that, with or without the extra footage, his film is no apology for Friedman. His office's appeals bureau is preparing a written response. I am joined in this belief by my sibling {names removed} who were also your students. An aerial shot of Great Neck, says Jarecki, "brought out this biological metaphor that had been in my mind a lot. - One detective admits to visiting a student 15 separate times in order to finally procure incriminating testimony despite the childs consistent statement that he had not been abused. That oldest son, David, was the one who told Jarecki: "If you're really going to change from the clown movie to this other movie, I should tell you: In addition to the 25 hours of home movies I gave you at the beginning, of the family kidding around, there's another 35 hours of movies I started taking after the police showed up." The most successful of these is/was David Friedman, Arnold's eldest son and brother to Jesse and Seth (Seth refused to participate in Jarecki's film). I take it you did not watch the film all together in one room. Meanwhile, Arnold, Jesse, and Ross Goldstein, 18, a friend of Jesse's, would be indicted in Nassau County on a total of 464 counts of sodomy, sexual abuse, using a child in a sexual performance and endangering the welfare of a child. Mr. Jarecki, the director, "ignored and hid evidence that Jesse was guilty and didn't reach out to actual victims, because I never heard from him," said the mother of one of 13 victims.
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