The Awareness Center, Inc. (International Jewish Coaltion Against Sexual Assault): Case of Arnold Friedman

Case of Arnold Friedman

(AKA: "Capturing The Friedmans")

Computer Teacher - Great Neck School, Great Neck, NY

Award-Winning Teacher - Bayside High School, Queens, NY

Flushing, NY

Piano Player - Club Arnito Ray, Brooklyn, NY

Former Chemical Engineering Student - Columbia University, New York, NY

Former Student - Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY

Former Student - Lincoln High School, Brighton Beach, NY

April 12, 1931 - February 14, 1995

Arnold and Jesse Friedman were arrested Nov. 26, 1987, after Nassau police (New York) and federal agents executed a search warrant at their house at 17 Picadilly Rd. and found child pornography, pornographic computer discs and lists of children enrolled in computer classes in the home.

The Friedmans and a neighbor, Ross Goldstein, who was arrested in June (1987), were charged in a series of indictments with more than 400 counts of various forms of sexual abuse involving 7 to 11-year-olds who were students in Arnold Friedman's computer classes. Jesse Friedman was accused in more than 200 of those counts.

Arnold Friedman, 57, was also charged by federal officials with distributing child pornography through the mail. He pleaded guilty in March and was sentenced to 10 to 30 years in prison. He pleaded guilty that same month before Boklan to 42 counts of sexually abuse involving 13 boys and was sentenced to 10 to 30 years in prison to run concurrently with the federal time.

Jesse Friedman pleaded guilty Dec. 20 to 17 counts of first-degree sodomy; four counts of first-degree sexual abuse; one count of first-degree attempted sexual abuse; one count of using a child in a sexual performance and two counts of endangering the welfare of a child. In the plea bargain, Jesse Friedman gave up the option of appealing the case and was promised the sentence imposed.

There are several people who go by the name of Arnold Friedman. The individual discussed on this page was born on April 12, 1931 and passed away on February 14, 1995.

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Disclaimer: Inclusion in this website does not constitute a recommendation or endorsement. Individuals must decide for themselves if the resources meet their own personal needs.

Table of Contents:

1988

New York State Department of Correctional Services - Arnold Friedman
United States of America, Appellee, v. Arnold Friedman, Defendant-Appellant (01/08/1988)
Notes of Conversations With Gary (01/26/1988)
Teen Faces 37 New Sex Charges (06/24/1988)
Boys' Sex Abuse Admitted - Great Neck teen to get 6-18 years in plea bargain (12/21/1988)
A Fresh Assault on an Ugly Crime (03/14/1988)
Teacher Guilty of Sex Crimes (03/26/1988)
Teacher Sentenced In Sodomy (05/14/1988)

1989

A letter written by an eight-year-old boy (01/22/1989)
Teen Gets 6-18 Years For Child Sex Abuse (01/25/1989)
Little Joy in Victory For Boys' Families (01/25/1989)
Dragnet Is Out For Porn Photos In Child Sex Case (02/08/1989)
The Secret Life Of Arnold Friedman (05/28/1989)

2003

Capturing the Friedmans - Film Trailer
Toward An Elusive Truth (01/16/2003)
Questions for Jesse Friedman - The Home Horror Movie (05/25/2003)
Capturing The Friedmans - What really happened to the Friedmans? (05/30/2003)
Capturing the Friedmans - Move Review (05/30/2003)
Film Revives Great Neck Controversy (06/01/2003)
From clowns to family tragedy (06/14/2003)
Arresting Images - Documentary Asks: Hysteria or Truth? (06/16/2003)
The Horror Movie - Questions for Jesse Friedman (06/29/2003)
Family's story is anything but happy (07/07/2003)
Interesting, but Not Quite Accurate (07/27/2003)
Revisiting the Friedmans Lays Doubts to Rest (09/02/2003)

2004

"CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS" Documentary or Whitewash? (10/14/2004)
Annotated Bibliography on "Capturing the Friedmans"
Summary of Jesse Friedman Legal Filing (01/07/2004)
Subject of documentary Capturing the Friedmans seeks new trial (01/07/2004)
'Friedman' Seeking New Trial (01/07/2004)
Friedman To Seek New Trial (01/08/2004)
`Capturing the Friedmans' son wants new trial - The convicted sex offender believes film uncovered new facts (01/08/2004)
Capturing Friedmans subject (01/08/2004)
Convicted Molester Wants To Clear Name - Cites evidence seen in film (01/09/2004)
'Capturing' Star Wants to Overturn Conviction (01/092004)
Capturing The Friedmans - A Factual Response To An Angry Attack (01/09/2004)
LA Critics Choose "Splendor," "Friedmans" Follow-Up, Texas Picks, and More (01/09/2004)
Friedman says film shows his innocence (01/09/2004)
Detective Stands by Friedman Probe (01/11/2004)
Documentary's Haunting Tale of Abuse (01/11/2004)
Jacko Financial Crisis: Beatles Bill Due (01/12/2004)
Awards a Glimpse of Oscars (01/12/2004)
Complete list of 76th annual Academy Award nominations (01/27/2004)
Acclaimed Film Helps Convicted Sex Offenders at Victims' Expense (01/27/2004)
Capturing the Friedmans' victims ask Academy to deny documentary Oscar (02/17/2004)
Abuse experts assail movie (02/23/2004)
Two Friedman victims send message (02/24/2004)
Victims Say Film on Molesters Distorts Facts (02/24/2004)
Some fear `Friedmans' may capture Oscar (02/26/2004)
Capturing justice... on film? (02/26/2004)
Troubling relationships surround case (02/27/2004)
Mistrial - The Capturing the Friedmans DVD sheds new light on the case (02/27/2004)
Academy Silences Child Sexual Assault Victims (02/28/2004)
Victims break their silence (02/29/2004)
Capturing the Friedmans (02/29/2004)
Film undermines efforts to fight child abuse (02/29/2004)
Capturing Friedmans documentary fails to win Academy Award (02/29/2004)
The redemption of Jesse Friedman (03/09/2004)
Capturing the truth (03/17/2004)
'I'm not done yet' (03/19/2004)

Also See:

Case of Ross Goldstein
Case of Jesse Friedman

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New York State Department of Correctional Services

Inmate Information - Location/Status/Legal Dates/etc.

Date of Information: 10/14/2003

(

Help) DIN (Dept. Identif. Number) 94A0722

Inmate Name: FRIEDMAN, ARNOLD

Sex: MALE

Date of Birth: 04/12/1931

Race/Ethnicity: WHITE

Custody Status: DISCHARGED

Housing/Releasing Facility: COLLINS

Date Received (Original): 02/02/1994

Date Received (Current): 02/02/1994

Admission Type:

County of Commitment: NASSAU

Latest Release Date/Type (Released Inmates Only): 02/14/95 DECEASED

Crime 1, Description: SODOMY 1ST

Crime 1, Crime Class: B

Crime 2, Description: SEXUAL ABUSE 1ST

Crime 2, Crime Class: D

Crime 3, Description: ATT SEXUAL ABUSE 1ST

Crime 3, Crime Class: E

Crime 4, Description: SODOMY 1ST

Crime 4, Crime Class: B

If all 4 crime fields contain data, there may be additional crimes not shown here. In this case, the crimes shown here are those with the longest sentences.

Aggregate Minimum Sentence: 010 Years, 00 Months, 00 Days

Aggregate Maximum Sentence: 030 Years, 00 Months, 00 Days

Earliest Release Date: Under certain circumstances, an inmate may be released prior to serving his or her minimum term and before the earliest release date shown for the inmate..

Earliest Release Type:

Parole Hearing Date: 12/1997

Parole Hearing Type: INITIAL RELEASE APPEARANCE

Parole Eligibility Date: 02/03/1998

Conditional Release Date: 02/03/2008

Maximum Expiration Date: 02/03/2018

Maximum Expiration Date for Parole Supervision:

Post Release Supervision

Maximum Expiration Date:

Parole Board Discharge Date:

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837 F.2d 48, *; 1988 U.S. App. LEXIS 199, **

United States of America, Appellee, v. Arnold Friedman, Defendant-Appellant

No. 87-1538

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SECOND CIRCUIT

837 F.2d 48; 1988 U.S. App. LEXIS 199

January 5, 1988, Argued

January 8, 1988, Decided

PRIOR HISTORY: [**1] Appeal from an order of detention issued by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Mark A. Costantino, Judge. Because the district court's finding that appellant posed a risk of flight was clearly erroneous, we vacate and remand.

CASE SUMMARY

PROCEDURAL POSTURE: Defendant appealed from a judgment of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, which ordered defendant detained following his indictment on charges of sending and receiving child pornography through the mail.

OVERVIEW: Subsequent to his indictment on charges of sending and receiving child pornography through the mail, defendant argued that the trial court erred in issuing an order of pretrial detention. On review, the court held that the Bail Reform Act allowed issuance of a detention order only for specifically enumerated crimes, or when a serious risk of flight or obstruction of justice existed. The court then noted that the crimes for which defendant was indicted did not fall within the list of crimes enumerated under the Bail Reform Act. Reviewing the record, the court held that the trial court failed to offer sufficient support for its implicit findings related to a risk of flight. Additionally, the court held that the trial court's finding that no condition could assure public safety if defendant was released was not a condition that supported detention under the Bail Reform Act. Thus, the court concluded that the trial court's order was clearly erroneous. Nonetheless, the court remanded the case to allow prosecution to introduce any new evidence supporting its claim that defendant was a flight risk or had the potential to obstruct justice if freed.

OUTCOME: The court vacated the order of pre-trial detention against defendant because the trial court's implied finding that defendant was a flight risk was not supported by sufficient evidence. The court then remanded the case to allow the prosecution to introduce new evidence concerning defendant's risk of flight and potential to obstruct justice.

CORE TERMS: flight, detention, enumerated, pretrial detention, obstruction, indictment, obstruct, sentence, Bail Reform Act, clearly erroneous, pornographic, three-count, fugitive, magazine, detained, hotel, surveillance, arrested, bail

LexisNexis (TM) HEADNOTES - Core Concepts - Hide Concepts Criminal Law & Procedure > Bail > Risk of Flight HN1 The Bail Reform Act limits the circumstances under which a district court may order pretrial detention. A motion seeking such detention is permitted only when the charge is for certain enumerated crimes, 18 U.S.C.S. § 3142(f)(1) (crimes of violence, offenses for which the sentence is life imprisonment or death, serious drug offenses, or felonies committed by certain repeat offenders), or when there is a serious risk that the defendant will flee, or obstruct or attempt to obstruct justice. §3142(f)(2).

Criminal Law & Procedure > Bail > Conditions of Release

Criminal Law & Procedure > Bail > Risk of Flight

HN2 After a motion for detention has been filed regarding a criminal defendant subject to the Bail Reform Act, the district court must undertake a two-step inquiry. It must first determine by a preponderance of the evidence that the defendant either has been charged with one of the crimes enumerated in 18 U.S.C.S. § 3142(f)(1) or that the defendant presents a risk of flight or obstruction of justice. Once this determination has been made, the court turns to whether any condition or combinations of conditions of release will protect the safety of the community and reasonably assure the defendant's appearance at trial.

Criminal Law & Procedure > Preliminary Proceedings

HN3 The provisions of 18 U.S.C.S. § 3142(i) require that when pretrial detention is ordered, the judicial officer include written findings of fact and a written statement of the reasons for the detention.

Criminal Law & Procedure > Bail > Risk of Flight HN4 In cases concerning risk of flight, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit requires more than evidence of the commission of a serious crime and the fact of a potentially long sentence to support a finding of risk of flight.

COUNSEL: Jerry D. Bernstein, for Defendant-Appellant. Kevin O'Regan, Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Andrew J. Maloney, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, John Gleeson, Assistant United States Attorney, of Counsel, for Appellee.

JUDGES: Van Graafeiland, Winter and Altimari, Circuit Judges.

OPINIONBY: PER CURIAM

OPINION: [*48] Arnold Friedman appeals from Judge Costantino's order of pretrial detention. In a three-count indictment, Friedman was charged with sending and receiving child pornography via the mails in violation of 18 [*49] U.S.C. § 2252 (Supp. IV 1986). Because Judge Costantino's implied finding that Friedman posed a risk of flight was clearly erroneous, we reverse and remand.

The three-count federal indictment against Friedman was filed on November 13, 1987. In Count One, he is charged with having received a single [**2] pornographic magazine in 1984, and in Counts Two and Three, he is charged with having mailed, and subsequently having had returned to him, another pornographic magazine depicting homosexual acts between an adult and child, all violations of 18 U.S.C. § 2252. The latter mailings were, unbeknownst to Friedman, between Friedman and a United States Postal Inspector. Each count carries a maximum of ten years in prison.

On November 25, 1987, Friedman, a computer teacher, was charged with multiple state offenses alleging that he had sodomized and sexually assaulted a number of his male students between the ages of eight and twelve. In state court proceedings, Friedman was granted bail in the amount of $ 250,000 cash, a sum he apparently can post by pledging his family home. 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. Pursuant to Judge Costantino's order, Friedman has been placed in segregation in the Metropolitan Correction Center.

HN1The Bail Reform Act limits [**3] the circumstances under which a district court may order pretrial detention. See United States v. Salerno, 481 U.S. 739, 107 S. Ct. 2095, 2102, 95 L. Ed. 2d 697 (1987). A motion seeking such detention is permitted only when the charge is for certain enumerated crimes, 18 U.S.C. § 3142(f)(1) (crimes of violence, offenses for which the sentence is life imprisonment or death, serious drug offenses, or felonies committed by certain repeat offenders), or when there is a serious risk that the defendant will flee, or obstruct or attempt to obstruct justice. Id. § 3142(f)(2).

HN2After a motion for detention has been filed, the district court must undertake a two-step inquiry. See United States v. Shakur, 817 F.2d 189, 194 (2d Cir. 1987). It must first determine by a preponderance of the evidence, see United States v. Jackson, 823 F.2d 4, 5 (2d Cir. 1987), that the defendant either has been charged with one of the crimes enumerated in Section 3142(f)(1) or that the defendant presents a risk of flight or obstruction of justice. Once this determination has been made, the court turns to whether any condition or [**4] combinations of conditions of release will protect the safety of the community and reasonably assure the defendant's appearance at trial. United States v. Berrios-Berrios, 791 F.2d 246, 250 (2d Cir.), cert. dismissed, 479 U.S. 978, 107 S. Ct. 562, 93 L. Ed. 2d 568 (1986).

In this case, the government concedes that Friedman was not charged with a crime of violence within the meaning of 18 U.S.C. § 3142(f)(1)(A), or any of the other crimes enumerated in Section 3142(f)(1). The government instead relies on the district court's "findings" that Friedman should be detained as a serious risk of flight. HN3Title 18, U.S.C. § 3142(i) requires that when pretrial detention is ordered, "the judicial officer shall -- (1) include written findings of fact and a written statement of the reasons for the detention; . . ." (emphasis added). Judge Costantino's order contains only implicit findings relating to risk of flight but concludes that "no release conditions will reasonably assure the safety of any other person or the community if defendant is not detained."

However, the Bail Reform Act does not permit detention [**5] on the basis of dangerousness in the absence of risk of flight, obstruction of justice or an indictment for the offenses enumerated above. 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. Yet, it is undisputed that Friedman is a lifelong New York resident, that he has no prior criminal record, that he has no passport or known ability to evade [*50] surveillance, that he has worked gainfully in the New York area for twenty-five years prior to his arrest, and that he is married and has three children, all of whom live in the New York area. Moreover, Friedman apparently took no steps to leave the jurisdiction after federal agents executed a search warrant at his home on November 3, 1987 and after he was arrested at home on state charges three weeks later. Finally, bail has been set for Friedman on the state charges, which are far more serious than those charged in this case.

HN4In other cases concerning risk of flight, we have required more than evidence of the commission [**6] of a serious crime and the fact of a potentially long sentence to support a finding of risk of flight. In United States v. Jackson, for example, the defendant, who was arrested on a narcotics charge that gave rise to a presumption of flight under 18 U.S.C. § 3142(e), had used a number of aliases, had lived from hotel to hotel, had shown skill in avoiding surveillance, and had hidden assets. 823 F.2d at 6-7. Similarly, in United States v. Coonan, 826 F.2d 1180, 1186 (2d Cir. 1987), where the defendant had been a fugitive for close to four months on the very charges for which he was incarcerated and his fugitive status had ended by capture, a serious risk of flight was shown. See also Shakur, 817 F.2d at 191 (defendant on FBI's list of "Ten Most Wanted Fugitives").

Accordingly, we hold that the district court's finding with regard to Friedman's risk of flight was clearly erroneous. We also reject the government's claim that this case involved a serious risk that Friedman would obstruct justice as the district court has made no finding whatsoever on this issue. We remand so that the district court can set [**7] conditions for Friedman's release under 18 U.S.C. § 3142(c). On remand, the government is also free to introduce purportedly new evidence in its possession of Friedman's risk of flight or of obstruction of justice.

Vacated and remanded.

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NOTES OF CONVERSATION WITH GARY _______

FROM: DEBORAH M. BRODER

RE: FRIEDMAN CASE

DATED: January 26, 1988

http://www.freejesse.net/NoCwG.htm

Gary ____ was a student in Mr. Friedman's class from the time he was in 3rd Grade to the end of 6th Grade. Gary is now in 8th Grade. I asked him if there was any reason for not continuing after 6th Grade and he said no, he did not think there were any classes after he left the 6th Grade.

I asked Gary if he noticed anything funny going on in the class and he said no. He believes Mr. Friedman is innocent. He never saw Mr. Friedman take any kids out of the room or go upstairs. He never saw any cameras. He mentioned that he liked Mr. Friedman better than he like Jesse, but that he did not think either one did anything wrong.

Gary did not speak to the police or any investigators. He feels that Mr. Friedman was well liked by all the kids in the class. He had no reason to believe that anyone was afraid of him. He said that he never heard any rumors about Mr. Friedman until this whole thing broke loose and it was in the newspaper.

He knows the brother of one of the kids who was involved in the charges. This is the brother of A.G. This kid signed a statement, according to Gary's mother, stating that he had been shown or had seen two pornographic computer disks. One was essentially strip poker and the other disk was of a guy masturbating. [She] said that her son Gary happens to have one of the disks but that he had gotten it from another kid, not from Mr. Friedman. According to [her] this kid who gave her son the disk had never taken the class. She said that the strip poker disk is sold over the counter in many stores.

Gary gave me some names of other kids in the class who he remembers: J.B., E.S., A.G. and M.D. J.B. told Gary that the police came to his house and that the police were telling him that Mr. Friedman took off his pants and rubbed himself against J.B.'s back. J.B. said that it never happened but the police told him that they know it happened because they had 5 people who signed statements saying that it happened and that they are trying to get as many people to say that as possible. J.B. denied it but he said that the police did not believe him.

[Note: J.B. later made statements to the police around June of 1988 of repeatedly being sodomized and witnessed others being abused as well as mass orgies with three defendants playing naked sex games over a period of years, as did his younger brother and two of his brother's friends]

Gary said that A.G. was also visited by the police who tried to get him to say that all these things happened to him by telling him that they know that it happened to the others. A.G., according to Gary, said that as far as he knew Mr. Friedman never did anything. Here we have A.G. saying that nothing happened and his brother supposedly signed a statement saying that Mr. Friedman showed him two pornographic computer disks. According to Gary, the brothers' parents are separated or divorced. Gary also mentioned E.S. who he believes was also contacted by the police. She is the mother of one of the kids in the class.

Gary wants to be a lawyer. He is willing to testify for Mr. Friedman and his mother does not object. Gary and his brother both wrote supportive letters to Mr. Friedman while he was in jail.

__ _____ Road

Great Neck, NY, 11023

-------------------------------------------------------

November 30th, 1987

Dear Mr. Friedman,

I don't know if you would remember met but I remember you as one of the greatest teachers I have ever had. Without your teaching, I would not have been able to boot up and execute the very word processor which I am using to write this letter. I want you to know that I believe in your innocence. I am joined in this belief by my sibling {names removed} who were also your students. My mother joins us in hoping that these difficult times will soon be behind you. We would have no hesitation in having the newest member of our family learn computers from you when he becomes old enough.

Sincerely Yours,

Gary

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A Fresh Assault on an Ugly Crime

by Bob Cohn

Newsweek - MARCH 14,1988

Federal agents enter a sleazy underworld to track down kiddie-porn customers and child molesters

Michael Bardy, 27, was getting ready for a Troop 960 Boy Scout meeting last June when the package of dirty pictures arrived. Dressed in his scoutmaster uniform, Bardy signed for a parcel containing a dozen photos of children in sexually explicit poses that he had ordered from a Canadian mail-order house. Minutes later the police knocked on the door of his Schiller Park, Ill., apartment and arrested him for importing child pornography. Once inside, they found hundreds of child-porn magazines, clippings of boys modeling underwear from department store catalogs and photos of scouts wearing only their briefs. In January Bardy, who had worked as a guard at the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center, pleaded guilty to two counts of importing child pornography; he's scheduled to be sentenced in federal court next week.

Bardy was snared by Operation Borderline, an ambitious project of the U.S. Customs Service to stem the trade in child pornography. Together with similar stings run by the U.S. 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. By the summer prosecutors estimate that Borderline alone will have yielded a hundred guilty pleas or convictions. And these efforts have paid unexpected dividends, leading investigators to two dozen alleged child molesters. "These guys are cruising out of control and cruising toward our kids," says Jack O'Malley, the customs agent who directed the Borderline operation.

Photo spread: While consenting adults continue to differ on the issue of conventional pornography, the society at large has reached a clear consensus on its disapproval of dirty pictures or films involving children. Federal law bars the importing of child porn, and nearly all states forbid its production or distribution. Six years ago the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a New York law making it a felony to sell child porn, and 13 states even bar its possession.

Law-enforcement agents believe that about 95 percent of the child porn in this country has been imported from abroad. But a few years ago O'Malley and his colleagues noticed that the volume of child porn seized by customs agents at O'Hare International Airport and other points of entry for overseas mail was dropping off. They concluded that foreign distributors had found ways to circumvent U.S. interceptions. The only way to find the customers then, O'Malley decided, was to have Uncle Sam go into the porn business

Working with a small team of customs agents, O'Malley created a bogus Canadian company, Produit Outaouais, whose principal product was 3-by-5 pictures of children in pornographic poses; each photo was mounted on cardboard as if it were a baseball card. The agents selected the photos from previously seized magazines and consulted a pediatrician to verify that each child depicted appeared to be under the age of 18. Then O'Malley designed a brochure advertising "boys and girls in sex action," offering a set of 12 photos for $15. For verisimilitude, he borrowed the euphemistic language and complicated ordering instructions from the mailings of real Scandinavian distributors. The brochure began "Hello Lolita Collector" ("Lolita" is the accepted term for child pornography, a legacy that would have appalled Nabokov), and offered ''foto sets" entitled: "Nymph Lover," "Mini Boys" and "Joe & His Uncle."

By March 1987 the sting was ready. A customs agent flew to Ottawa and mailed 2,500 fliers to people whose names had been compiled from previous raids and interviews. About 200 people responded to the offer. Some requested child-porn videos, which O'Malley quickly produced from seized tapes and made available in a second brochure. "I couldn't believe the response," said Richard Tierney, head of the Chicago customs office. "Who knew?"

In June agents posing as messengers from DHL Worldwide Couriers (with the company's permission, according to customs) delivered the packages. After the drop was made, the agent would radio a team of federal and local officials waiting nearby with a search warrant. Once inside, the officials would look for other samples of child pornography or evidence of molesting. One search in Illinois uncovered a cache of 1,000 child-porn magazines; agents had to rent a truck to remove them.

Agents report that most suspects are ashamed and contrite. "It's the scarlet letter of the '80s," says O'Malley. Two Borderline suspects killed themselves last year: a 25-year-old Ohio student shot himself after he was indicted, and a Wisconsin lawyer left a note saying he had been "cursed with a demon for a sexual preference."

Some suspects fight back, arguing that the government has "entrapped" them. But to sustain that defense they must show they had no "predisposition" to the crime and that agents had originated the idea. Thus far it has been successful in only one Borderline case: Vincent Herbort, a 71-year-old man from Cincinnati. Agents who searched his home found an extensive collection of legal adult pornography -- magazines and films – but no child porn other than the order from Produit Outaouais. At the trial, defense lawyer Allen Brown maintained that Herbort thought he was making a legal purchase. Herbort, he argued, was "an old man being manipulated" by the Feds. A jury acquitted him. Says Brown: "This kind of operation stinks."

During searches and subsequent investigations, agents looked for signs that their suspects had jobs or hobbies that brought them into contact with children. Interviews with Michael Kabala, who had received a Produit Outaouais order, led them to a nine-year-old boy who alleged that Kabala had twice fondled him during wrestling matches. Kabala, 33, of Chicago, pleaded not guilty to two counts of aggravated sexual abuse. In Great Neck, N.Y., agents working in a Postal Service sting were led to former high-school teacher Arnold Friedman and his son Jesse. They were arrested on charges of sexual abuse of young boys. The Friedmans have denied the charges.

Last June agents came upon a nightmare in Conneaut, Ohio, when they searched the home of David McNutt. He had received the "Loving Children" photo set from Produit Outaouais. Agents entered a house thick with garbage and reeking from urine. Upstairs they discovered McNutt's three-year-old daughter and two-year-old son locked in what Ashtabula County Sheriff 's detective Skip Eller called "the filthiest rooms I've ever seen." On top of the refrigerator they found a Polaroid print of the youngest daughter posing naked and exposing her genitalia. McNutt, 38, an unemployed Vietnam vet, sheepishly told detectives at the scene: "I thought it would be fun to take." As agents toured the house taking photographs for evidence, the daughter followed, posing all too coyly for the camera.

Psychological problems: McNutt admitted to having sex with his three children, forcing them to perform acts of oral sex from the time they were infants. According to police reports, he locked the kids in their rooms, releasing them only for meals and for his gratification. McNutt pleaded guilty to one charge of child rape; he was sentenced last month to 10 to 25 years.

McNutt fits the national profile of child molesters. His court-appointed lawyer, James Schoren, describes him as a "meek, mild ... very pathetic person," who had psychological problems dating to his own abuse as a child. Like other pedophiles, he was too obsessed to stop. "He loves his kids like any parent. He said he couldn't help himself," says Schoren. His wife says she couldn't stop him, either. According to statements by her husband, Marsha McNutt, 39, was aware of the abuse. But her lawyer claims she didn't speak up because she was afraid of being beaten. "She's very pliable. She let this guy run her life," said attorney Frederick Pfouts. She has been charged with child endangering.

The McNutt children have been in foster homes since the arrests. The oldest, now 12, faces the most difficult adjustment. "She's in conflict about wanting to be back with her parents," explains Sally Richards, the Ashtabula county attorney who represents the youths. The younger kids, now three and four, also show emotional scars. "To them this is not wrong," says detective Eller. "This is the way they were raised." Like the boys and girls who are forced to pose for pornographic photos, the McNutt kids have been robbed of their innocence.

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Boys' Sex Abuse Admitted - Great Neck teen to get 6-18 years in plea bargain

By Alvin E. Bessent

Newsday - December 21, 1988

A Great Neck teenager accused of sexually abusing boys who attended computer classes given by his father in their home pleaded guilty yesterday to 25 counts of sexual abuse in exchange for a promise of 6 to 18 years in prison.

Jesse Friedman, 19, during an appearance before Nassau County Court Judge Abbey Boklan, admitted he fondled and sodomized 13 youths, and photographed one of them in a sexual scene. After conferring briefly with his lawyer, Peter Panaro, Friedman assured Boklan, "Your honor, all the things I said were the truth."

Friedman did not look back at spectators as he was handcuffed and escorted from the heavily guarded courtroom where relatives of his victims sat, many of them in tears. His mother, Elaine Friedman, sat with her eyes closed or her gaze averted during most of the proceeding.

Boklan ordered Friedman immediately jailed without bail pending sentencing Jan. 24.

Friedman had maintained his innocence from Nov. 26, 1987, when he and his father, Arnold, were arrested, until about three weeks ago when he went to the district attorney in search of a deal, Panaro said.

In an interview, Panaro said several factors were involved in his client's decision, namely Arnold Friedman's guilty plea in the case in March and his subsequent 10-to-30-year prison sentence; the filing of additional charges against Jesse Friedman in the case last month; and an agreement by Ross Goldstein, a teenaged neighbor of the Friedmans also charged in the case, to cooperate with authorities.

On the charge of first-degree sodomy alone, Jesse Friedman could have received a maximum sentence of 8 1/3 to 25 years on each of the 17 counts pending against him.

"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.

The deal was struck yesterday after daylong meetings between the victims' parents and prosecutor Joseph Onorato. All but one of the families agreed that the plea bargain was the best way to resolve the case, Onorato said. The final piece fell into place yesterday when Jesse Friedman agreed to drop attempts to have evidence in the case suppressed, Onorato said.

The group of parents left the Mineola courtroom without comment after the 40-minute proceeding. But, in a later interview, one man whose son had been victimized said he was not pleased with the deal.

"It's a shame with all this public attention on child abuse the system does not adequately punish it. I would have liked a stronger sentence," he said.

Jesse Friedman had been charged in three indictments with more than 200 counts. Yesterday's plea to the multiple counts of first-degree sodomy, four counts of sexual abuse first degree, two counts of endangering the welfare of a minor, one count of using a child in a sexual performance and one count of attempted sexual abuse first degree, will satisfy all those charges, Onorato said.

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Teen Faces 37 New Sex Charges

By Alvin E. Bessent

Newsday - June 24, 1988

A Great Neck teenager already charged with molesting young male students at his father's private computer school was rearrested yesterday on 37 new counts of sodomy and other forms of sexual abuse, Nassau police said.

Jesse Friedman, 18, surrendered to police at about 4 p.m. and was charged with 20 counts of first-degree sodomy, 11 counts of first-degree attempted sodomy, four counts of first-degree sexual abuse and two counts of using a child in a sexual performance, police said.

Police said they expect to arrest as many as four acquaintances of Jesse Friedman in the burgeoning case.

With yesterday's arrest, the case has yielded a total of 200 charges against Arnold Friedman, 56, his son, Jesse, and a neighbor, Ross Goldstein, 17, who was arrested Wednesday.

Jesse Friedman will plead not guilty on the new charges when arraigned today, said his attorney, Peter Panaro. "Jesse informs me he never committed any of these acts," Panaro said yesterday. "My client is distraught and he's asserting his innocence completely."

The charges stem from alleged abuses during the past eight years of 7to 11-year-old boys attending weekly computer classes at the Friedman home at 17 Picadilly Rd. And, prosecutor Joseph Onorato said yesterday, "There are allegations that, in the view of these classes, Arnold and Jesse were sodomizing one another."

The investigation into the Friedmans' activities intensified in March after Arnold Friedman pleaded guilty to sexually abusing 13 boys, Onorato said. At the same time, Jesse Friedman rejected a deal that would have brought him about 5 to 15 years in prison, Onorato said. "Jesse's indication [that] he wanted to go to trial forced a greater effort to solidify what we had and to build on what we had," Onorato said.

The investigation got a boost when, as part of a plea bargain, Arnold Friedman identified about 80 boys he had sexually abused, sources have said. The plea netted Friedman 10 to 30 years in prison.

The eight-member police task force handling the cases then began contacting newly identified victims and their families while continuing interviews in already-surfaced cases. The numerous sessions with the children brought out information that has led to the latest arrests, police said.

"As we went back the second time, we began to hear statements such as, `You know, sometimes Jesse had his friends there,' " said Det. Sgt. Fran Galasso, head of the sex crimes squad. "On further questioning, we began to hear that the friends were involved."

Arnold Friedman had established the computer school in his home eight years ago. He first acted alone in abusing the students, police said, but his son became involved three or four years ago.

Goldstein, a former schoolmate of Jesse Friedman, was being held yesterday in lieu of $100,000 bail set by District Court Judge Murray Pudalev. He is scheduled to return to court Monday. Jesse Friedman had been free on $250,000 bail until yesterday.

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Teacher Guilty of Sex Crimes - In plea bargain, admits sodomizing boys in Great Neck home

By Alvin E. Bessent

NewsDay - March 26, 1988

Computer teacher Arnold Friedman admitted yesterday that he sodomized or otherwise sexually assaulted numerous young boys who were students in his Great Neck home and pleaded guilty to 42 counts of various forms of sexual abuse.

The plea was made during a tense, one-hour appearance before Nassau County Court Judge Abbey Boklan in Mineola and followed 2 1/2 hours of closed-door negotiations between attorneys in the case. Friedman sat with his wife at his side as the plea and details of the agreement - which will send him to jail for 10 to 30 years - were read into the court record. Sentencing before Boklan was set for July 6.

Boklan allowed Friedman to remain free on $250,000 bail after defense attorney Jerry Bernstein said his client will be sent to a federal, in-patient psychiatric facility in Springfield, Mo., Monday after sentencing on another charge in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn. Friedman pleaded last month to the federal charge of distributing child pornography through the mail.

Ten people identified as relatives of the victims clustered in two front rows of the heavily guarded courtroom. Some perched on the edge of the benches and others shared tissues and wiped their eyes as Friedman, 56, in a barely audible voice, admitted sodomizing, sexually touching and forcing the boys, all under age 11, to look at sexually ex-plicit videotapes and magazines for his own sexual gratification.

Friedman also admitted ramming one young boy's head into a wall while other students watched. He answered with the single word, "Yes," when asked by Boklan if he then threatened to do the same to the other boys if they told anyone about the sexual abuse.

The father of a 9-year-old victim said the parents have become very close to one another throughout the ordeal of the investigation and prosecution.

"We've spent hundreds and hundreds of hours together over the last months," he said. "These children have been brutalized."

But he and a second father both ex- pressed satisfaction with the plea and sentence.

Friedman and his son Jesse, 18, of 17 Picadilly Rd., Great Neck, were charged in December in a 54-count indictment in which they were accused of sexually abusing five boys aged 8 to 11 and endangering the welfare of a child. An additional 91-count indictment charging the two with similar acts involving eight other young boys was added in February.

Jesse Friedman did not take part in the plea bargaining. According to his attorney, Douglas Krieger, he will probably stand trial.

Jesse Friedman sat in a front-row seat in the courtroom as his father pleaded, and showed little emotion. At one point about 50 minutes into the proceeding he tried unsucessfully to stifle a yawn.

Arnold Friedman, an award-winning teacher who taught for 20 years at Bayside High School in Queens, pleaded yesterday to eight counts of sodomy, 28 counts of sexual abuse, four counts of attempted sexual abuse and two misdemeanor counts of endangering the welfare of a child. He faced a maximum of 50 years in prison. But Boklan said she would impose only 10 to 30 years to run concurrently with any prison time imposed by the federal court.

Jesse Friedman, a student at the State University at Purchase, is charged with multiple counts of sodomy, sexual abuse, endangering the welfare of a child and using a child in a sexual performance. He will return to court April 22.

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Teacher Sentenced In Sodomy

By Alvin E. Bessent Staff Writer

Newsday - May 14, 1988

A Long Island man who admitted sodomizing or sexually assaulting 13 boys who came to his Great Neck home for computer courses was sentenced yesterday to up to 30 years in prison.

"Never in my experience have I ever come across a case as wide-ranging and as heinous as that perpetrated by this defendant," said Assistant District Attorney Joseph Onorato, who has prosecuted sex crimes since 1973.

Arnold Friedman, who pleaded guilty March 25 to 42 sex-related charges involving the 13 boys, stood meekly with his hands cuffed behind his back as Nassau County Judge Abbey Boklan sentenced him to the 10to 30-year jail term to which Friedman had agreed when he entered his plea.

The sentence is to run concurrently with a similar federal one that Friedman received earlier for sending child pornography through the mails.

"Since I may not be on the bench in 10 years when you are eligible for parole," Boklan told Friedman, "this court wants the record to show that you are a menace to society and should not be released early."

Friedman said nothing when offered a chance to speak.

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. Most sat impassively, but one woman bowed her head and sobbed quietly after at first glaring in Friedman's direction.

In letters to the court, Boklan noted, some of the victims' parents had asked whether she could order Friedman to pay for their children's therapy. "Since restitution was not a part of the plea bargain I cannot impose it," she said in court.

Friedman, 56, was brought from the Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville, N.Y., for his court appearance. He has been in the prison since March 28, when he was sentenced to 10 years for sending child pornography through the mail. He pleaded guilty to that charge Feb. 8 and was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Mark A. Costantino.

Friedman's son, Jesse Friedman, who faces multiple counts of sodomy, sexual abuse, endangering the welfare of a child and using a child in a sexual performance, is awaiting trial. Arnold Friedman's wife, Elaine, has been charged with attempted second-degree assault and second-degree obstructing governmental administration after taking a swing at a police officer Nov. 27 as he gathered evidence from the couple's home. She is free without bail awaiting trial.

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A letter written by an eight-year-old boy
January 22, 1989

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Teen Gets 6-18 Years For Child Sex Abuse

By Alvin E. Bessent - Staff Writer

Newsday - January 25, 1989

Jesse Friedman, who admitted sexually abusing children during computer classes taught by his father in their Great Neck home, was sentenced yesterday to 6 to 18 years in prison, despite an impassioned defense plea that he was a victim of his father's abuse.

Nassau County Court Judge Abbey Boklan recommended that, despite Friedman's abused childhood in a family "devoid of love," he should serve the full 18-year maximum sentence behind bars.

With his hands cuffed behind his back, Friedman, 19, tearfully expressed sorrow for the children he has admitted sodomizing, fondling and photographing in sexual scenes, and for their families and the Great Neck community. All were victims, the defendant said, of his father, Arnold Friedman.

"But I, too, am a victim," Jesse Friedman said haltingly. "My father raised me confused about what was right and what was wrong and I realize now how terribly wrong it all was."

In his bid for lenience, defense attorney Peter Panaro said Arnold Friedman began entering his son's bedroom when Jesse was 9 years old, fondling him while reading bedtime stories.

"The real culprit here is Arnold Friedman. The man is a monster," Panaro said.

The defendant's mother, Elaine Friedman, buried her face in her hands and wept quietly as Boklan recounted a psychiatrist's report of her son's joy when his father's unwanted sexual attention was shifted to children in the class. She later left the Mineola courtroom without commenting.

Boklan said that, based on a pre-sentencing report from the county probation department, it appeared that Jesse Friedman was indeed sexually abused and "raised an unwanted child in a home devoid of love."

But Jesse Friedman most often physically brutalized the boys in his father's classes, and invited friends to participate in orgies of child sexual abuse, Boklan pointed out. "The fact that you were a victim does not absolve you from responsibility," Boklan said.

Before Friedman's sentence was pronounced, Panaro urged Boklan to make no recommendation on how much of the sentence actually should be served. After Friedman serves the minimum sentence of 6 years, a parole board - taking the judge's recommendation into consideration - will determine when he would be released.

Panaro also asked the judge to grant youthful offender status to Friedman, which would seal the record of his conviction.

Boklan rejected both requests.

Arnold and Jesse Friedman were arrested Nov. 26, 1987, after Nassau police and federal agents executed a search warrant at their house at 17 Picadilly Rd. and found child pornography, pornographic computer discs and lists of children enrolled in computer classes in the home.

The Friedmans and a neighbor, Ross Goldstein, who was arrested in June, were charged in a series of indictments with more than 400 counts of various forms of sexual abuse involving 7to 11-year-olds who were students in Arnold Friedman's computer classes. Jesse Friedman was accused in more than 200 of those counts.

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Little Joy in Victory For Boys' Families

By Alvin E. Bessent

Newsday - January 25, 1989

For about a dozen people who came to court to see Jesse Friedman imprisoned for sexually abusing their sons, the sentencing yesterday was at best a bittersweet end to a sordid affair.

After sitting through countless, gut-wrenching proceedings in the past year in the Mineola court room of Nassau County Court Judge Abbey Boklan, they were glad to see Friedman finally on his way to prison, two parents said after discussing the matter with the others. And they were gratified at the judge's recommendation that Friedman, 19, serve the full 18-year sentence.

Friedman's tears and the tale of his sexual abuse at the hands of his father, Arnold Friedman prompted only the smallest bit of sympathy from the parents whose own sons are in therapy, trying to deal with scars inflicted by the defendant. "I think he was crying for Jesse, who might have to spend 18 years in jail, not for our kids," said one man whose son was abused. "I bet you dollars to donuts that at age 40, he will sodomize kids again."

Of the hundreds of children that authorities believe the Friedmans abused over the years, it was these parents' sons who endured police lineups and testified before as many as three grand juries.

The parents had hoped the case their children testimony solidified would end with a stiffer sentence against Jesse Friedman; the recovery of pornographic photographs which the boys said the Friedmans made of them; and charges against two suspects still under investigation who have not been named. About nine families had said that, if necessary, they had been ready and willing to go to trial and have their children testify in an effort to ferret out the truth. Jesse Friedman's plea, which, some said they were "browbeaten" to accept, short-circuited that effort.

No photographs have been recovered, although the younger Friedman admitted when he pleaded guilty to using a child in a sexual performance that he had taken at least one. "If he was truly repentant and remorseful for what went on, where are those pictures demanded one mother.

Nineteen of the victims' relatives left silently after the sentencing through a back door, provided so they could dodge- the reporters and camera crews waiting in the lobby. They promised to return, again and again and again, for as long as it takes to resolve the case against Ross ________, the other defendant charged in the case.

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Dragnet Is Out For Porn Photos In Child Sex Case

By Alvin E. Bessent

Newsday - February 8, 1989

Police are searching for pornographic photos and videotapes that could be key evidence in their continuing investigation of a Great Neck child sex-abuse case.

Many victims told police they were photographed performing sexual acts in the home of computer teacher Arnold Friedman, who has pleaded guilty to sex abuse. And many parents, who fear the material is circulating in child pornography circles, say they were angered because plea bargain negotiations by authorities with Friedman's son Jesse, 18, did not lead police to the material.

A teenage neighbor of the Friedman's has been indicted in the investigation, but two other men that the victims and he said were also involved haven't been charged. The missing pornographic materials could provide needed evidence against the two suspects, officials said.

"Virtually every child who gave a statement said they were extensively photographed and videotaped during these sexual acts," said Det. Sgt. Frances Galasso, chief of the Nassau police sex crimes unit. "Just about every class was videotaped. It had to be dozens [of tapes]," she said.

Jesse Friedman's defense attorney, Peter Panaro, said a video camera and a 35mm still camera were regularly positioned on tripods in the ground floor classroom where Arnold Friedman conducted computer classes. But Panaro maintained that his client doesn't know what became of the photos and tapes, or whether they still exist. "Jesse says he's never seen a picture ever," Panaro said. "Arnold had 100 percent control over pictures." Arnold Friedman's attorney, Jerry Bernstein, declined to comment.

None of the pictures or tapes were found during two searches in late 1987 of the Friedman house at 17 Picadilly Road. Nassau police have traveled around the region to view child pornography seized in other jurisdictions, Galasso said. And federal postal inspectors said they, too, are on the lookout for homemade pornography tied to those involved in the case. Authorities said they have no firm leads to the whereabouts of the materials.

Parents of many of the victims say they fear that the materials featuring their children will be distributed in the child pornography netherworld. That was one of the threats Arnold Friedman used to keep the children quiet about what was going on during his classes, parents and police have said.

Because of those concerns, and the parents' desire that the two additional suspects described by victims be charged in the case, questions about the missing photos and tapes almost derailed the negotiations that resulted in Jesse Friedman's Dec. 20 guilty plea to 25 counts of sexual abuse in the case.

According to parents of the victims, Jesse Friedman often had a camera around his neck when he greeted their children outside his home before computer classes. When he entered his guilty plea, he admitted taking photos, of at least one boy in a sexual scene. In an interview, one victim said he was afraid the pictures and tapes could ruin lives, but took solace in the hope that the pornography will not surface for years. "People change so much as they grow older . . . If these things surface 20 years later, they won't be recognizable," he said.

The mother of a victim said, "The kids are afraid Jesse has those pictures and when he comes out of jail he's going to be real angry and use those pictures to hurt them. It's a very powerful hold to have on someone, to have those pictures."

The Friedmans were arrested Nov. 26 1987, and charged with counts of child sexual abuse. Charges were later filed against a third defendant, Ross [ ], bringing the total number of counts to 465. [I have deleted the surname of the state's witness because he received a youthful adjudication and has a sealed criminal record.]

Questions about the tapes and photos were not raised during negotiations with Arnold Friedman that resulted in his guilty plea to 42 felony child sexual abuse charges in exchange for a 10 to 30 year prison sentence. The children had not told police about being photographed or the presence of additional adults during the classes before March 25 when Arnold Friedman's plea was accepted, officials said. Arnold Friedman is serving his state sentence concurrently with 10 to 30 years imposed on the federal charge of distributing pornography through the mail.

[Ross], who was indicted last November on 118 counts of sexual abuse, confirmed in grand jury testimony that, in addition to the Friedmans, two additional men participated in the abuse of the victims. But that account from a co-defendant such as [Ross] must be independently corroborated to be of use during a trial, said Assistant District Attorney Joseph Onorato. [Ross] has pleaded not guilty to the charges and is free on $25,000 bail. [Ross'] attorney Michael Cornacchia declined comment

Based on [Ross'] testimony, police said, two suspects were brought in for lineups. But only one of the twelve victims who have been cooperating with the investigation made a positive identification. Two others said they thought they recognized one of the men, but weren't sure, Onorato said.

That left police with the missing photos and tapes as their best remaining hope for making cases against the two suspects, Galasso said.

Outraged relatives of seven of the victims wanted a 10-to-30 year sentence for Jesse Friedman unless he led police to the pornography. They said Onorato badgered them during Dec. 16 and Dec. 20 meetings in his Mineola office when he advised them to accept a deal for 6-to-18 years.

Onorato denied pressuring the parents. Before accepting the plea, Onorato said, he pushed Jesse Friedman for leads to the photos and tapes. But the defendant maintained he knew nothing about the pornography.

Panaro confirmed that Onorato pressured Jesse Friedman on the subject of the photos and tapes before agreeing to the deal. "They wanted those pictures," Panaro said. "I thought the whole deal was dead."

Police asked anyone with information about the case to call the sex-crimes unit at 535-7816. All calls will be kept confidential, they said.

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The Secret Life Of Arnold Friedman

By Alvin E. Bessent

Newsday - May 28, 1989

Friends and parents knew him as a respected teacher. What they didn't know was that he and his son were sexually abusing pre-teen boys. See end of text for sidebar-Possible Telltale Signs

IN THE SPRING of 1986, about 100 people - most of them former students of the guest of honor - crowded a hot, second-floor television studio at Bayside High School in Queens to honor a science teacher named Arnold Friedman.

The ex-students, who had come from places as far away as California, greeted each other over sodas and sandwiches and talked about a man some described as unforgettable and others called the best teacher they'd ever had. One guest credited Friedman with turning his life around.

The occasion was Arnold Friedman's retirement after a 26-year career at Bayside High. Friedman, who had the respect of his peers as well as his students, had taught one of New York City's first high school classes in nuclear physics and the first organic chemistry class ever offered at Bayside. And he and his students had converted classroom 235 into WBAY-TV, a simulated television station where they produced videotapes. In a speech to the group, Lester Speiser, principal of the school during most of Friedman's tenure, talked about the joy that Friedman got from "communicating and teaching and seeing his students succeed."

Afterwards, Friedman's youngest son, Jesse, pumped Speiser's hand. "It was wonderful, the things you said about my father," Speiser remembers Jesse telling him.

"In my whole career I don't remember students ever throwing a party like this for someone," Speiser says. * * *

On the day of Arnold Friedman's retirement party, postal inspectors in New York City were in the middle of an investigation that would shatter the teacher's reputation, tear apart his family and horrify his suburban community.

The investigation had been going on for two years. In July, 1984, U. S. Customs officials at Kennedy airport had plucked a small parcel from the stream of boxes and envelopes culled daily for contraband. They had learned to be suspicious of small parcels in plain brown wrappers like the one sent from Holland to Arnold Friedman, 17 Picadilly Rd., Great Neck, Long Island.

Inside was a magazine called Boy Love. It featured low-budget color photos of nude boys and graphic pictures of men having sex with children.

Postal authorities were alerted and the investigation was launched. Using an undercover name and address, a postal inspector wrote to Arnold Friedman and asked if he had "boy lover" material to sell. "I have none to sell but am interested in obtaining," Friedman responded three days later. "Do you know of any sources?"

The inspector, who called himself Stan, wrote back but heard nothing from Friedman for more than a year. Then, the day after Christmas, 1985, Friedman renewed the correspondence. "I have a great photo book from Holland that might be copyable. Could you do it?" Other letters followed; the correspondents became "Stan" and "Arnie." "The book is `Joe and his Uncle,' " Arnie wrote. "I think I'd like you to send me something (sort of good faith) and I will forward this rather precious book to you."

Stan sent two photos and on Feb. 8, 1986, Arnie mailed a large envelope with a handwritten note. "Stan - Enjoy! Arnie." Inside was the magazine "Joe and His Uncle" - kiddie-porn from a company in Denmark. It was the breakthrough the postal inspectors had been waiting for. The correspondence built up; Arnie even filled out a questionnaire from Stan for an ostensible porn pen-pal club.

On Nov. 3, 1987, an inspector dressed as a postman returned "Joe and his Uncle" to the house on Picadilly Road where Arnold Friedman gave computer lessons to children. Fifteen minutes later, government officials and Nassau police, armed with a warrant, raided the home. They found a foot-high stack of child pornography secreted behind a piano in the living room. And there were grimmer discoveries - child-sized dildoes in a cabinet just outside a makeshift classroom.

They also found a list of 80 names and phone numbers handwritten in Friedman's tortured, tiny scrawl.

Police realized that they had found something that went far beyond pornographic magazines. They intensified the investigation. Before it was over, the probe would uncover the largest child sex-abuse case ever on Long Island and one of the largest in New York State - both in the number of victims and the number of charges. The investigation would leave the lives of the children and their families in shambles, and underline the difficulty of gathering evidence in cases involving pedophiles - adults who are sexually attracted to children.

And it would leave friends, relatives and colleagues of award-winning teacher Arnold Friedman wondering how such a seemingly nice man could do such horrible things. How it could have happened without anyone knowing it was going on?

"I ask myself, looking back, if there were any clues I could have picked up on and the answer is no," said Robert Sholiton, director of The Adult Program for the Great Neck public schools, where Arnold Friedman taught computer classes from 1981 to 1987. "I keep asking myself, is this the man I knew?"

Along the way, the investigation into what went on in the house on Picadilly Road would lay bare a lifetime of unspeakable secrets, and lead to Friedman and his 19-year-old son, Jesse, being indicted on hundreds of counts of sex abuse and sentenced to jail terms. THEY WERE secrets that would make the brick-and-shingle high-ranch on a proverbial tree-lined, suburban street in upscale Great Neck a chamber of horrors for dozens of children. Police said that 140 children - ranging in age from 7 to 12 - would finally admit what they had been too shamed and afraid to tell their parents. Some of them still wet their beds, take baseball bats to bed with them or are unable to sleep. "If you murder someone, seconds later they're dead," says the father of one of the young victims. "This was like a prolonged torture they subjected the kids to." They were secrets of incest that Arnold Friedman's now 19-year-old son Jesse kept hidden through years of therapy and drug abuse. "I guess it mostly started out with my father trying to love me." Jesse says.

They were also secrets that Arnold Friedman, a pudgy 58-year-old pedophile, had not only managed to hide from colleagues but, according to the woman to whom he had been married for 33 years, even concealed from her. "It hit me like a bolt from the blue," she says.

* * *

Arnold Friedman was born in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, the second of three children. Money was scarce for the family during the Great Depression. Arnold's father hustled a living buying and selling auto parts. According to Arnold Friedman's wife - who insisted that her first name be withheld as a condition for consenting to an interview - her father-in-law was emotionally distant. "Arnie's father was a strange man," Mrs. Friedman said. "He didn't talk. When he walked in he said `Hi.' When he left he said `goodbye.' " But she said there was never any indication that her father-in-law molested his son.

When Arnold was about 5 years old, his father left the family, plunging them into even more desperate financial straits. The father kept in touch with his relatives but would never again live with his wife and children. "There was an older sister who died suddenly of what they called at the time blood poisoning. This was a Shirley Temple look-alike. The mother was devastated by this sudden death," Mrs. Friedman said. "The father left . . . They were on welfare as a result."

After he graduated from Lincoln High School in Brighton Beach, Arnold went to Brooklyn College and then Columbia University, where he studied chemical engineering. He worked for a short time as an engineer, his wife said, but quit because he detested the odors.

Instead, Arnold, who played the piano, chose to spend his time working Brooklyn clubs as "Arnito Ray," leader of a six-man rhumba band. "I was very much in love with Arnold's music," said Mrs. Friedman. "He never really spoke too much, but his feelings came out in his music and that's what really attracted me."

The bride-to-be had also grown up in Brooklyn. Her father abandoned his family when she was 18, and her mother, an unemployed bookkeeper, was forced to move with her daughter into the home of relatives. There was no hugging or touching in her family, she said. "They are very loving people. They just don't know how to show their love."

In Arnold she found a man concealed within a similar emotional shroud.

"In fact, when Arnie and I were first going together, he said to me, and probably only once said it, `I love you.' It made me feel uncomfortable."

They married in 1955, and eventually moved to Flushing, where they bought their first house. Mrs. Friedman taught school. Arnold played club dates at night but took education courses and did substitute teaching during the day. In 1960, he relegated the band to weekends and became a full-time science teacher at Bayside High School.

His colleagues saw an imaginative, productive teacher whose humor, even temper and contagious enthusiasm made him respected and well liked. He had a favorite response to suggestions, they said. "Dynamite."

"We never saw him really raise his voice or get angry," said a Great Neck neighbor who also taught with him at Bayside but did not want her name used.

Arnold displayed what Mark Yohalem, former head of the Bayside High School science department, described as "a relaxed authoritativeness."

"He was always one of my best," said Speiser, who was principal at Bayside from 1972 to 1985. "In all this time he was like a pied piper. He was venerated by the boys and girls." Speiser and his family celebrated at the Friedman house in 1983 when computer instructions written by Arnold were released on records and cassette tapes. And Arnold played the piano at the marriage of Speiser's daughter in 1984. "In the years I knew him there was never a scintilla, not a breath of this kind of thing," Speiser said, referring to the abuse case.

Speiser said he teased Friedman for being obsessed with technology. "I would walk in and he'd be doing something technical. I would yell, `Hamlet, Hamlet. Do something with that!' "

In 1981, Friedman was hired by the Great Neck School District to teach personal computers in The Adult Program. By the next year, he was appointed coordinator for the program's 20 or so computer classes, said spokeswoman Ronna Telsey. He always had high enrollments and positive ratings, officials said.

And in October, 1987, less than a month before authorities seized stacks of kiddie-porn from his house, Arnold Friedman was cited by the state Association for Computers and Technologies in Education for innovation and excellence in computer education.

But at home, Friedman seemed a different person - his effervesence disappeared.

He was a workaholic who talked little and demonstrated no affection for either her or their three sons, Mrs. Friedman said. He never hugged the boys. He would stay alone for hours in one of the two cluttered offices he maintained in the Great Neck house and then spend the remainder of the night slumped in front of the television set.

"A sentence that began `I feel' was never in his vocabulary," Mrs. Friedman said. "The only conversations Arnold ever had with the children were about work."

"I had an awfully peculiar family," says Jesse Friedman.

* * *

When word went out in Great Neck that Arnold Friedman was offering private computer classes for children in his home - teaching general know-how and basic programing - there was no shortage of takers.

Police said the classes took place for about eight years, starting around 1979.

Hundreds of largely college-educated, upper-middle-class professionals - doctors, lawyers, business executives and entrepreneurs - enrolled their children. Officials estimate that about 500 youngsters, the great majority of them boys, participated in the classes.

The parents of five of Arnold Friedman's victims have talked at length about the case in recent months. All said they went inside the Friedman house only once - when they dropped their children off for the first day of class. They saw nothing to be suspicious about.

A small room to the right of a short corridor had been converted into a classroom. Kid-size, Formica-topped tables held personal computers. Tiny orange, yellow and blue molded plastic chairs were scattered about the room, which was cluttered with books, computer manuals, magazines and hundreds of computer discs. On one dark, wood-paneled wall, a printout sign proclaimed: "Computer Class is Great."

"It had a real classroom feeling. A little shabby, a little seedy, but a real classroom," said a woman who enrolled her two sons.

Across the hall was the entry to Arnold Friedman's office. Just beyond the classroom, adjacent to a laundry room and bathroom, was the room where Jesse slept. A sign on the wall called his domain "Paradise 7."

Arnold, his wife and sons stared from a framed photograph in the hall.

The parents left confident that all was as it seemed. An affable Arnold Friedman had explained that there was no need to come into the house when they left and picked up their children. He said neighbors had complained about heavy traffic and parking congestion. The parents could simply pull up out front and his son Jesse would escort the kids into and out of the house.

The children came home with stacks of printouts and talked about what they had learned about computers. But they were too shamed and fearful to talk about everything that took up their after-school hours.

Police have given the following account of what happened in Arnold Friedman's computer class:

What the parents did not see were the pornographic magazines interspersed on shelves along with legitimate classroom materials. Some featured pictures of nude women, others showed men posing with women, men with men and men with young boys. Students sent in search of computer manuals would stumble across the magazines.

Soon the children found that Arnold knew they'd discovered the racy pictures. He told them he understood. Their parents would get uptight about things like that, he said, but they could talk to him about anything.

Next the children were introduced to the pornographic computer discs. Things like "Stroker," in which the player could make a graphic representation of a man masturbate. And "Strip Poker," in which a prone woman figure would shed clothing as the game progressed until she was naked.

Or "Talking Sam" in which a male figure would expose his genitals and ask the kids questions about sex.

Det. Sgt. Frances Galasso, head of the Nassau sex crimes unit, said the Friedmans had the children mimic the actions of the computer figure in "Talking Sam." "The Friedmans would demonstrate that on the kids, touch them on their private parts and have the kids touch them."

As a reward for keeping quiet, children were allowed to take computer discs home to copy. In a few cases, police found such discs in the homes of Friedman's students. None of the parents knew what the discs contained, police said. Experts said this added to the youngsters' feelings of complicity. And the children were warned that if they told anyone what was going on there would be no more computer classes in Great Neck, Arnold Friedman would go to jail and it would be all their fault.

"I really wanted to take computer so I never told anyone about what was going on except my dog," said one 8-year-old victim in his statement to police.

Inexorably, police said, the Friedmans increased the abuse, touching and fondling and performing sex acts. Boys were eventually told to drop their pants. The Friedmans would sometimes expose themselves, walk around the room and order their young charges to touch them. Children's games were perverted. Nudity and fondling were demanded in "Simon Says."

Refusals to cooperate were punished by Arnold and Jesse.

"I remember once they banged some kid's head against the wall and said this will happen to you," a 12-year-old boy who attended the classes two years ago said in an interview. "Mr. Friedman would sneak up behind me and take his hand and push it down into my pants," said an 8-year-old boy in his statement to police. "Jesse used to sneak up from behind me and he would slide his hands the same way his father did. First he would touch my shoulders then down my chest and into my pants.

"Mr. Friedman pulled my pants half-way down and he made me hold onto one of the computer table chairs . . . I screamed `Dad!' and Mr. Friedman said to me to be quiet. Mr. Friedman put his hands over my mouth. During this time the other kids were screaming and telling Mr. Friedman to get off me. I was scared and the other kids were scared, too."

Then in March, 1986, friends of Jesse joined in what police said escalated into orgies of sexual abuse. Arnold and Jesse Friedman and three teens would sometimes attend classes with five to 10 students. Victims recounted being held down by one attacker and raped by another.

As the abuse escalated so did the threats. Police said the children were extensively videotaped and photographed. No pictures of the children have been recovered. But police said Arnold Friedman told the children he would send pornographic pictures of them to magazines and tell the publishers to print their names if they told what was going on.

He threatened to burn their houses down. He reportedly said he would kill their parents.

"It was brainwashing," the mother of one victim said.

* * *

The Friedmans' wall of secrecy quickly disintegrated after police and postal inspectors turned up the list of names in the Nov. 3 raid.

It was a wall that apparently had even hid Arnold Friedman's activities from his wife. "When the federal officers came, Arnold told me he'd mailed a magazine and that was the totality of his crime," Mrs. Friedman said. "He was almost in tears because they took his books. Not because his family was in jeopardy, but because they took his pictures. The family was distraught and destroyed. We began to bicker a lot and work at cross purposes with each other."

Although Friedman insisted he was guilty only of collecting pornography, she said, he began to talk about suicide.

"He felt desperate," said Mark Yohalem, Friedman's former department chairman. Yohalem talked to him shortly after he was hit with the federal charges. "He saw his life in ruins regardless of how the trial would come out."

Jesse, then a student at SUNY Purchase, said his mother called and told him about the raid. He refused to accept later calls from home, and for the next few weeks tried to forget developments in Great Neck.

Galasso and her 11-member squad of Nassau detectives and officers were hard at work checking out names. The interviews started when detectives chose a name at random from the handwritten list and visited that family. They found three brothers who had all attended classes with the Friedmans. "Two of the three boys gave indications they'd been sexually abused by Mr. Friedman," Galasso said.

But the parents refused to cooperate with the investigation, a reaction that police came to know well. About two dozen families flatly refused to allow officers to talk to their children. "There were even kids who told their parents they were involved in front of us and the parents didn't believe it," Galasso said.

Working with the list of names, Galasso's squad divided into two-persons teams and knocked on doors all over Great Neck as they followed the list. Files were established for each child. Police officers canceled vacations and switched to night shifts.

It was a week before Thanksgiving when two detectives knocked on the door of a woman who would still look haunted more than a year later as she recounted the scene.

The detectives - a man and woman team - said child pornography had been found in Arnold Friedman's house. They wanted to speak to her son as a precaution.

She said the boy "started out saying nothing happened. Then, `Maybe I saw something.' Then about two hours later, `Well, maybe Arnold did expose himself. Maybe Jesse did expose himself.' " Finally, the boy described being fondled and sodomized.

"At that point I went nuts," the woman said, remembering the fury she felt at Arnold Friedman. "I said if you don't arrest him after what I just heard, I'm going to buy a gun and kill him."

One young boy, who revealed what happened only after numerous visits by detectives, repeatedly pounded his head against a wall while describing the sexual abuse. "He would literally beat himself, he was so guilty about what had happened," Galasso said.

As more and more children confided in police, their parents began to talk with one another. Arnold Friedman had phoned some and sent letters to others saying he was innocent - that police were setting him up. He asked for their support.

Frustrated because no arrests had been made, a group of parents decided to confront the teacher at his home. They met Nov. 24 at an office in Great Neck in preparation for the siege. Police attended the meeting. They headed off the confrontation by convincing the group that arrests were imminent.

The next day, Nov. 25, 1987, 12 Nassau police officers and an assistant district attorney descended on the house and broke in the front door. They took Arnold Friedman into custody.

Mrs. Friedman was out shopping for Thanksgiving dinner. Thirty minutes after police arrived, she got home to find neighbors, reporters and camera crews gathered out front and her husband inside in handcuffs. "It was a horror," said Mrs. Friedman, who frantically tried to stop the police searching her house.

"She pushed me," Galasso said. "She threw a punch at my head."

Arnold Friedman was arrested on a variety of child-abuse charges, and his wife was arrested for attempted assault.

Jesse Friedman was with friends shopping in the East Village that day. He bought a scarf and some records and then at 5 p.m., he called home. Galasso answered. His father and mother had been arrested, she said. She advised him to come home.

Telling his friends nothing of what was going on, he went to Pennsylvania Station, stumbled onto a Long Island Rail Road train and began the long ride home to arrest and jail.

It was a journey that had begun in his childhood.

* * *

According to the judge who would sentence him to prison for child abuse, Jesse Friedman was "raised an unwanted child in a home devoid of love."

His mother, in tears as the judge spoke, didn't challenge that assessment.

"When I was married and had babies, I couldn't love those babies," she said in an interview. "I asked Jesse, do you remember me hugging you at all? He said no. He was so starved for love, for approval, for acceptance that he would have done anything for this love.

"He came into the family sort of out of step. The family focus was on the two older boys," said the mother, who declined to discuss her older sons, neither of whom was involved in the sex abuse case. "He was always kind of . . . dragged along and felt excluded."

Jesse Friedman was interviewed in March in a prison visiting room. As he slouched on a plastic chair and sipped a cherry cola, Jesse said he is "halfway between loving and hating" the man he holds responsible for landing him in prison. "He let me down as a father."

When he was 8 or 9 years old, Jesse said, he stumbled upon his father's cache of kiddie porn. Later, his father began to visit his bedroom at night and fondle him. The abuse escalated into sodomy.

"In my family, everything got washed under the rug," Jesse said. "I never told about the abuse. I didn't think anyone would understand. Trying to do something about the problems in my family never seemed to get me anywhere." Jesse said his parents fought a great deal. "I used to go to sleep listening to them fighting, screaming at one another . . . I never saw them loving each other. I would cry when they would fight. I would bang on the walls. I've got all these holes in the walls from my banging." Jesse said his parents argued about him and about such mundane issues as the color of a carpet.

When he was 10, Jesse began psychiatric therapy. He insists he never told his therapist about the incest.

Jesse increasingly had trouble in school. By ninth grade he rarely attended classes and failed every subject. His academic record improved when he enrolled in an alternative school in Great Neck.

But his emotional problems continued. At 15, Jesse said, he was diagnosed as manic depressive. "I had no friends and no interests except M&Ms, marshmallows and TV." He was 5 feet, 6 inches tall and he ballooned to 175 pounds. At 16 he began smoking marijuana and using LSD, and before long he was stoned on a daily basis.

Jesse gave up drugs a year later after meeting his first girlfriend. "I enjoyed friends and women more than smoking pot," he said.

As he sipped the soft drink and talked about his life, Jesse had been glancing about the room. Now his close-set, ice-blue eyes stared straight ahead. "I'm not a pedophile. I hate little kids," he declared without blinking. He tugged an ear and stroked the close-cropped beard grown during his first few weeks in prison. "I'm a perfectly healthy, adjusted heterosexual."

It was during his teenage years that Jesse helped his father teach the computer classes in their home. "Jesse was thrilled to do the computer class with Arnie because it was something, it was an activity that gave him a father," his mother said.

* * *

The crimes of Arnold and Jesse Friedman spread pain in a wide wake. Young victims were left scared and unable to sleep. One boy is deathly afraid of fire. Another's stutter has grown worse. Well-behaved children have become difficult.

One 12-year-old questioned his faith. 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. The boy's mother remembered her son's reply. "No, because a good God wouldn't let this happen to children."

Another mother had lunch with a friend whose son had also been a computer student. She tried to convince her companion that something horrible had indeed happened in the Friedman house. The woman flew into a huff.

"I thought she was going to throw the food in my face. She said she had such a good relationship with her kid he would talk to her. I said, `What am I - a bad mother?'"

Like other guilt-ridden parents, the woman wondered why she didn't see what was happening. And she wrestled with an equally nagging question: Why didn't my child confide in me?

"In the subculture of adolescent boys, the greatest taboo is being homosexual," said FBI special agent Kenneth Lanning, a veteran of more than 1,000 such cases. "That's a big incentive to keep your mouth shut."

According to the victims, fear was another answer.

Experts say silence in the face of abuse is commmon for childen whose first response to the unthinkable is figuratively to pull the covers over their heads and forget it ever happened. "It's almost like an amnesia," said Dr. Sandra Kaplan, chief of North Shore University Hospital's division of child and adolescent psychology, who is treating some of the Friedman victims.

One 12-year-old boy was interviewed for this story in his own room. The room - crammed with schoolwork, electronic equipment, personal computers and two dogs - bespoke comfort and security. But the boy squirmed as he struggled to come to terms with his silence about what had happened during the computer classes in the Friedman house. "The threats made a pretty good impression," he said, glasses askew and eyes darting. He recalled the incident in which a boy's head was banged against the wall. " `Tell and this will happen to you,' " he quoted the Friedmans as saying. He said they also threatened to kill his parents and burn his house if he told.

It was almost two years after his last computer class but the strain of remembering soon showed. 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. Then his nose began to bleed. The nosebleeds predated his enrollment in computer classes. But they too were triggered by stress. He's always agitated like that after talking about the Friedmans, his parents said later across their dining-room table.

It has also been difficult for parents to talk about their children's ordeals. "We used to have lunches when we sat around and cried on each other's shoulders. I don't think it will ever end," one mother said.

Eventually, about 14 families banded together and, over countless hours, helped police and prosecutors build cases against the men charged with abusing their kids. Twenty children testified before grand juries that ultimately returned three indictments in the case.

"It helps them a great deal," Kaplan said, referring generally to victims of child abuse. "This enhances their selfesteem, to see themselves as heroes because they helped stop sex abuse." * * *

On March 29, 1988, Arnold Friedman appeared in Federal Court in Brooklyn and was sentenced to 10 to 30 years in prison for distributing child pornography through the mail. 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. Arnold, indicted on 107 counts, would later plead guilty to 42 sex crimes, including eight counts of sodomy and 28 counts of first-degree sexual abuse. Jesse, charged with 239 counts, pleaded guilty to 25 charges, including 17 counts of sodomy and four counts of first-degree sexual abuse.

Both Arnold and Jesse would admit molesting 13 boys. On May 13, 1988, Arnold was sentenced by Nassau County Court Judge Abbey Boklan to a concurrent 10 to 30 years in prison for sodomy, sexual abuse and endangering the welfare of a child. Boklan recommended that he serve the full 30 years. Arnold, who will be eligible for parole in 10 years, is imprisoned in the Federal Correctional Institute in Oxford, Wis. In a letter to Newsday, in which he refused requests for interviews, he referred to his case as "the Great Neck Horror" and said it was the story of a town that "conducted a modern-day witch hunt."

"The fact that my son and I pleaded guilty was not an admission of culpability," Friedman wrote, "but an attempt to salvage whatever little remained of our lives."

On Jan. 24, 1989, Jesse Friedman was sentenced to six to 18 years in prison. At the sentencing, Jesse revealed through his attorney, Peter Panaro, that he had been abused by his father. Despite the attorney's plea for leniency, Boklan again recommended that the defendant serve the full sentence. Jesse is in the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora.

"I don't long to be free," Jesse said in the prison interview. "I don't miss my old life."

Ross Goldstein, who was indicted on 118 counts of various sexual abuses, cooperated with authorities and implicated Jesse Friedman before a grand jury. He pleaded guilty March 22 to three counts of first-degree sodomy and one count of using a child in a sexual performance. He was sentenced May 3 to two to six years in prison.

Mrs. Friedman pleaded guilty to attempted assault, second degree, and obstructing governmental administration. She was sentenced Oct. 20, 1988, to three years probation and a $1,000 fine.

Two additional suspects - teens referred to by the children and named by Goldstein - remain at large. The children were unable to identify the two positively in police line-ups.

Police said they believe the two suspects were photographed and videotaped with the children. They said the children claim to have been extensively photographed. Nassau detectives have viewed pictures seized in other jurisdictions but have not yet turned up anything.

Bitterness resulted among parents of the some of the victims who felt that prosecutors had failed to force Jesse Friedman to lead police to the photos before allowing him to plead guilty. The parents fear the pictures will be circulated among pedophiles and will one day surface and embarrass the children.

Some parents attended a series of tense meetings with Assistant District Attorney Joseph Onorato while he negotiated Jesse Friedman's plea. They said he told them their children would have to testify in open court if the case went to trial. Onorato also raised the spectre of appeals based on defense attempts to suppress the list police used to locate the victims. The parents said they were told that all of the evidence their children provided could be suppressed by an adverse ruling.

Onorato said he just wanted parents to know all the things that could possibly go wrong if they proceeded to trial.

The parents reluctantly accepted the deal that sent Jesse Friedman to prison. "It seemed like Jesse was calling the shots," the mother of one victim said. "Jesse could accept or reject the plea bargain. Jesse could appeal."

Both federal and state prosecutors said as a rule they always prefer to avoid taking child molesters to trial. "We don't want to put these children on the stand if we can avoid it," said Andrew Maloney, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

* * *

Discussing sexual-abuse therapy, Kaplan said that one objective is to help such victims learn to deal with shame and confusion about their sexuality. "A boy who has been sodomized may feel that he's destined to be a homosexual. We help them to understand they're victims. That sex abuse is the fault of the adult perpetrator, not the child."

The children whose parents deny what has happened and force them to suppress it often suffer the most, Kaplan said. "Parents who encourage their children to deny are telling their kids they can't trust them to help."

For some parents and children, the ordeal was exacerbated by accidental meetings with Mrs. Friedman and Jesse, who was free on bail for a long time after his indictment. One woman and her two sons - both victims - saw Mrs. Friedman and Jesse in a local poultry market. The boys ran for cover. "My kids were deathly afraid. They asked for the keys and ran out and locked themselves in the car," the woman said.

Some of the children who testified before the grand juries received threatening telephone calls warning them not to cooperate with police. Now they worry that videotapes will come back to haunt them. They want to forget the lessons in the house on Picadilly Road.

"I've been trying to put it behind me and go on," one 12-year-old victim said of the experience that scarred his childhood. He tries not to think about the respected teacher who lived a secret life.

By virtue of his own admissions in court, Arnold Friedman is a pedophile. According to Kaplan, he fits much of the classic pattern. Pedophiles, she said, are often intelligent, talented and respected in their communities. They often manage to find jobs such as teachers, police officers, doctors or nurses, or activities like scout leader or coach that bring them into regular contact with children. In many cases, they were abused as children and pick out victims in that age group. They come from all social classes and all walks of life.

It is common for them to live behind facades so respectable that even the parents of their victims are shocked by the disclosures of abuse. It was that way with Arnold Friedman, whose persona was his protection.

"These kind of offenders are the most prolific child molesters known to mankind," says FBI agent Kenneth Lanning. But he adds: "One of the difficulties is the stereotype of the offender as totally bad, the dirty old man in the wrinkled raincoat. Society has a problem when the offender is not totally bad." Possible Telltale Signs EXPERTS say that it is difficult but not impossible for parents to protect children from pedophiles, who often hide behind a cloak of respectability while their victims rarely talk about being attacked and sometimes exhibit no symptoms.

Police and experts on the subject say several of the following symptoms of behavior, while not necessarily proof that sexual abuse is taking place, may become evident:

Many young victims become irritable, depressed, can't sleep, or become afraid of men in general, said Dr. Sandra Kaplan, director of North Shore University Hospital's Division of Child and Adolescent Psychology.

They may also display "hypersexuality," a sudden concern with sex that is inappropriate for their age. Compulsive masturbation and fear of going to a specific place can also occur. Other children display what Kaplan calls a "frozen watchfulness," suspiciously eyeing people around them. Abused children may begin to dress in inappropriately heavy clothes, said Alane Fagin, executive director of Child Abuse Prevention Services of Roslyn. "They're ashamed of their bodies. They think people can see they've been sexually abused." Fagin also said that some victims may want to bathe continually.

But about one in four abused children will show no symptoms at all, Kaplan said. Boys, in particular, are less likely to confide what's happening to them, she said. The bottom line, said postal inspector John McDermott, whose unit conducted the Friedman child pornography investigation, is never trust your child completely to anyone.

When a child is with a babysitter, teacher or anyone, McDermott said, "one of the things you should do is drop in unannounced and uninvited."

_________________________________________________________________________________

Toward An Elusive Truth

By Karin Lipson - Staff Writer

Newsday - January 16, 2003

A documentary filmmaker exploring the abuse cases against a Great Neck father and son lifts the curtain on the family's private dramas

Three years ago, filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, having spent a successful decade in the business world, decided to return to movies with a documentary about children's party clowns. "I thought it would be fun to follow one of these people into their lives," he recalled recently. "I was really trying to make a pretty light film."

What he wound up with couldn't have been more different.

"Capturing the Friedmans," a documentary that premieres tomorrow at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, is a sobering re-examination of events that stunned Long Island in the 1980s, when they seemed to cast doubt on the very notions of normality, community and safety.

It was in 1987 that Great Neck resident Arnold Friedman, an award- winning former high school science teacher who now held computer classes for boys in his home, was charged, along with his 19-year-old son, Jesse, a college student, with multiple counts of child abuse and sodomy.

Police interviewed dozens of children, ranging in age from 8 to 11, who had attended the computer classes over a period of years. What emerged from those interviews were horror stories - stories police said the children had been too frightened to tell before - that turned the innocuous-looking, middle-class Friedman home on Picadilly Road into a virtual lair of sexual depravity against innocent children.

Indicted on 107 counts, Arnold Friedman pleaded guilty in 1988 to 42 sex crimes against children and was sentenced to 10 to 30 years in prison. Jesse, faced with 245 counts, later pleaded guilty to 25 charges and received a sentence of 6 to 18 years. The Great Neck community felt relieved that it had rid itself of two sexual predators.

These events are recalled in "Capturing the Friedmans." But the 107-minute film is not a police procedural: "Frankly, the police story had been told" in news accounts at the time, said Jarecki, during a brief stop in New York (he lives with his family in Rome), before heading on to Sundance.

Nor is the film an anti-police diatribe, though it does question some police methods and conclusions in the case. "It's not a deconstruction and criticism of the police," said Jarecki. "It analyzes everyone's approach. I don't think it tries to draw conclusions."

In fact, "Capturing the Friedmans" isn't principally about a child-abuse case, though that clearly is what set other events in motion. It is about the elusiveness of truth, despite the seemingly best efforts of those involved to grasp it. Perspectives shift as the director interviews different people and reveals new details.

"What fascinated me was how smart everyone was," Jarecki said. "The family was smart, the police were smart, the judge was smart. Everyone was smart, and yet no one can agree on anything."

Arnold, for instance, emerges clearly as a pedophile; in fact, it was his mailing of pornographic material that initially put him in the crosshairs of law enforcement officials. "You could believe Arnold was using the U.S. mail to mail child pornography; that he had a sexual interest in children; you could even believe he molested children" at some point, noted Jarecki. "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.

If "Capturing the Friedmans" is partly about the shifting sands of truth, it also is about our concepts of family - and how one admittedly unusual family fell apart under almost unimaginable stress.

In the film, a still-bewildered Elaine Friedman - who was Arnold's wife and the mother of his three sons, David, Seth and Jesse - recalls the shock of the unfolding events: "We had a middle-class home, educated. We had a good family, right? Where did this come from?"

It was, in fact, a family member who ultimately led Jarecki to make "Capturing the Friedmans." While interviewing potential subjects in 2000 for his then-planned clown film, Jarecki came across David Friedman, whom he describes as "the No. 1 children's entertainer in New York."

Though clearly a perfect subject for the film, Friedman "had an undercurrent of a certain kind of intensity, I might even say anger," Jarecki recalled. That, plus Friedman's reluctance to talk about his family, led Jarecki and his staff to do some independent research. They found Newsday articles summarizing the case and identifying David Friedman as the eldest son of Arnold Friedman.

But, of course, Jarecki was reading of those events years later, with an inevitably different perspective. The Friedman case, for example, had unfolded during an era of national mass hysteria over purported instances of child sex-abuse in group settings. At least two headline-making cases, respectively involving the McMartin Preschool in California and day-care teacher Kelly Michaels in New Jersey, eventually fell apart when the accuracy of children's testimony was questioned.

And while both Arnold and Jesse Friedman had confessed to their crimes, recent events have shown that confessions may not always be what they seem: "The five 'Central Park jogger' defendants confessed convincingly," noted Jarecki, yet their convictions were overturned a dozen years later.

In the case of the Friedmans, he said: "The police took decisive action. The court took a decisive view. And yet, the world had changed so much since then, I felt I needed to start fresh."

The fact that there had been no trial for either Arnold or Jesse also intrigued Jarecki: "When there's no trial, you often have a very intense series of negotiations and stress, and perhaps that was why the clown was so angry." At this point, he said, "I was still thinking of making this a part of David's story. Then the rest of the story just basically pushed the David story out."

Although his planned six-month clown project would stretch to three years, Jarecki had the financial and artistic resources to proceed. Founder and former chief executive of Moviefone, the nation's largest movie show time and ticketing service, Jarecki, now 39, sold the company to AOL in 1999. The producer of a prize-winning short film, Jarecki counted film director Melvin Van Peebles among his mentors.

As he ventured into the cross-currents of "Capturing the Friedmans," he was able, over time, to conduct multiple interviews, nearly two dozen of which appear in the film. (Filmmaking seems to run in the Jarecki family: Andrew's younger brother Eugene directed the favorably reviewed documentary "The Trials of Henry Kissinger.")

Jarecki had almost finished his film when David revealed an astounding fact: Not only did he possess many hours of old Friedman family home movies, but he also had hours of videotape that documented the family's life while they were facing the sex-abuse charges.

The oldest films, taken by Arnold's father, show little Arnold, his brother and a sister who died in childhood. "The father passed the camera on to Arnold, who passed the camera to David. They were fascinated with themselves," said Jarecki.

Some of the films - of young brothers David, Seth and little Jesse frolicking at the beach, or blowing out candles at a birthday party - have the awkward, poignant, slightly goofy quality of all home movies. This could be any family making memories of the highlights in their lives.

But the later videos show a family torn apart, wracked by questions of guilt and innocence, feelings of betrayal and arguments over legal strategy. "Things were happening in the family, and yet they never turned the video off," said Jarecki.

According to Geoffrey Gilmore, director of Sundance, the videos "made this film possible": In a festival description of "Capturing the Friedmans," he writes that the film "creates a [family] portrait which is complex, ambivalent, and absolutely engrossing because of video."

Through the videos and Jarecki's interviews, we follow the family's decision- making. Arnold Friedman, it appears, pleaded guilty rather than go to trial, partly in the hope that this somehow would make things easier for Jesse.

Jesse, however, also took a plea when it appeared that there would be no testimony in his favor at a trial. (Ross Goldstein, a teenage friend whose story is not explored in the film but who also was charged in the case, made a plea agreement to cooperate with the Nassau district attorney's office and spent only six months in jail.)

"Jesse was facing consecutive time on every one of these charges," his former lawyer, Peter Panaro of Massapequa, told Newsday recently. "If he didn't plea-bargain and was found guilty, he could have spent the majority of his life in jail."

After spending 13 years in prison, Jesse was released in December 2001 and is now on parole in New York City. According to Jarecki's production notes, he has returned to college to complete his degree in economics.

Elaine Friedman has remarried and moved to the Berkshires. Middle son Seth, who did not want to be interviewed for the film, no longer lives in New York.

To this day, there are multiple truths vying for dominance in the minds and hearts of the Friedmans. Though the film explores (but does not resolve) the issue of whether Jesse himself was molested by Arnold, the youngest son maintains an essentially positive memory of his father.

"I still think I knew my father very well," says Jesse in the film. "I don't think that just because there were things in his life that were private and secret and shameful, that that means that the father who I knew and the things I knew about him were in any way not real."

Arnold Friedman died in prison, under circumstances explored in the film. He is buried on Long Island, and his epitaph reads: "Loving father, devoted teacher, pianist, physicist, beach bum."

Not the whole truth about Arnold Friedman, certainly. But not wholly a lie, either.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Capturing The Friedmans - What really happened to the Friedmans?

By John Anderson

News Day - May 30, 2003

(NR). Reprise of a late '80s Great Neck child sex-abuse case is deeply troubling, thrillingly cinematic, aptly enigmatic. With David, Jesse, Elaine and Arnold Friedman. Directed by Andrew Jarecki. 1:47 (adult content, language). At area theaters.

Ah, the '80s: Greed was a virtue, rap was music, objective reality was on the ropes. Society, justifiably confused, found in child abductions and sex abuse an oasis of outrage: a violation it could attack without fear of contradiction, and without ever having to explain itself.

It did, in the end, have to explain itself to some degree, but not before consequences both good and bad: a healthy increase in the awareness of heinous crimes and the reporting of same, for instance. And a witch-hunt mentality that resulted in several celebrated cases of gross injustice and professional malpractice. The McMartin case in California, for one. The Kelly Michaels case in New Jersey, for another.

Whether the case against Arnold Friedman - award-winning school teacher, computer instructor, admitted pedophile - fits in that latter category is the question posed by "Capturing the Friedmans," Andrew Jarecki's scathing exploration of the Great Neck child sex-abuse case and a movie that is in turn surgical laser and blunt instrument. Having seen "Friedmans" in January at the Sundance Film Festival - where it was selected best American documentary - a colleague told me she was convinced that the movie's audiences would conclude "something happened" in Great Neck during Friedman's after-school computer classes. Others, myself included, have come, via the film, to the precisely opposite opinion: that the case against Friedman - and his son Jesse, who was indicted with his father and served 13 years in prison - was largely a matter of law-enforcement overkill and communitywide hysteria.

I don't write this to make an argument either way, but rather to point up the major coup of Jarecki's film. Lack of concrete perspective is usually not considered a major asset in documentary filmmaking. But by not making any case, "Friedmans" makes its own. The flaw of human perception - the real theme of the film, the one thing it firmly establishes - is that people are not only capable of seeing what they want to see, but of embracing what they fear the most.

"Friedmans" is a film that can only be watched the same way once, because Jarecki's strategy is to present us with testimony and evidence by people who seem to believe what they're saying and then have that evidence abruptly dismissed by others who firmly believe what they are saying. Just when you think you know what's going on - which was precisely the experience so many had during the investigation, prosecution and reporting of the Friedman case - Jarecki takes you in the opposite direction. The end result is that a firm conviction is a dangerous thing.

Jarecki set out to make his second film - his first was a short called "Swimming" that also played at Sundance - about Manhattan birthday clowns. 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). What Jarecki discovered during the interview process was that David had a very interesting family. And hours of videotape of them.

Camcorders were relatively new; the Friedmans had a penchant for self-portraiture even at their most desperate and David gave Jarecki the tapes. It's the integration of them into the story that makes "Friedmans" so masterful. Dreamy sequences of al fresco Great Neck are interwoven with the case's various talking heads - who include detectives, journalist Debbie Nathan, prosecutors, defense laywers and other alleged victims - the resulting tone being one of verite unreality. But it's the footage of the family - unhinged by pursuit, notoriety and their already disturbed dynamics - that gives the movie its power. And its considerable pathos.

Jarecki has taken an impossible subject, and subjects, and made a movie that works as crime thriller, social document and, occasionally, surrealist comedy. It's hard to imagine minds not being changed by "Capturing the Friedmans" simply because you can't watch the film without entertaining the notion of changing your mind.

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Capturing the Friedmans

By Peter Rainer

New York Metro - March 5, 2003

More than three years ago, Andrew Jarecki, the founder of Moviefone, decided to make a documentary about David Friedman, New York's premiere children's-birthday-party clown. What he uncovered instead was a family scandal: In 1987, David's father, Arnold, a respected Great Neck schoolteacher, was arrested for possessing child pornography; along with his 18-year-old son Jesse, he was also charged with having sex with minors. In the not-terribly-probing interviews Jarecki conducted with lawyers and sex-crime investigators for Capturing the Friedmans, the Rashomon-like recounting of these charges leaves it ambiguous as to the exact nature of the father's and son's guilt.

Even pre-scandal, the Friedmans extensively filmed their day-to-day lives—as if they were waiting for someone, someday, to make a documentary about them. Jarecki shows off this footage as evidence of a truly dysfunctional family in various stages of denial. What it reveals at least as much is the modern phenomenon of reality-TV self-exposure carried to such lengths that, by comparison, the Osbournes look like the Cleavers. (1 hr. 47 mins.; PG)

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Questions for Jesse Friedman - The Home Horror Movie

by Cindy Price

New York Times Magazine - June 30, 2003

You were thrust into the spotlight recently when ''Capturing the Friedmans,'' the documentary movie about your family and the conviction of you and your father on charges of sexually abusing students who came to your house, had its premiere in New York. How is all this sudden attention sitting with you?

From the day I was arrested, I ceased to be anonymous. The 13 years I was in prison, everybody knew who I was. I was an infamous criminal. So I've just gotten used to -- I guess the sense of whatever privacy you sacrifice by not being anonymous. It has just become second nature to me; it's not just the film.

At screenings of the movie, you've been answering questions from the audience. What has been the most interesting one?

Someone said this question is for both Jesse and for the co-producer and asked, ''What is the movie about?'' And we both looked at each other and were both equally kind of dumbfounded. There's no real easy way to put in one sentence what this movie's about.

So what is the movie about? Have you figured it out?

The movie is about all the people whose lives were affected by the arrest of my father and me.

And what is the worst question you've been asked?

There were a few people who did not respond to the film the way the vast majority did. But I don't think that's in any way wrong. I'm not out trying to convince anybody of my innocence. I'd like to make that perfectly clear. The only thing I'm hoping for is that the people in the computer classes hear the message, see the film and they come forward and tell the truth.

What was your impression when your brother David first brought out the video camera after the police had begun investigating you and your father for molesting children in your father's after-school computer class?

There was no moment when we said let's videotape this family falling apart. We're not the Osbournes. The Osbournes know the cameras are on and they're going to end up on TV. We were just goofing around for the camera.

The public thinks you were recording all the time.

We weren't ''Big Brother.'' ''Big Brother'' is always being filmed. That's not what was going on inside the Friedman house. After the arrests, all the underlying dysfunction that was there just got aggravated and turned into this monster dysfunction. But for the most part growing up, it was dormant. We didn't scream and fight like that all the time. We did scream and fight, but not every day, because it's one thing to scream and yell about whose turn it is to do the dishes and another thing to have a big fight about the fact that your father's going to prison and is never going to get out.

Did you and your father ever discuss the case?

Sure, but Dad was not well. He was treated cruelly and harshly by the other inmates, and he was in anguish about the fact that he was in prison and he was going to die in prison and his wife had divorced him, his career was gone, his reputation was ruined, every friend he had for years abandoned him and his mistake sent his son to prison.

Did you ever write him trying to abate his guilt?

I was about to say I never blamed my father for what happened, but I came across a letter I wrote to my dad in December of 1988 where I was clearly mean toward him. It surprised me to see that at that particular juncture I was very angry at him. Did I ever try to abate my father's guilt? I guess no.

Your father died in prison. How has the documentary affected the rest of your family?

I still say everything is status quo. My brother David still has a lot of issues to work through. Mom says that she and my Uncle Howard reconnected after many years of not speaking to each other.

I take it you did not watch the film all together in one room.

We did not have a Friedman family reunion, no.

What would be the best thing to come out of this movie?

The conviction overturned, vacated and the charges dismissed would be very nice. But I don't know how far that would really go. It's not going to give me back my life. I still wouldn't have a job. I still would have this nightmare in my head. Happiness would come in a very different way. 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.

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Film Revives Great Neck Controversy

By Víctor Manuel Ramos

Newsday - June 1, 2003

It's the day before Thanksgiving 1987. The Friedmans are looking forward to a holiday together when police shatter the apparent peace of Great Neck's Piccadilly Road - conducting a raid that ultimately would put Arnold Friedman and his youngest of three sons, Jesse, then 19, behind bars.

They would soon face more than 300 charges between them for repeatedly sodomizing local kids during Arnold Friedman's computer classes. Police had been led to the Friedmans by the father's acceptance of child pornography from a postal inspector investigating him. They filed the charges after interviews with many of Friedman's students.

Many Great Neck residents stepped into that time and place Friday night, when they watched an almost two-hour documentary of the Friedmans' shattered lives, told through interviews with law enforcement officials, attorneys, neighbors, relatives and others. But most important, the story was told by the Friedmans themselves in a collection of home videos shot before, during and after the charges that was woven into "Capturing the Friedmans," the first feature film of director Andrew Jarecki, which opened to rave reviews Friday. At times people laughed, grunted, gasped and fell silent as the breaking apart of a family unfolded. When the lights came back on at Great Neck's Squire Theatres, the spotlight was on Great Neck residents themselves. There was a question-and-answer session with Jarecki and Newsday film critic John Anderson. It became, in some ways, an extension of the film, which raised questions about the fairness of all aspects of the case, from the police investigation to the conviction to the media coverage.

The most intense exchanges were between Jarecki and some people in the film, who stepped out of the audience to stress their views or correct what they saw as distortions. Jesse's high school friend, Judd Maltin, decried what he saw as the detectives' bias. And, although the film did not deny Arnold Friedman's pedophilia, Judge Abbey Boklan, who presided over the case, was alarmed at the film's and the public's second-guessing of the criminal prosecution.

"I feel that I cannot just sit silently by and not protect the credibility of many of the victims in this case," Boklan told the crowd. "[The victims] were children at the time, they are young adults now and I can't bear to see them victimized once again." Some booed, but she pressed on, addressing Jarecki. "You tried to be fair, but I don't think you were."

Although Boklan said incriminating records from court proceedings are now confidential, she added the two men confessed their guilt in open court. The witnesses' and victims' testimony of sexual abuse was "real evidence," she said.

Jarecki countered there was more to the case than what was aired in court and that "no physical evidence" was ever introduced to prove their guilt. The other two sons, David and Seth, and their mother, Elaine, were not prosecuted. Arnold Friedman died in prison at age 64 and Jesse Friedman lives in Manhattan after a 2001 jail release.

Most of the audience's feedback was positive. Many spoke of the gentle Arnold Friedman they knew as an award-winning science teacher at Queens' Bayside High School, a dexterous pianist and enthusiastic computer instructor.

David Friedman, the Friedmans' eldest son who provided the family home videos to Jarecki, returned to Great Neck on Friday for the first time since 1988.

"I was uncomfortable being here before the movie ended, but there was really a lot of support and encouragement," said David Friedman, now a children's clown in Manhattan. People crowded around him after the movie, an outpouring he said was "as surreal as the charges against my father."

Jarecki, too, said he had been concerned about how residents would withstand the poking of an old wound. "I think people were ... more open than I expected," he said. "I was refreshed by that."

Some said they did not yet know what to make of the nuances. "You know," said Great Neck resident Donna Schreiber as she exited the theater, "I lived on Piccadilly Road, about five houses away from [Arnold Friedman] at the time, and I was very shocked because of what happened, but the film gives you a whole different view. So I'm really confused."

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From clowns to family tragedy

Filmmaker's discovery of a father's ghastly legacy

By Gary Arnold

The Washington Times - June 14, 2003

Andrew Jarecki hit the jackpot in the telecommunications industry when he sold the Moviefone information service to America Online for a reported $388 million in 1999.

This windfall allowed Mr. Jarecki to devote himself to a new career, filmmaking. It was an unorthodox change of direction for a successful businessman in his late 30s, but Mr. Jarecki could also afford to pick and choose his subjects, without fearing financial backers who might limit his independence.

Fortune continues to smile on his endeavors — in a sobering kind of way. Mr. Jarecki's first feature — a remarkable documentary chronicle of family scandal, estrangement and solidarity titled "Capturing the Friedmans" — has opened to an admiring press in several cities, duplicating its reception at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

Mr. Jarecki spent a couple of days in Washington recently to play host to press screenings and give interviews.

The movie, which reconciles gravely serious content with gallows humor and exploitable oddness, is playing at both the Cineplex Odeon Dupont Circle 5 and Landmark Bethesda Row Cinema. By chance, it has opened just before Silverdocs, a five-day film festival at the American Film Institute Silver Theatre showcasing documentaries. Silverdocs runs from Wednesday to June 22.

Mr. Jarecki discovered his eventual subject matter while interviewing people who worked as birthday party clowns in New York City. One of his subjects, David Friedman, turned out to be the heir to a melancholy legacy: a uniquely painful family history, documented with astonishing intimacy and candor in many sequences of "Capturing the Friedmans" by home movie and videotape archives. 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.

"David is sort of conflicted," Mr. Jarecki says. "He knows the film could be bad for his career, but he did it for the right reasons. I was open to whatever I might find. I began without the slightest inkling that this dreadful family calamity would be lurking in the background of my birthday clown project."

Mr. Jarecki dismisses the idea that his film confirms the cliche of clowns hurting inside, behind the makeup. "If you keep looking at any group of people, you could find something haunting," he says.

Mr. Jarecki had been keen on magic in his youth but thought it curious that there were grownups who made a living as birthday party clowns.

"David was recommended to me as No. 1 guy in New York," he recalls. "He has many colorful colleagues, like the lady who makes things out of paper plates and the best balloon twister in the world. I gathered a lot of interesting material for a clown film, but the story of David's family demanded a radical change of theme."

While attending a private secondary school in Tarrytown, N.Y., Mr. Jarecki was required to write a thesis about classic tragedy in his senior year.

"So it's ironic," he says, "that this story would come to me — and in such a disarming, roundabout way. I think the saga of the Friedmans could be studied in tragic literature classes. It has all the elements, starting with the father, who could be considered a noble man.

"Arnold Friedman started a family with the best of intentions. He was a respected and dedicated schoolteacher, but he clearly had a tragic flaw. Not the obvious, psychological bent, the clinical thing: his lust for young boys. Something else betrayed him when that weakness was exposed publicly: the Aristotelian thing, his pride. Hubris."

Arnold and Elaine Friedman lived in the Long Island community of Great Neck with their three sons, David, Seth and Jesse. One Thanksgiving eve, David returned from college to discover that domestic security had collapsed: The police were ransacking the place and preparing to arrest Arnold and Jesse. Subsequently, Arnold admitted that he was a furtive pederast of long standing. He let his guard slip by answering a correspondent who purported to be a dealer in foreign pornographic publications. By mailing this stranger a magazine from his hidden collection, Arnold sprung a trap patiently prepared for two years by a postal inspection agent, entrusted with a watch list of customers for obscene goods who might prove to be distributors, as well.

The magazine rap led to an avalanche of harrowing criminal charges. Learning that Arnold Friedman had been teaching private piano and computer lessons to adolescent students in his home for several years, Great Neck police were emboldened to suspect that sexual abuse had run rampant. Jesse, 18 at the time of the arrests, was his father's classroom assistant. He was swept up in the suspicions, which ultimately resulted in hundreds of charges of appalling molestation. The police questioned scores of students, all boys, who were urged to bear witness to repeated sexual victimization in the Friedman basement.

The specific nightmare scenario remains far-fetched. "Jesse is such an unusual guy," Mr. Jarecki says. "He built a computer database to analyze the charges that were being brought against him. He discovered that if you did the math, one kid in a 90-minute class that met once a week would have to have been raped every 30 minutes for 10 weeks. Then in the fall, when he enrolled in the advanced class, this same victim would have submitted to four rapes a session to account for all the charges."

Nevertheless, Arnold Friedman ultimately confirmed his own chronic pedophilia in private confessions to his wife, his brother, a lawyer and a journalist. These revelations are profoundly self-incriminating, even through Arnold may have gone to prison on wrongful charges. Both Arnold and Jesse pleaded guilty, persuaded for different reasons that they could expect no vindication from juries in Great Neck.

"Let's go with the supposition that Jesse was innocent of the charges against him," the filmmaker says. "And that he was doomed to spend 13 years in prison from the moment his father confessed. I think Arnold missed a chance to save him in the early going. There were three indictments. The first involved serious charges against Arnold and minor ones against Jesse. No sodomy charges, for example."

Mr. Jarecki thinks that the police were signaling that a deal could be orchestrated.

"Arnold knew his hands were too dirty to proclaim innocence in front of a jury," he says. "But if he had been less prideful about his reputation, his standing in the community, he might have said, 'Look, I didn't do these terrible things, but there are things in my past I'm ashamed of. Let me acknowledge them and go to jail, but spare my son. I'll plead guilty, but leave him out of it.' "

After uncovering such a tangled and sorrowful real-life chronicle, what does Mr. Jarecki envision as his next project?

"Maybe something fictional," he says. "When I was at Princeton, I directed a lot of plays and thought I might pursue that as a profession. I'm not exclusively interested in nonfiction subject matter. I've lived in Rome for the last few years, and I have an idea for a story about an Italian family. Or I might try to write something that doesn't need to be filmed.

"There are a lot of interesting things that could work out. I would like it to be as involving and revealing as this experience. I think we've done right by David's story. Everything else is a bonus."

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Arresting Images - Documentary Asks: Hysteria or Truth?

By Desson Howe

Washington Post - June 16, 2003

The book was supposed to be closed on The People v. Arnold Friedman and Jesse Friedman, two sexual-molestation cases in the late 1980s that destroyed a family and devastated a community.

But "Capturing the Friedmans," a new documentary and Sundance film festival winner that raises disturbing questions about the police and legal procedure that led to both men's convictions and imprisonment, has revived those painful events.

Heated discussions and finger-pointing among the principal players have characterized question-and-answer meetings after screenings of the film, which opened here this past weekend. Many articles and reviews, mostly supporting the movie's point of view, have been written. 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.

On one side of the controversy is "Capturing the Friedmans" director Andrew Jarecki, whose film strongly suggests that law enforcement officials of Nassau County, Long Island, were overzealous in their investigation, indictment and imprisonment of computer teacher Arnold and his then 18-year-old son, Jesse.

The film is strongly endorsed by Jesse Friedman, who served 13 years in jail and still holds out hope of legal vindication, his brother David and other friends, family and supporters. On the other side are the Nassau County officials, who are featured in the film but strongly denounce it as "fiction." They say it is misleading and manipulative. These critics include now-retired Nassau County Court Judge Abbey Boklan; Assistant District Attorney Joseph Onorato; detective Frances Galasso, also retired, who headed the investigation; and several other police officers.

Caught in the anonymous netherworld in between are perhaps dozens of men in their twenties and thirties whose complaints as children condemned the Friedmans to prison. Jesse was freed in 2001 but lives a heavily restricted life as a convicted sex offender, with an electronic monitor attached to his foot. Arnold Friedman, an admitted pedophile, who strongly denied molesting the children in his classes, died in jail in 1995.

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. As the movie outlines, police arrested Arnold Friedman, a popular and award-winning computer and piano teacher from Great Neck, N.Y., and his son Jesse on multiple counts of child sodomy and sex abuse.

Arnold had already been arrested in a sting operation for receiving and distributing child pornography through the mail in the mid-'80s. When postal inspector John McDermott told police that Arnold also taught preteen boys, the Nassau County sex crimes unit (headed by Galasso) got lists of his students and interviewed them. Their testimony included alleged acts of abuse, sodomy and bizarre sexual games.

Throughout the proceedings, Arnold and Jesse maintained their innocence but eventually agreed to guilty pleas in return for reduced sentences.

The film, which includes interviews with the Friedmans, various Nassau County law enforcement and justice officials, as well as former computer students, strongly suggests the children's testimony was obtained with the sort of unfairly leading interview techniques and false-memory hysteria that characterized such 1980s trials as the McMartin preschool case in California. At those trials, alleged child victims were repeatedly interviewed until they gave increasingly lurid accounts of sodomy, other abuse and even satanic rituals.

The movie also contains astoundingly personal footage shot by the Friedmans themselves. Arnold and sons David, Seth and Jesse were home movie enthusiasts who loved to make hammy films about themselves. Elaine, Arnold's wife, never enjoyed these games. When the arrests occurred, the cameras kept rolling. Excerpts from those films and videotapes include some of the family's most private, agonizing moments, as they react to the investigations and legal cases. (Seth declined to participate in Jarecki's project.)

Also evident is Elaine's horror about her husband, as well as her conviction that he should plead guilty. (She and Arnold eventually divorced.) There are screaming battles around the table during a Passover Seder and in the living room. And throughout this emotional distress, Arnold remains a passive participant, seemingly resigned to his fate.

The almost surreal family scenes, further disturbing revelations by Arnold about his previous pedophilia and the underlying premise that both Friedmans were unfairly convicted have galvanized audiences, said Jarecki, who has attended several public screenings around the country. But most people, he continued, focus squarely on the case.

"When I ask [at screenings] how many people feel that Jesse Friedman went to prison unfairly, I would say more people than not raise their hands . . . and the other people look over and think, 'Oh, I didn't think I had permission to think that.' . . . To me the most interesting thing is when they stop looking at me and start looking at each other and talking directly to each other."

Things got very heated, according to Jarecki and several other witnesses, at the Tribeca Film Festival last May and at screenings in Great Neck earlier this month, both of which were attended by several principals from the film. At Tribeca, Jesse and David Friedman, Galasso and Onorato, as well as investigative reporter Debbie Nathan, investigator Lloyd Doppman and Jesse's defense lawyer Peter Panaro, squared off. ("That turned out to be a life experience," recalled Jarecki.) And at the Great Neck screening, there were heated exchanges as well.

The movie, said Boklan in a later telephone interview, "is a brilliant piece of fiction and theater but unfair and inaccurate." She cited a Geraldo Rivera show in 1989 in which Jesse -- already in prison at that point -- admitted he had abused those children. But the scene, she says, is left out of the movie.

"I can't even remember what I said [on Geraldo]," said Jesse, who consented to a conference call interview for this story with his brother David on the line. At the time of the TV interview, he said, his strategy was to claim he had been abused by his father and forced to participate in the sexual abuse. This was a failed attempt, he said, to curry favor with the parole board and his fellow inmates so they wouldn't see him as a voluntary child molester. He claimed this was a strategy once suggested by his lawyer, Panaro.

Panaro did not return a reporter's call. In the movie, Panaro denies making any such suggestion.

The film, Jarecki said, is "about the elusive nature of truth. About how influenced the truth is by all of our own prejudices and agendas and needs on every level. . . . We put our memory in these memory banks and it sits there. But really it's just this electro-chemical impulse that kind of bubbles away and as soon as you lock it away in your memory bank it changes the next second."

Jarecki pointed specifically to a comment by detective Galasso in the movie, recalling "foot-high stacks" of pornographic material found in the Friedmans' living room.

In the movie Jarecki cuts to still photos of the living room showing no such thing. But in a telephone interview, Galasso responded: "I don't know where he [Jarecki] got those photos. I don't recall anyone in my squad taking photographs. I think he may be confused in this matter."

Galasso also strongly rejected the idea that interviews with the children were designed to coax preconceived answers. The first detective sent out to interview one 10-year-old boy was surprised when the boy -- upon meeting the detective -- immediately handed him a flier that advertised Elaine Friedman's in-home day-care center.

According to Galasso, the boy told the detective he wanted him to have the poster because "'I don't want any more children to get touched.'"

"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." The 10-year-old's older brother, who also attended classes with Arnold Friedman, "told the same story, by the way," Galasso said.

Two-person teams began interviewing "a great number of children within a very short period of time," she said. Lurid accounts surfaced of games of "leap frog" in the nude and "find the M&M's," which involved children using their mouths to find candy hidden inside other children's underwear.

The police, she said, did their best to ensure that the interviewers did not manipulate answers. But, Galasso allowed, "at some point some detective might have said, 'We know something happened because we've talked to other children in the class.' "

Prosecutor Onorato, who met with "every one of these children, a number of times," started each of his interviews in the same way, he said. "I say to them: 'I don't care what you've told the police or anybody, it's now time for you and I to talk about the truth.' You could say [the children] felt as though they were entrenched by the things they had already said to their parents and the police by this time and weren't going to back off now. I can understand that. I felt that these boys were not making things up."

"I know that none of the sex abuse charges against my father or myself are true, because I was there in the classes," said Jesse Friedman, in the conference-call interview. "Not one single person has come forward and said they were victims, only the people interrogated repeatedly by the Nassau County police. Not one piano student [of Arnold's] going back 30 years ever came forward, after we were on the front page of all the newspapers, to say there was abuse. If my father was secretly molesting kids, I would think he might have done so in the piano classes where he was alone with the kids."

On his Web site (freejesse.net), Jesse Friedman details his present life. By law, he has to register every 90 days as a "violent sexual predator" under Megan's Law and must do so for the remainder of his life. He cannot visit toy stores or playgrounds or revisit the scene of the purported crimes. He must attend sex-offender therapy twice a week. And he has worn his electronic ankle bracelet, thus far, for a year and a half.

"There is no indication," he writes, "that the Division of Parole plans to remove it from my leg before my time on parole is over in December 2006."

Added David Friedman: "There were 17 children who accused my father and brother of weekly sodomy over four years, which means more than 50 visits to the pediatrician at this time. No pediatrician noticed any scarring, tearing, bleeding to suggest any abuse. No one ever dropped out of [Arnold Friedman's computer] classes despite claiming to be sodomized after sessions. They re-enrolled in what was an elective program. It doesn't make any sense. Why would they re-enroll for a program, if these things were going on?"

No physical evidence was sought, Galasso said, because the procedures would have been too invasive and "none of the parents wanted that." Besides, Onorato says, physical evidence was not needed under New York state law. And the testimony was compelling enough.

If the police were gentle with the young boys, says Great Neck resident Stuart Maltin, they weren't quite so tender with his son Judd, who was Jesse's best friend. When Nassau County police were seeking people to testify against Jesse (who at that point was considering going to trial), detectives visitedJudd's house to ask him to come to the station, ostensibly to pick up his computer, which had been found at Arnold's home and contained pornographic disks. The Maltins refused. The police came again.

"They really started to badger me," said Maltin. "They really wanted to pick him up and go to the station. They wanted for Judd to say he saw something. I said, 'I would like you to go.' "

In the end, they did. Judd was not charged by the police.

Jesse, said Maltin, "was a kid in my house all the time. I guess you could be a nice, sweet kid and be a child abuser, but it really made no sense. He was a teenager. They just treated him so unfairly."

The issue, said Galasso, is not Jesse's plight, but that of the victims.

"I have heard from the parents since the film came out and they're in contact, of course, with their children. They're all grown up and many of them are out of state now. They're saying they feel re-victimized. . . . They still wish to remain anonymous."

Jesse Friedman said he expects "only good things to come from this film. The end goal is to have my conviction overturned and vacated. . . . As it stands I have no [legal] avenues for appeal. But I fully expect my accusers will come forward as adults and talk about how I never sexually molested them. I can challenge the conviction in newly discovered evidence if someone comes forward and changes their testimony. They'd have to come to court and testify to police misconduct and testify they were never abused in computer classes."

Jarecki said he's considering the release of a 51/2-hour, extended version, possibly on DVD release.

"I remain obsessed with this," he said.

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QUESTIONS FOR JESSE FRIEDMAN - The Home Horror Movie

Interview by CINDY PRICE

New York Times - June 29, 2003

At screenings of the movie, you've been answering questions from the audience. What has been the most interesting one?

So what is the movie about? Have you figured it out?

The movie is about all the people whose lives were affected by the arrest of my father and me.

And what is the worst question you've been asked?

The public thinks you were recording all the time.

Did you and your father ever discuss the case?

Did you ever write him trying to abate his guilt?

Your father died in prison. How has the documentary affected the rest of your family?

I still say everything is status quo. My brother David still has a lot of issues to work through. Mom says that she and my Uncle Howard reconnected after many years of not speaking to each other.

I take it you did not watch the film all together in one room.

We did not have a Friedman family reunion, no.

What would be the best thing to come out of this movie?

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Family's story is anything but happy

By Duane Dudek

Journal Sentinel - July 7, 2003

There were signs, in retrospect, that the Friedmans were not an ordinary family.

Filmmaker Andrew Jarecki's documentary, "Capturing the Friedmans" opens in Milwaukee on Friday.

For example, the compulsive habit of documenting every aspect of their lives on film or videotape suggested a level of narcissism and sense of self-importance above and beyond that of families who document special occasions.

And there was the standoffish oldest son David, who became a celebrated birthday clown in Manhattan but who was secretive about his personal life.

It was while making a documentary about the subculture of children's birthday entertainers that filmmaker Andrew Jarecki stumbled onto David Friedman, the clown prince of jesters-for-hire in Manhattan.

Through him, he learned the Friedmans' dark secret. And, ultimately, David gave him hours of home movies that revealed the deep dysfunction that ensnared the family like a group hug and became the centerpiece of Jarecki's documentary, "Capturing the Friedmans."

In the end, contradictory testimony about unseen events makes it impossible to fully determine just who did what to whom. But certain facts are inescapable: that the day before Thanksgiving in 1987, the father, Arnold, was arrested for possessing child pornography, and that he and his youngest son Jesse were later prosecuted and imprisoned for child sexual abuse.

Arnold died in prison; Jesse served 13 years and was recently released.

Jarecki's film, which opens in Milwaukee on Friday, captures the confusion and shame of a family in self-denial and the complex nature of truth when it is hidden in the shadows. It questions the prosecution as much as it suggests a malevolence whose name is unclear.

Jarecki believes these contradictions represent the story in a nutshell.

"You can't leave the film and think the police ran a tip-top investigation," Jarecki said in an interview conducted earlier this year. "And you can't say these guys were railroaded from day one. But you can say, from day one, that you started out with a flawed family."

On the trail of a clown

While researching his birthday-entertainer film, Jarecki kept running across people who referred him to David Friedman, who was considered the most successful clown of them all.

"We knew we had to talk to him," said Jarecki, "but, intuitively, we knew we shouldn't talk to him right off the bat because we heard he was pompous and unapproachable."

When David finally agreed to cooperate, Jarecki "noticed that all his stories sort of dead-ended. And I'd say, 'When was that?' and he'd say, 'A long time ago,' or he'd say, 'My dad was a great guy.'

"His stories all felt a little hollow, so I felt there was something that he wasn't telling us."

But when Jarecki lured David to an interview on the front steps of his childhood home in Great Neck, N.Y. on Long Island, "he became a little wobbly and emotional" and mentioned, in passing, his mother's suicide attempt.

And that was the start of the film Jarecki ended up making.

A computer search revealed the stories written at the time about the highly sensational case. And they told the story of a 56-year-old man and his then-18-year-old son who were charged with molesting young boys at a computer class they taught at their home.

"What fascinated me," Jarecki said, when conducting interviews with victims, investigators and prosecutors involved in the case - all of them "highly articulate" and "very smart" - was that "nobody could agree on anything."

The Friedmans talked to Jarecki, the director believes, because "this family needed to tell this story. Partly because the story was told at the time in such a simplified way. They wanted it told in a fulsome way.

"I also feel these issues are current for them. It's not a (16)-year-old story. It's a story that's happening to them every day."

Jesse, now 34, showed up for screenings of the film at the Sundance Film Festival wearing a court-ordered electronic monitoring device and was harassed by parole officials after his release, said Jarecki.

'A tragic flaw'

News stories and interviews with officials since the film's release charge that it is biased, and that Jarecki's use of the facts is misleading and selective.

But the filmmaker believes "Capturing the Friedmans" is accurate and leaves enough doubt for audiences to make up their own minds about guilt or innocence. For his part, Jarecki said, he "never saw anything in the course of the three years I worked on this film that I felt indicated that Jesse participated in anything inappropriate in those computer classes."

Arnold's guilt is less ambiguous. Jarecki describes him as having "a tragic flaw."

"This guy was pretty awful," said Jarecki. But he added: "If you put people in the category of monster, you learn nothing. You escape the responsibility of learning anything."

Over time, Jarecki came to see "a biological metaphor" in the Friedmans' story.

Their quiet suburban neighborhood was "this organism," Jarecki said, " . . . and somewhere in that organism there is this Friedman cell. Clearly, Arnold was a damaged cell, and he got together with (his wife) Elaine, and she was in some way a damaged cell. And after the first mitosis, it was obvious that this cell was replicating in a way that wouldn't be suitable for the bigger organism.

"And, not to overstate the metaphor, but I started to see the police and the judges as these white blood cells that were saying, 'This cell doesn't fit into our community. This cell needs to be eliminated. So whatever you believe the truth of the story to be, that family was going to be eliminated.

"It was," said Jarecki, "a biological imperative."

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Interesting, but Not Quite Accurate

By Paul Vitello

Newsday - July 27, 2003

The documentary film "Capturing the Friedmans" won the Best American documentary prize at the Sundance Film Festival this year, which might imply that it is a true story.

It is described by critics as a brilliant movie that raises questions, in particular, about a child sex abuse case in Great Neck and, by extension, about the reliability of child sex abuse prosecutions in general.

The questions in particular are these: Did police and a hysterical public railroad an award-winning science teacher named Arnold Friedman, then 56, and his 19-year-old son, Jesse, into pleading guilty to things they didn't do - namely, sexually molesting dozens of boys during private computer classes in the Friedmans' home in the 1980s?

Could dozens of boys, age 7 to 11, suffer sodomizing episodes in front of each other without any of them ever telling their parents?

Is America in the midst of a hysterical overreaction to the perceived threat from pederasts?

Though many witnesses are brought to suggest that the police overreached in prosecuting the Friedmans, there are no simple answers offered in this movie.

And it is probably not fair to describe it only in terms of these policy questions. It is a good film.

It is as much about the peculiar Friedman family - Arnold and his wife, Elaine, and their sons David, Seth and Jesse - as it is about any "issues" at all. In producing this work, the filmmaker, Andrew Jarecki, mines a motherlode of home movies and video made by the weirdly narcissistic Friedmans themselves before and after the arrest of the father and son. And what he produces is a fascinating document.

I liked it, honest. And I don't wish to take any artist to task for having insights that jar or even anger me. That is what artists do.

But take this as a friendly caution if you should decide to see this movie: "Capturing the Friedmans" is a "documentary" only in the sense that real people appear in it and talk without scripts.

There are too many omissions, however, for it to fairly answer any of the particular or general questions it purports to ask.

It leaves out, for instance, any mention of a co-defendant of Arnold and Jesse Friedman - an 18-year-old friend of Jesse's named Ross Goldstein, who pleaded guilty to participating in the sex abuse of the boys and received a sentence of 2 to 6 years in exchange for his cooperation.

In a recent interview with Newsday's Víctor Manuel Ramos, the filmmaker Jarecki said he did not mention Goldstein in the film because Goldstein asked not to be mentioned.

Excuse me?

How does one make a film raising questions about the guilt of two defendants in a criminal case - and just leave out mention of the existence of a third?

Goldstein, the third defendant, said he was there in the Friedmans' computer classes, said he saw the sex crimes against the children, was able to identify the victims from photographs shown to him by police and was willing to testify against the Friedmans in court. A documentarian can question such a person's credibility if he so chooses.

But the film leaves him out, and lets Jesse vent his frustration - over and over - at being emotionally strong-armed into accepting a guilty plea by the prosecutor, and by his mother, who was afraid he'd receive a harsher sentence if he went to trial and was convicted. The fact there was an adult witness ready to testify against Jesse is never mentioned or alluded to. This is bad documentary journalism, at best.

Also bad, if you followed this story in the local newspapers at the time, is the way the film deals with Jesse's allegation that he was molested as a child by his father. It comes up because Jesse's lawyer, Peter Panaro of Massapequa, mentions it as a mitigating circumstance.

Yet, in the film, Jesse repeatedly insists that the case against him and his father was made up from whole cloth - and that the claim of abuse by his father was just a lie he made up to win sympathy.

That seems believable in the film. 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. That was pretty believable, too; but Jarecki told Newsday he couldn't get a release to use that tape. Whatever.

"I don't long to be free," Jesse said in a 1989 prison interview with Newsday reporter Alvin Bessent. "I don't miss my old life." In his old life, Jesse told Bessent: "When he was 8 or 9 years old, he stumbled upon his father's cache of kiddie porn. Later, his father began to visit his bedroom at night and fondle him. The abuse escalated into sodomy.

"'In my family, everything got washed under the rug. I never told about the abuse. I didn't think anyone would understand. Trying to do something about the problems in my family never seemed to get me anywhere ... But I, too, am a victim,' Jesse said."

No mention is made in the film of the pre-sentencing psychiatric report in which Jesse told a psychiatrist that he was relieved when his father began molesting the children in his computer classes because it finally deflected his father's sexual attentions from him.

Maybe it was all a lie then, of course. And maybe Jesse Friedman lies in his statements in the film, "Capturing the Friedmans." Certainly, Arnold Friedman lies over and over by omission; he is a strange presence throughout the home videos shot by his sons, participating with jokes and poses but never once addressing the question on everyone's mind: Did you do it, Dad?

His most eloquent moment occurs during an all-out fight between Elaine, his wife, and the boys, who support him unwaveringly.

"Shhhhhhh," he says. "Shhhhhhh ... This is getting out of hand."

Filmmakers and artists put things in and leave things out all the time. Discrimination is the essence of art, but there are moments in this fine film where a reporter can't help but feel that the artist is playing a little too loose with the facts.

You wouldn't care that much except for the kids, the Friedmans' victims, who are implicitly victimized again.

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Revisiting the Friedmans Lays Doubts to Rest

By Alvin Bessent - member of Newsday's editorial board.

Newsday - September 2, 2003

I stalled for a long time before seeing "Capturing the Friedmans." The award-winning documentary promised an up-close and personal peek inside the family of Arnold and Jesse Friedman, a teacher and his son from Great Neck who pleaded guilty in 1989 to multiple counts of sexually abusing young boys. A peek is the last thing I wanted.

I covered the Friedman case for Newsday. As the paper's courthouse reporter, I followed the sordid tale from the first time the Friedmans appeared in court through their guilty pleas and then some. I talked with Jesse, his mother, victims and their parents, police, prosecutors, defense lawyers, psychologists and many other players. It was rough duty.

And it left me feeling troubled. Because of the guilty pleas, there was never any trial. No testimony or cross examinations. No dramatic courtroom confrontations between accused and accusers. With no systematic testing of the evidence, there was lingering uncertainty about the Friedmans' guilt.

Still, a raft of damning things are clear, some from my reporting, others from the film. Arnold Friedman was a pedophile. He traded kiddie porn with undercover postal inspectors. As a teen, he had sex with his younger brother. As an adult, he had sex with other young boys on Long Island. And if what Jesse said in court and to me in a prison visiting room in 1989 can be believed, Arnold abused him, too.

"I guess it mostly started with my father trying to love me," Jesse said back then. The Friedmans who are revealed in the amazing home videos that form the backbone of the film were clearly, as Jesse said in 1989, "an awfully peculiar family."

So what are the odds that Arnold Friedman had hundreds of boys of just the age he liked in his home for computer classes on Saturday afternoons for six years and never once indulged his predilections? Or that Ross Goldstein, who wasn't in the film, would plead guilty to sodomy and implicate his friend Jesse if nothing happened? Slim and none, I'd say.

It's not hard to surmise that something horrible happened in that house on Picadilly Road. But did it involve 140 children as police charged? Was the abuse as reckless and open and repetitive as they said? Or, did the children simply tell police what they wanted to hear? Did the Friedmans fall prey to a national paranoia?

There was a troubling frenzy at the time around accusations of mass child molestation. Criminal cases, each involving scores of children who told incredible stories of violent, repeated, semi-public abuse, were aggressively being prosecuted by righteous authorities around the country. But many of those cases came to nothing. The most spectacular of them was the McMartin preschool case in Manhattan Beach, Calif. The owner of the school and her son, who worked there, were accused of having orgies with children in churches, airplanes and secret passageways under the school.

At the time it was the longest, costliest criminal proceeding in U.S. history, eating up seven years of court time. Both defendants were exonerated, but not before their family business was ruined, their reputations trashed and the son had spent five years in jail, unable to make bail.

When pondering the Friedmans' fate over the years, the McMartins were never far from my mind. In both instances the defendants were charged with countless unthinkable acts, some of which strained credibility. The alleged abuse was reckless, occurring in front of groups of children. It was brutal and supposedly continued over long periods of time. The children kept it all secret. Caring parents had no clue.

Experts say that's not so unusual. But in the McMartin case, the stories of abuse the children told were so implausible that the prosecution was ultimately discredited. The children had been coached, led by well-meaning social workers to say what police and prosecutors wanted to hear.

I saw no evidence of coaching when I was reporting the Friedman case, but it was hard to shake that nagging doubt.

I can never know how much of what police charged actually happened. Officers often seem to file as many charges as conceivable, leaving it to the courts to sort out which ones stick. And charging hundreds of counts in an indictment is one way to pressure defendants to plead guilty to a few.

It took Arnold Friedman's performance in the home videos folded into the film to lay my lingering misgivings to rest.

He just didn't come across as a man wrongly accused of so heinous a thing as molesting children. He never railed about being wrongly prosecuted. He never indignantly proclaimed his innocence. Pressed on videotape by one of his sons to say he didn't do it, the best Arnold could muster was a muttered, barely comprehensible and thoroughly unconvincing agreement.

That's not the kind of evidence that's admissible in a court of law. But Arnold Friedman simply didn't act like an innocent man.

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"CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS" Documentary or Whitewash?

January 4, 2004

Have you seen Andrew Jarecki's award-winning film? Did it leave you with the impression that Jesse Friedman and maybe his father, Arnold, were victims of a witch hunt conducted by an inept and overzealous investigation team? That conclusion is no accident. Jarecki omitted incriminating evidence that might have made you think differently about Jesse and Arnold. Consider this information, and decide for yourself if this well-reviewed "documentary" can be trusted.

What Arnold and Jesse admitted under oath: The film shows--but minimizes the fact- - that Arnold and Jesse admitted to molesting 13 boys, ages 7-11. Arnold pled to 8 counts of sodomy, 28 counts of first-degree sexual abuse, and also admitted to ramming a child's head into a wall in front of other children. Jesse pled to 17 counts of sodomy, 4 counts of first degree sexual abuse.
Arnold had an established history as a child molester: The film acknowledges that Arnold was an admitted pedophile. He admitted to abusing his own brother when the brother was 8. Although initially admitting to abusing only one boy, Arnold admitted in a therapy session with Elaine to abusing (though not sodomizing) two boys, one of whom was the child of his good friend. He went to therapy out of fear that he would molest his own children.
Was no evidence found in the house beyond one stack of porn? (1) Although Jarecki shows the house looking porn free and a voice-over says porn was only found in the office, the prosecutor says in the movie that child pornography was found all over the house. (2) In 1986, Arnold Friedman mail-ordered "Boy Love," a magazine featuring graphic pictures of men having sex with children, which led to a sting operation. Jarecki doesn't say that other child- porn magazines were found on classroom shelves; the boys said Arnold used them to initiate discussions of sex. (3) Jarecki fails to mention that parents were not allowed into the classroom or that nine obscene computer games were found in Friedman"s classroom such as "Dirty Movie" ("animation of woman who undresses, spreads her legs and then masturbates/ urinates"), and "Seasons Greeting" ("animation of Mickey Mouse, dressed in a Santa suit, appears with erection and ejaculates"). 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. Boys were allowed to take these computer disks to their homes, where a few were found by police. (4) Numerous children, ages 7-12, disclosed similar details about sexual "games" such as leap-frog and Simon says. (5) Jarecki didn't mention that child-sized dildos were found in a cabinet just outside the classroom.
What about the witness who was left out of the film? Jesse's friend, Ross Goldstein, witnessed and admitted to participating in the crimes, could identify the victims, and would have testified in court. He pled guilty to 3 counts of first-degree sodomy. Both he and Jesse pled to one count of using a child in a sexual performance (pornography).
Why didn't the boys tell anyone? Children "tell" about abuse indirectly. In 1989 some wet their beds, took baseball bats to bed, could not sleep. The children reported Arnold threatened to burn down their houses, kill parents, if they told.
Why was there no physical evidence? Jarecki fails to mention that the Friedmans pled guilty so none was sought. Physical evidence is typically rare in such cases. Many assume that child sexual abuse must leave gaping tears and telltale scars, but due to the nature of children's bodies, even when there are physical signs, most disappear in a few days.
Can Jesse's retraction of his father's abuse of him be believed? Jesse said in a 1989 interview that he was "halfway between loving and hating" his father. He said Arnold fondled and later sodomized him. Jesse started seeing a psychiatrist at the age of 10; he was diagnosed manic depressive. He started using drugs at 16 and was soon stoned on a daily basis; his weight ballooned; he had no friends. Court psychiatric testimony described Jesse's joy when his father turned from Jesse to children in the class. When interviewed on the Geraldo Rivera Show, Jesse sobbed while describing sexual abuse by his father and confessed to abusing three children. He said, "I fondled [the children]...I was forced to, to pose in hundreds of photos for my father in all sorts of sexual positions with the kids..." He now claims that his story and his tears were "fictionalized to win leniency". However, he had already been sentenced. So which is the truth -- his admission or his recent retraction?
What else do we know about the Friedmans? They often appear confused. Sometimes they remember that "it" happened, sometimes not. Arnold's brother and David hit their heads, saying maybe someday they'll remember something, but they don't, now. Jesse describes them as sweeping things under the rug. When Elaine saw one of Arnold's child porn magazines she didn't register what it was until she looked again. The film shows her being mistreated by her sons for questioning Arnold's innocence. Victoria News describes "one astonishing sequence [of the film], on the morning of one of the sons' sentencing, the boys decide to shoot footage while harassing the parents of some of the alleged victims."
What else do we know about Arnold? As a child, Arnold witnessed his mother having sex with various men. Elaine, in a 1989 article, said that her normally emotionless husband was almost in tears when police took his child porn photos. Arnold's motion from prison to have them returned (as well as the names and numbers of numerous victims) was denied. In the film, Jesse's attorney describes Arnold in a prison visit asking to move to another table because he is excited by a 4 or 5 year old boy bouncing on his father's lap nearby.

Bessent, A.E. (1989, May 28). The secret life of Arnold Friedman. Newsday. LI., NY http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-friedman052889,0,1128093.story?coll=ny-li-span-headlines Posted also among many other useful articles at http://www.theawarenesscenter.org/arnoldandjessefriedman.html

Vitello, P., Commentary: Interesting, not accurate. (2003, July 27) Newsday, LI . NY http://www.newsday.com/news/printedition/ny-livit273389114jul27,0,4000086.column?coll=ny-news-print

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Annotated Bibliography on "Capturing the Friedmans"

From the Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence:

"Capturing the Friedmans" is Andrew Jarecki's powerful and artistically executed film detailing a family's disintegration after two members are charged with sex crimes against children. Jarecki's documentary creatively interweaves recent interviews with home movies shot by the older Friedman brother as the events were unfolding. The effect is a complex story where truth appears ever elusive.

Many viewers leave the theatre believing that they have seen an objective documentary presented by a director who entrusted audiences to draw their own conclusions on Arnold Friedman's and Jesse Friedman's guilt. A careful review of the original evidence, however, shows that the case against the Friedmans was much stronger than the film suggests. The following annotated bibliography provides important background about the Friedman case along with educational information about sex abuse. It also documents political usage of the film to help free convicted sex offenders who are currently incarcerated.

The Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence is committed to supporting justice, protecting children, and promoting responsible research and information on child abuse. We believe that society benefits when the public has access to accurate information regarding child abuse and other forms of interpersonal violence. In that spirit, we are sharing this important bibliography with the public, and hope that audiences will withhold judgment regarding the Friedman case until they have had access to more complete information.

[Click here to view the complete annotated Bibliography on "Capturing the Friedmans"]

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Summary of Jesse Friedman Legal Filing

Movie City News - January 7, 2004

This week, Jesse Friedman is filing a 440 motion in an effort to get his conviction overturned. Using evidence uncovered during the making of film, he is trying to clear his name.

Explanation of Jesse's filing:

Jesse Friedman, the subject of the film Capturing the Friedmans, is filing a motion in Nassau County Court to overturn his 1988 conviction on charges that he and his father sexually abused children in computer classes they ran in their home in the late 1980's. Jesse has said "I served 13 years in jail for crimes that never occurred. The exhaustive investigation done by the filmmakers in the course of making the film uncovered a tremendous amount of exonerating material. The prosecution had an obligation to share this information with me at the time they became aware of it, but they kept it secret from me and my lawyer. Had I known of this information before, I would have been able to use it at trial and prove my innocence. It is my hope that by presenting this information now, I will be able to overturn my conviction and clear my name.

The filing is being made at the Nassau County Courthouse, the same Courthouse where 15 years ago, Jesse was sentenced to 6-18 years after having been charged with hundreds of counts of child sex abuse in a case similar to the late 80's mass sex abuse cases that have now largely been overturned.

The material that was not disclosed by the prosecutors, is known as ¯Brady materialÆ named for the case ¯Brady v. Maryland" in which it was established.that a prosecutor has an obligation to disclose to a defendant any information that could be potentially exculpatory.

In a 1000-page filing, Friedman's brief argues that had this information been disclosed to him at the time, he would have had a substantially better chance of prevailing at trial, and therefore would not have pled guilty to crimes he did not commit.

The following is a partial summary of facts that came to light during the making of the film:

The vast majority of the computer students interviewed by the police had no recollection of any abuse despite being visited by the police many times. The police had notes of these interviews, and never provided them to the Friedmans as required under Brady v. Maryland.
- Students who eventually provided testimony that they had been abused, had no recollection of such abuse until they had been subjected to up to five kinds of manipulative and suggestive questioning by the police -- questioning methods now proven to cause false memories in children. For example:
- One of the computer students who became a key witness in the case, admitted that he did not remember any of the abuse he alleged, until after he was hypnotized, a technique proven to lead to false memories.
- 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 ¯deputizeÆ cooperative children.
- One detective admits to visiting a student 15 separate times in order to finally procure incriminating testimony despite the child©Æs consistent statement that he had not been abused.
- A number of computer students admit to having provided false testimony in order to ¯end the questioningÆ and that they actually did not experience the abuse to which they had testified to.
- One team of detectives, in a tape recorded interview, told one of the computer students who was adamantly insisting that he had not been abused, that he might become a homosexual if he did not admit to the abuse.

Under New York law, where Brady material is withheld from the defense, reversal of a conviction is required if there is a ¯reasonable possibilityÆ that the prosecution's failure to disclose exculpatory information contributed to the defendant's conviction.

Friedman is being represented by attorney Mark Gimpel, and on a pro-bono basis by Earl Nemser of Swidler Berlin in New York City.

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Subject of documentary Capturing the Friedmans seeks new trial

Associated Press - January 7, 2004

GARDEN CITY, N.Y. (AP) - Jesse Friedman, whose imprisonment for child molestation was the subject of Capturing the Friedmans, wants a new trial based on information revealed in the award-winning documentary.

Manhattan lawyer Earl Nemser said Wednesday he's filing papers in Nassau County Court seeking a new trial for the 34-year-old Friedman, the youngest member of the Great Neck, N.Y., family featured in the film.

Friedman and his father were imprisoned in the late 1980s for sexually abusing dozens of children. Nemser says the film shows prosecutors withheld "important facts" that could have exonerated the younger man.

The film, which won the documentary grand prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and was named best non-fiction film by the New York Film Critics Circle, has appeared on several critics' top 10 lists and has been mentioned as a possible Oscar nominee.

Friedman was 19 when he pleaded guilty to child sex abuse in 1988 after being charged with hundreds of counts alleging he and his father, Arnold, molested children during computer classes in their suburban home.

Jesse Friedman was sentenced to six to 18 years and was paroled after 13 years in prison; he's now a registered sex offender living in Manhattan. His father, an admitted pedophile who also was convicted of sending child pornography through the mail, died in prison in 1995.

"Had Jesse known at the time about the doubts which the prosecutor knew about, it could have been used in his defence," Nemser said. "He would not have pled guilty and he . . . would have had a very, very good chance of being acquitted."

A spokesman for Nassau County District Attorney Denis Dillon declined to comment, saying prosecutors had not yet seen the court papers.

Nemser claimed the "vast majority" of the computer students police questioned had no recollection of abuse despite being interviewed many times. Notes from those interviews weren't provided to the defence, he said.

Nemser said another alleged victim was hypnotized before making incriminating statements against the Friedmans, a technique he claims has dubious results.

He added that several people said they gave false testimony to investigators to "end the questioning."

The abuse claims came "only after repeated pressure and questioning and suggestive conduct," he said. "The victims seemed to have been arm-twisted into buying into the prosecutors' theory that this was some kind of pedophile circus going on."

Nemser conceded that Friedman "was not telling the truth" when he entered his guilty plea, admitting he abused children.

"Jesse was put into a corner and had to plead guilty," Nemser said. "The pressure mounted until he had no clear choice: either plead guilty and get a limited sentence or face the prospect of a conviction at trial and an even longer prison term."

The lawyer added that Friedman is the beneficiary of "an enormous windfall" of evidence because of the research done by director Andrew Jarecki.

"I've been waiting 16 years now to prove my innocence," said Friedman, who's been taking courses at Hunter College since his release from prison. "Andrew was able to uncover a tremendous amount of information ... to prove what I always suspected was the case. I never doubted me."

Jarecki said he's "very supportive" of Friedman's quest for a new trial. He said people "come away from the film thinking that Jesse was railroaded."

"I still haven't found anyone who gave credible evidence of Jesse's guilt," he said. "That's a hard thing for me to overlook. Based on the quality of the police work, I think the case should have been thrown out."

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'Friedman' Seeking New Trial

Associated Press - Jan 7, 2004

http://entertainment.msn.com/news/article.aspx?news=145568

NEW YORK (AP) -- Jesse Friedman, whose imprisonment for child molestation was captured in "Capturing the Friedmans," wants a new trial based on information revealed in the award-winning documentary.

Manhattan attorney Earl Nemser said Wednesday he's filing papers in Nassau County Court seeking a new trial for the 34-year-old Friedman, the youngest member of the Great Neck, N.Y., family featured in the film.

The film, which won the documentary grand prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and was named best nonfiction film by the New York Film Critics Circle, has appeared on several critics' top 10 lists and has been mentioned as a possible Oscar nominee.

Jesse Friedman was sentenced to 6 to 18 years and was paroled after 13 years in prison; he's now a registered sex offender living in Manhattan. His father, an admitted pedophile who also was convicted of sending child pornography through the mail, died in prison in 1995.

"Had Jesse known at the time about the doubts which the prosecutor knew about, it could have been used in his defense," Nemser said. "He would not have pled guilty and he ... would have had a very, very good chance of being acquitted."

A spokesman for Nassau County District Attorney Denis Dillon declined to comment, saying prosecutors had not yet seen the court papers.

Nemser said another alleged victim was hypnotized before making incriminating statements against the Friedmans, a technique he claims has dubious results.

He added that several people said they gave false testimony to investigators to "end the questioning."

The abuse claims came "only after repeated pressure and questioning and suggestive conduct," he said. "The victims seemed to have been arm twisted into buying into the prosecutors' theory that this was some kind of pedophile circus going on."

Nemser conceded that Friedman "was not telling the truth" when he entered his guilty plea, admitting he abused children.

"Jesse was put into a corner and had to plead guilty," Nemser said. "The pressure mounted until he had no clear choice: Either plead guilty and get a limited sentence or face the prospect of a conviction at trial and an even longer prison term."

The attorney added that Friedman is the beneficiary of "an enormous windfall" of evidence because of the research director Andrew Jarecki did.

Jarecki said he's "very supportive" of Friedman's quest for a new trial. He said people "come away from the film thinking that Jesse was railroaded."

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Friedman To Seek New Trial

By Jennifer Smith, STAFF WRITER

Newsday - January 8, 2004

Lawyers for Jesse Friedman, the former Great Neck resident who served 13 years after pleading guilty to multiple counts of child sexual abuse, intend to file a motion today to overturn his 1988 conviction, saying new evidence uncovered in the documentary film "Capturing the Friedmans" had been previously withheld by prosecutors.

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. They were students at a computer school run out of the home of Friedman and his father, Arnold, who was also convicted on the charges. Arnold died in prison.

Friedman, who now says he is innocent, was 19 when he pleaded guilty. He said he believed at the time there was no way he could win the case.

"I was faced with a horrible no-win situation," said Friedman, in an interview yesterday with WB11 News. "I didn't have any defense witnesses. My father had already pled guilty, and I had no way to prove it didn't happen. It was going to come down to my word against the cop's word."

A spokesman for the Nassau County district attorney's office said yesterday he had no comment, as the motion had not yet been filed.

Nemser said the motion, to be filed in State Supreme Court at the Nassau County Courthouse in Garden City, will suggest these tactics were part of a "pattern of conduct" here and in other states in the 1980s aimed aiming at convicting accused child molesters, Nemser said. "We want to unlock information that the DA was obligated to give us at the time," he said.

Nemser said filmmaker Andrew Jarecki gathered evidence that Jesse Friedman could not, because he didn't have the resources after his arrest.

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`Capturing the Friedmans' son wants new trial - The convicted sex offender believes film uncovered new facts

By Frank Eltman

The Associated Press - January 8, 2004

Jesse Friedman, left, works with attorney Mark Gimpel, right,
while preparing to file a motion to overturn a 1988 conviction on
charges that Friedman and his father sexually abused children.

GARDEN CITY, N.Y. - Jesse Friedman, whose imprisonment for child molestation was captured in "Capturing the Friedmans," wants a new trial based on information revealed in the award-winning documentary.

Portrayed as part of a 'pedophile circus'

A spokesman for Nassau County District Attorney Denis Dillon declined to comment, saying prosecutors had not yet seen the court papers.

Nemser said another alleged victim was hypnotized before making incriminating statements against the Friedmans, a technique he claims has dubious results.

He added that several people said they gave false testimony to investigators to "end the questioning."

Friedman felt he had no choice

Nemser conceded that Friedman "was not telling the truth" when he entered his guilty plea, admitting he abused children.

The attorney added that Friedman is the beneficiary of "an enormous windfall" of evidence because of the research director Andrew Jarecki did.

Jarecki said he's "very supportive" of Friedman's quest for a new trial. He said people "come away from the film thinking that Jesse was railroaded."

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Capturing Friedmans subject seeks retrial

UK Guardian - Thursday January 8, 2004

One of the subjects of Capturing the Friedmans, the award-winning documentary about a father and son accused of child abuse, is pushing for a new trial based on information revealed in the film.

Jesse Friedman was jailed in 1988 at the age of 19 after he and his father Arnold were convicted of sexually abusing dozens of children during computer classes at their New York suburban home.

Mr Friedman's legal team have filed papers at Nassau county court seeking a new trial following evidence discovered in Capturing the Friedmans, which won the documentary grand prize at the 2003 Sundance festival and was named best non-fiction film by the New York Film Critics Circle.

His lawyer Earl Nemser said yesterday that the prosecution in the case failed in its duty to reveal material which cast doubt on the allegations against Jesse Friedman. The material includes police interviews in which alleged victims are pressurised to report abuse they initially said had not occurred.

"It could have been used in his defence," Nemser said. "He would not have pleaded guilty and he... would have had a very, very good chance of being acquitted."

Jesse Friedman spent 13 years in prison before being released on parole in 1991. He is now a registered sex offender. Self-confessed paedophile Arnold Friedman died in prison in 1995.

Andrew Jarecki, whose film about the pair has been mentioned as a possible Oscar nominee, said he supported Mr Friedman in his efforts to prove his innocence. He said: "I still haven't found anyone who gave credible evidence of Jesse's guilt. Based on the quality of the police work, I think the case should have been thrown out."

Capturing the Friedmans is due to open here (United Kingdom) in April.

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Convicted Molester Wants To Clear Name - Cites evidence seen in film

By Chau Lam, Robin Topping contributed to this story.

Newsday - January 9, 2004

Seeking to clear his name, a former Great Neck man filed court papers yesterday to vacate his 1988 sex abuse convictions because he claims some of the boys who said they were molested did so after they were hypnotized and others did so after they were repeatedly questioned by police.

Jesse Friedman of Harlem cited evidence unearthed by the maker of the award-winning documentary film "Capturing the Friedmans," which raised questions about the quality of evidence against Friedman and his father, Arnold.

The new evidence shows that detectives used "a compendium of suggestive and manipulative interview techniques proven to encourage false accusations from children," according to the court papers, filed in Nassau County Court in Mineola.

A spokesman for the Nassau County Police Department, Det. Lt. Kevin Smith, declined to comment yesterday, citing the litigation. A spokesman for the Nassau County district attorney's office could not be reached yesterday evening.

Jesse Friedman and his father, a retired schoolteacher, separately pleaded guilty in 1988 to scores of sexual abuse charges, admitting that they molested 13 boys who were students in a computer class that Arnold Friedman ran from his home on Piccadilly Road in Great Neck. Arnold Friedman died in prison, apparently a suicide. Jesse Friedman served 13 years before he was released on parole in 2001.

In a previous interview, Jesse Friedman said he lied in 1988 when he confessed to molesting the boys. He said he pleaded guilty because he feared that if he convicted at trial, he would have spent life in prison.

However, the judge who heard the Friedman case, the detectives who worked on it and Jesse Friedman's attorney at the time said filmmaker Andrew Jarecki's examination was incomplete and biased.

Critics pointed out that Jarecki downplayed the fact that Jesse Friedman and his father pleaded guilty. Jesse Friedman even detailed the abuse during a 1989 interview broadcast on national television.

The court papers laid out some of the interviewing methods that Jesse Friedman's attorney, Earl H. Nemser of Manhattan, claims were coercive.

In one instance, Det. Wallene Jones, who was talking to a member of the team making the documentary in 2001, recalled that she and her partner, William Hatch, visited one student on 15 separate occasions before the child finally said he was sexually abused, according to the motion papers.

However, Jones said the abuse caused the boy tremendous trauma and it took that many interviews for her and Hatch to get him to open up.

Jones and Hatch, who have since retired, could not be reached yesterday for comment.

Staff writer Robin Topping contributed to this story.

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'Capturing' Star Wants to Overturn Conviction

By Roger Friedman

Fox News - Friday, January 09, 2004

Jesse Friedman (no relation to this writer), the central character in Andrew Jarecki's documentary, "Capturing the Friedmans," is taking action. He's filed a motion to overturn his 1988 conviction on charges that he and his father sexually abused children. Jesse served thirteen years for his crimes; his father died in prison.

"The exhaustive investigation done by the filmmakers in the course of making the film uncovered a tremendous amount of exonerating material. The prosecution had an obligation to share this information with me at the timethey became aware of it, but they kept it secret from me and my lawyer. Had I known of this information before, I would have been able to use it at trial and prove my innocence. It is my hope that by presenting this information now, I will be able to overturn my conviction and clear my name."

In his 1000-page filing, Friedman alleges that the majority of the computer students interviewed by the police had no recollection of any abuse despite being visited by the police many times.

He also claims that the students who did provide testimony that they had been abused "had no recollection of such abuse until they had been subjected to up to five kinds of manipulative and suggestive questioning by the police

— questioning methods now proven to cause false memories in children. For example:
— One of the computer students who became a key witness in the case, admitted that he did not remember any of the abuse he alleged, until after he was hypnotized, a technique proven to lead to false memories.

— 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.

— One detective admits to visiting a student 15 separate times in order to finally procure incriminating testimony despite the child's consistent statement that he had not been abused.

— A number of computer students admit to having provided false testimony in order to end the questioning and that they actually did not experience the abuse to which they had testified to.

— One team of detectives, in a tape-recorded interview, told one of the computer students who was adamantly insisting that he had not been abused, that he might become a homosexual if he did not admit to the abuse."

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Capturing The Friedmans - A Factual Response To An Angry Attack

Movie City News - January 9, 2004

Dear Editor,

I am one of the lawyers working on a pro-bono basis (without compensation) on the Jesse Friedman case, and I am responding to the posting on your site regarding the case and the movie Capturing the Friedmans.

This unsigned posting is rife with inaccuracies. At this very sensitive time, when Jesse's motion is in front of a judge in Nassau County Court, having patently inaccurate information appear on the internet can only harm his chances of succeeding in the already difficult task of overturning his conviction. 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. In addition, I will respond to each of the inaccuracies below.

Earl Nemser, Esq.

Swidler Berlin Shereff Friedman

New York City

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(Unsigned posting in italics - Earl Nember response in bold)

"CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS"

Documentary or Whitewash?

[This comment implies that the filmmakers shaded the film to support the Friedman version of the events. In fact, more than half of the 21 people interviewed in the film were members of the police department, the prosecution, and prosecution witnesses. Because of this objectivity, viewers are permitted to draw their own conclusions from information gleaned during the filmmakers' three-year investigation of the case, just as a jury would have, if there had been a trial. The Friedmans had no prior relationship with the filmmakers and were not permitted to see the film until it was complete.]

1. What Arnold and Jesse admitted under oath: The film shows--but minimizes the fact- - that Arnold and Jesse admitted to molesting 13 boys, ages 7-11. Arnold pled to 8 counts of sodomy, 28 counts of first-degree sexual abuse, and also admitted to ramming a child's head into a wall in front of other children. Jesse pled to 17 counts of sodomy, 4 counts of first degree sexual abuse.

[Rather than minimizing the guilty pleas, the film shows them using archival television footage of both pleas. It also shows the evidence the prosecutor withheld from the Friedmans, which included the improper methods - such as hypnosis -- used by the police to elicit the testimony of the alleged victims who initially said nothing had happened to them. Without this information, in an atmosphere of hysteria associated with the now-debunked "sex-ring" cases of the late 80's, and with Judge Boklan's decision to allow cameras in the courtroom for the first time in Nassau County history, the Friedmans had little chance of succeeding at trial. Jesse Friedman has said in his motion that threatened with a life sentence, he pled guilty to crimes he did not commit, in return for a 6-18 year sentence.]

2. Arnold had an established history as a child molester: The film acknowledges that Arnold was an admitted pedophile. He admitted to abusing his own brother when the brother was 8. Although initially admitting to abusing only one boy, Arnold admitted in a therapy session with Elaine to abusing (though not sodomizing) two boys, one of whom was the child of his good friend. He went to therapy out of fear that he would molest his own children.

[Arnold Friedman was a user of pornography and confessed to contact with two boys. Jesse has no such history. This is extensively covered in the film.]

3. Was no evidence found in the house beyond one stack of porn? (1) Although Jarecki shows the house looking porn free and a voice-over says porn was only found in the office, the prosecutor says in the movie that child pornography was found all over the house.

[This is false. The prosecutor in the film actually states "There was a dearth of physical evidence" and "We didn't find any of that." In fact, the complete Search Warrant Inventory, the official record created on November 3, 1987 by the postal inspector and shown in the film, shows that the only pornography that was found in the house was a small pile of old magazines behind a piano in Arnold Friedman's private office. A later search by police, documented on November 20, showed no additional material.]

(2) In 1986, Arnold Friedman mail-ordered "Boy Love," a magazine featuring graphic pictures of men having sex with children, which led to a sting operation. Jarecki doesn't say that other child- porn magazines were found on classroom shelves; the boys said Arnold used them to initiate discussions of sex.

[This false statement about pornography found on classroom shelves is directly contradicted by the November 3 and November 20 police Search Warrant Inventories, the authoritative documents on what was found in the house and where. The author of the Newsday article in which this statement appeared received this information from the police but did not fact-check it against the Inventory documents. The willingness of the police to make false statement to the press in this case is documented in Jesse Friedman's legal motion.]

(3) a) Jarecki fails to mention that parents were not allowed into the classroom.

[This is false. In Jesse Friedman's legal motion, a parent of one computer student (Margalith Georgalis) signed a sworn affidavit stating that she regularly entered the Friedman house before, during, and after classes, and never saw anything improper. Other parents confirm this in interviews.]

b) or that nine obscene computer games were found in Friedman"s classroom such as "Dirty Movie" ("animation of woman who undresses, spreads her legs and then masturbates/ urinates"), and "Seasons Greeting" ("animation of Mickey Mouse, dressed in a Santa suit, appears with erection and ejaculates"). 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. Boys were allowed to take these computer disks to their homes, where a few were found by police.

[The film did not fail to mention these games, and in fact shows the games onscreen. Witness Judd Maltin states in his sworn affidavit that these games were commonly available and that the ones found by the police came from Judd's own collection of computer discs which he had given to the Friedmans.

By that time I had lost interest in personal computers, and I decided to give to Arnold Friedman my entire collection of software. The games that were discovered by the police were in common circulation among the community of Great Neck youth who used personal computers and with whom I had traded software. I never heard Arnold or Jesse Friedman make mention of any of this software, and I think it is highly likely that he never used any of the software that I gave him.

-Affidavit of Judd Maltin, 440 motion, January 8, 2004

In addition, a former computer student states in his affidavit that he never used pornographic computer games in the Friedman home.]

(4) Numerous children, ages 7-12, disclosed similar details about sexual "games" such as leap-frog and Simon says.

[No child's testimony in the case ever stated that they participated in sexual games. The charges related to these games were only that others had "witnessed" these games being played. The children who were allegedly forced to play these games have never been identified and never pressed charges. ]

(5) Jarecki didn't mention that child-sized dildos were found in a cabinet just outside the classroom.

[This sensational phrase comes from a Newsday report, not from the Search Warrant Inventory. There is no product manufactured by this name. One adult sexual aid was found in the home, and not near the computer class.]

4. What about the witness who was left out of the film? Jesse's friend, Ross Goldstein, witnessed and admitted to participating in the crimes, could identify the victims, and would have testified in court. He pled guilty to 3 counts of first-degree sodomy. Both he and Jesse pled to one count of using a child in a sexual performance (pornography).

[Goldstein was actually one of a series of neighborhood boys brought into the case by the police, who had theorized that there was a "sex ring" operating out of the Friedman house with more than five adults simultaneously raping ten children. After vehemently defending himself, and being threatened with a 50 year jail term if found guilty, Goldstein ultimately accepted a deal to testify against Jesse in return for a 6 month term in county jail and no criminal record. Once Ross testified, no charges were ever brought against any of the other boys who had been alleged to be involved. We understand that this story is included in the DVD version of Capturing the Friedmans.]

5. Why didn't the boys tell anyone? Children "tell" about abuse indirectly. In 1989 some wet their beds, took baseball bats to bed, could not sleep. The children reported Arnold threatened to burn down their houses, kill parents, if they told.

[This homespun theory is disproven by numerous scientific studies. In one well-known study (E. Gray, UNEQUAL JUSTICE: THE PROSECUTION OF CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE (MacMillan 1993) it was shown that two-thirds of child victims of sexual abuse who were threatened not to disclose the improper conduct revealed it anyway.]

6. Why was there no physical evidence? Jarecki fails to mention that the Friedmans pled guilty so none was sought. Physical evidence is typically rare in such cases. Many assume that child sexual abuse must leave gaping tears and telltale scars, but due to the nature of children's bodies, even when there are physical signs, most disappear in a few days.

[The idea that evidence was not sought by the police is false. As stated by the prosecutors and police in the film (Assistant D.A. Onorato, Det. Galasso) they searched unsuccessfully for evidence for months while Jesse Friedman prepared for trial. They also did not find any of the hundreds of photographs and videotapes they alleged the Friedmans had made. As for medical evidence, the police alleged the Friedmans had "slammed" children's heads into walls and committed other non-sexual violent acts that would have produced physical trauma even if sexual abuse did not.]

7. Can Jesse's retraction of his father's abuse of him be believed? Jesse said in a 1989 interview that he was "halfway between loving and hating" his father. He said Arnold fondled and later sodomized him. Jesse started seeing a psychiatrist at the age of 10; he was diagnosed manic depressive. He started using drugs at 16 and was soon stoned on a daily basis; his weight ballooned; he had no friends. Court psychiatric testimony described Jesse's joy when his father turned from Jesse to children in the class. When interviewed on the Geraldo Rivera Show, Jesse sobbed while describing sexual abuse by his father and confessed to abusing three children. He said, "I fondled [the children]...I was forced to, to pose in hundreds of photos for my father in all sorts of sexual positions with the kids..." He now claims that his story and his tears were "fictionalized to win leniency". However, he had already been sentenced. So which is the truth -- his admission or his recent retraction?

[When Jesse Friedman pled guilty, he asked for leniency on the basis that he was a victim of his father. He has stated that this was because he wanted the parole board to read his statement in the future when considering the possibility of releasing him before he served his full 18 year sentence. He made similar statements to the press in an effort to win leniency from the future parole board. This is why the story was still relevant even after his sentencing. He was also hopeful, having already been attacked while in jail, that this story might reduce the chances of his being killed in prison.]

8. What else do we know about the Friedmans? They often appear confused. Sometimes they remember that "it" happened, sometimes not. Arnold's brother and David hit their heads, saying maybe someday they'll remember something, but they don't, now. Jesse describes them as sweeping things under the rug. When Elaine saw one of Arnold's child porn magazines she didn't register what it was until she looked again. The film shows her being mistreated by her sons for questioning Arnold's innocence. Victoria News describes "one astonishing sequence [of the film], on the morning of one of the sons' sentencing, the boys decide to shoot footage while harassing the parents of some of the alleged victims."

[The contention that the Friedmans are confused or sometimes remember the abuse happening is false. There are no such quotes in any interview in the film.]

9. What else do we know about Arnold? As a child, Arnold witnessed his mother having sex with various men. Elaine, in a 1989 article, said that her normally emotionless husband was almost in tears when police took his child porn photos. Arnold's motion from prison to have them returned (as well as the names and numbers of numerous victims) was denied. In the film, Jesse's attorney describes Arnold in a prison visit asking to move to another table because he is excited by a 4 or 5 year old boy bouncing on his father's lap nearby.

[The claim that Arnold made a motion from prison to have pornography or other materials returned to him is false. Many of the family's other possessions had been seized by the police and the family (not Arnold) made a request to return those normal household items.

With respect to the attorney's story about Arnold Friedman asking to move to another table, the more likely explanation is the one from Arnold Friedman, who said that it was accepted practice in prison for convicted child molesters not to sit near children in the waiting room to avoid recriminations from the children's incarcerated relatives.]

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LA Critics Choose "Splendor," "Friedmans" Follow-Up, Texas Picks, and More
"American Splendor" topped the L.A. Film Critics' awards for 2003

by Wendy Mitchell

IndieWire - January 9, 2004

INDUSTRY MOVES: Susan Wrubel has joined Paramount Classics as VP of acquisitions and co-productions in Los Angeles. She recently left Global Film Initiative in New York.

"SPLENDOR" SPLENDID IN LA: The L.A. Film Critics Association has selected "American Splendor" as its top film of 2003, while directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini were also honored for their screenplay. The group named Peter Jackson as the best director of the year for "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King." Bill Murray was named best actor for "Lost in Translation" and Naomi Watts was selected as best actress for "21 Grams." The award for best doc went to "Fog of War" while the prize for foreign-language film went to "Man on the Train."

RETURNING TO THE SCREENING ROOM: Last night, the Tribeca Film Institute christened its new Tribeca Cinemas screening venue -- formerly the Screening Room -- with a preview screening of Russian film "The Return." The festival hit is Russia's submission for the foreign-language Oscar, and it also has a Golden Globe nomination for best foreign film. Kino International and Tribeca hosted director Andrey Zvyagintsev for a Q&A after the screening. The film opens in select theaters January 23.

FRIEDMAN FILING: The makers of "Capturing the Friedmans" have announced that Jesse Friedman has filed a 440 motion in the hopes of overturning his 1998 conviction on charges that he and his father had sexually abused children during computer classes at the Friedman house. Jesse Friedman filed a 1000-page brief in Nassau County Court, charging that a number of the facts that came to light during the making of Andrew Jarecki's documentary weren't disclosed at the time of the trial. "The exhaustive investigation done by the filmmakers in the course of making the film uncovered a tremendous amount of exonerating material," Friedman said in a statement. "The prosecution had an obligation to share this information with me at the time they became aware of it, but they kept it secret from me and my lawyer. Had I known of this information before, I would have been able to use it at trial and prove my innocence. It is my hope that by presenting this information now, I will be able to overturn my conviction and clear my name."

NEW ANGELIKA: The Angelika Film Center in Dallas announced that it will open a Plano location in "late spring 2004." The art-house theater will be located at the Shops at Legacy, on the corner of the North Dallas Tollway and Legacy.

TEXAS CRITICS: In other Texas news, the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association revealed its annual winners, announced at a ceremony at the Angelika. They named "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" as the best film of 2003. Rounding out the top 10 were "Cold Mountain," "Mystic River," "Lost in Translation," "Finding Nemo," "American Splendor," "In America," "Big Fish," "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World," and "The Last Samurai." Sean Penn took best actor for "Mystic River," and best actress went to Charlize Theron for "Monster." Other winners included Alec Baldwin (best supporting actor), Renee Zellweger (best supporting actress), Peter Jackson (best director), "City of God" (best foreign-language), "Capturing the Friedmans" (best doc), "Finding Nemo" (best animated), and "American Splendor" (Russell Smith award for cutting-edge indie film).

CINEMATOGRAPHY AWARDS: The American Society of Cinematographers will present its Conrad L. Hall Heritage Award for promising film students to Nelson Cragg and Bill Fernandez, who both have their master's degrees in film studies. Cragg attended the University of Southern California while Fernandez attended Florida State University. The ASC also recognized Alfonso Aguilar from Los Angeles Film School, Brian Plow from Ohio University's School of Film, and Ji Yong Kim and Jitsu Toyoda from the American Film Institute.

[Eugene Hernandez contributed to this report.]

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Friedman says film shows his innocence

By Frank Eltman

The Associated Press - Friday, January 09, 2004

GARDEN CITY, N.Y. — Jesse Friedman, whose imprisonment for child molestation was captured in the award-winning documentary "Capturing the Friedmans," wants a new trial based on information revealed in the film.

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.

The film, which won the documentary grand prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and was named best nonfiction film by the New York Film Critics Circle, has been mentioned as a possible Oscar nominee.

A spokesman for Nassau County District Attorney Denis Dillon declined to comment, saying prosecutors had not yet seen the court papers.

Nemser said another alleged victim was hypnotized before making incriminating statements against the Friedmans, a technique he claims has dubious results. He added that several people said they gave false testimony to investigators to "end the questioning."

Nemser conceded that Friedman "was not telling the truth" when he entered his guilty plea, admitting he abused children.

"Jesse was put into a corner and had to plead guilty," Nemser said, adding that Friedman is the beneficiary of "an enormous windfall" of evidence because of the research that director Andrew Jarecki did.

"I've been waiting 16 years now to prove my innocence," Friedman said. "Andrew was able to uncover a tremendous amount of information ... to prove what I always suspected was the case."

Jarecki said he's "very supportive" of Friedman's quest for a new trial. He said people "come away from the film thinking that Jesse was railroaded."

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Detective Stands by Friedman Probe

By Robin Topping and Denise M. Bonilla, Staff Writers

Newsday - Feburary, 2004

Responding to charges of police coercion in the 1980s sex abuse case against Arnold and Jesse Friedman, the lead detective said children were never pressured into making accusations.

Father and son pleaded guilty in 1988 to charges of abusing 13 boys who were students in Arnold's computer classes, held in their Great Neck home.

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.

Frances Galasso, the retired detective-sergeant who was in charge of the Friedman case, defended the integrity of the investigation. "Some of the boys talked very readily, and some did not, and that's the way it goes in almost every sex abuse case," she said. "Kids are very reluctant to talk until you build a relationship with them."

The critical legal issue involved is whether information on questioning techniques used by police and some children's initial denials constituted material that, by law, had to be handed over to the defense before trial. If it is deemed to be so-called Brady material -- and wasn't turned over -- the conviction could be reversed, according to state and federal law.

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. The investigation was fundamentally unfair and it was practically designed to elicit false allegations of abuse."

Galasso denied hypnosis was used and said detectives did not coerce statements from the victims. Some of the victims also were reluctant to talk because Friedman and his father -- who killed himself in prison in the mid-to-late 1990s -- had threatened them if they disclosed the abuse, she said.

Galasso said it was sometimes necessary to conduct multiple interviews to get the child's whole story, which was often given in pieces. Many children also were questioned by parents, therapists and prosecutors, she said, who were told the same versions of events. In addition, a third person charged with abusing the students, Ross Goldstein, a neighbor who later pleaded guilty and aided the prosecution, corroborated several of the victims' stories.

"I am personally offended by these accusations," Galasso said. "I hope it leads to a hearing where, I believe, the victims in the case ... will testify, and instead of Jesse Friedman facing 9- and 10-year-old frightened kids, he will face 25- and 26-year-old men who are doctors and lawyers and professional people."

Galasso said Friedman gave police a detailed confession and also failed two polygraph tests, which are not admissible in court.

Friedman, who served 13 years of a 6-to-18-year prison sentence, was released on parole in December 2001. He is a registered Level 3 sex offender, the most serious level, and must inform police of his whereabouts regularly. Friedman, who lives in Spanish Harlem, could not be reached for comment.

Friedman has said he lied when he pleaded guilty and did it because he feared he would spend life in prison if he were convicted after trial. His claims that children were manipulated into making the allegations against him and his father have riled law enforcement officials associated with the case.

Retired Nassau County Court Judge Abbey Boklan, who accepted guilty pleas from both the Friedmans, called Friedman's legal motion, which was filed in Nassau County Court in Mineola, a publicity stunt for a documentary film about the effect of the case on the Friedman family.

"I have known for at least seven months that there was a motion that was going to be filed, and at that time I predicted that it would be filed close to the time the video and DVD would be coming out. ... My prediction has proved accurate," Boklan said. The film, "Capturing the Friedmans," is due to be released for home sales on Jan. 27.

Boklan would not comment on the legal issues of Friedman's motion but said, "From my experience, both in the district attorney's office as head of sex crimes and my 20 years on the bench it happens very frequently that children initially deny they have been sexually abused."

Anthony Squeglia, a retired Nassau police detective who worked on the case with Galasso, said of Friedman's claims of coercion, "It's all garbage at this point. He's guilty and that's the end of it."

Retired Det. Patricia Brimlow, who also worked on the case, denied any police pressure on the victims, saying, "The children, witnesses, or their families were never coerced or manipulated by police."

Nassau police had no comment. Patrick McCormack, executive assistant district attorney, said only that the motion papers are being reviewed by the office's appeals bureau.

The court papers detail five interrogation techniques used by Nassau police that supposedly encouraged false accusations by the children. "The statements of detectives themselves reveal that after initially being unable to procure incriminating statements from the children," the papers state, "they utilized a high-pressure, manipulative and result-oriented approach to their questioning that was not disclosed to the defense ... "

Richard Barbuto, president of the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said various court cases have established that the defense is entitled to "inconsistent statements" made by witnesses during the discovery phase, in which prosecutors turn over evidence to the defense.

"Especially in sex cases, you always ask for inconsistent statements in the discovery phase since we have learned that these techniques can be faulty in and of themselves and, also, when abused, can produce false results," Barbuto said.

"Guilty pleas are a product of knowing what the evidence is, and as defense lawyers, when the prosecution doesn't want to tell us what happened, it makes it difficult to tell our clients whether to go forward. Discovery is designed so we wouldn't have trial by ambush."

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Documentary's Haunting Tale of Abuse

by Paul Vitello

Newsday - January 11, 2004

The late Arnold Friedman and his son, Jesse, admitted to police in 1988 that they had sexually molested 13 children during computer classes in the Friedman home in Great Neck. The documentary film "Capturing the Friedmans" is based on their case.

This is an open letter to the 13 former children:

You are the invisible actors in "Capturing the Friedmans." If this flawed documentary film has a certain "haunting" brilliance, as many movie critics have said, you are what haunts it.

Your faces are never seen but you inhabit every frame of the film. Every recrimination between father and mother and sons is about you. Every silence is filled with you.

Every closeted emotion borne by members of the Friedman family, as filmmaker Andrew Jarecki documents the disintegration of their fragile nuclear unit, pulses with fear about the power of you to destroy Arnold and his son in court.

The "Capturing" movie, which has already won many awards and is considered a likely Academy Award nominee, is basically about the agonizing process by which father and son decide to avoid that courtroom confrontation with you.

They decide, instead of facing you (and although the movie neglects to mention him, the testimony of a teenaged friend of Jesse's who participated in the abuse and became a prosecution witness) to plead guilty and cut the best deals they can get.

The movie suggests that an injustice was thereby done:

It suggests that police over-reacted to what was no more than a collection of child pornography in Arnold Friedman's house; that there may have been no assaults at all; that, in effect, you might have been coerced or hypnotized into making it all up.

Arnold Friedman died in prison.

But with funding from Jarecki, who apparently became a believer while making the film, lawyers for Jesse Friedman, now 34 and free after serving 13 years behind bars, filed a motion in Nassau County Court last week to vacate the younger Friedman's conviction.

They claim that Nassau County police coerced you and badgered you because they believed the Friedmans were at the center of the biggest child sex ring case ever.

They don't say it was all your fault. They claim that some of you were visited in your homes by detectives 15 times before you remembered what happened to you on Picadilly Road. One of you is alleged to have jumped up and down screaming that Friedman had done nothing to you before police, on a subsequent visit, obtained your statement that something had happened.

To be frank, you are on the spot.

If an injustice was done to the Friedmans, you are honor bound to undo it. There is no crime in admitting to an untruth wrung from you by a persistent detective when you were 9 years old, if that is what happened.

If on the other hand no injustice was done, you have to defend yourselves - and other victims like you - and to explain to those unfamiliar with the sexual abuse of children why the cops were right to come back, and come back, until you were able to talk.

You would not be the first kids who denied there was anything wrong when there was everything wrong.

We saw boys older than you - freshmen on the Mepham High School football team, for instance - who denied and denied, and probably would still be denying today if one of them had not been betrayed by the blood from his own injuries.

In the court papers filed last week, there are citations about studies into the unreliability of "recovered memory" and other allegedly coerced testimony.

There are also studies, however, showing how children behave in the aftermath of sexual assaults. And they show children are extremely reluctant to talk. If they have been threatened with harm - as the police say you were by the Friedmans - kids are terrified that something horrible will befall them and their families if they tell.

It may be unfair to put you on the spot like this. You are all in your 20s. Some of you may be successfully launched in the world. Some of you may still struggle with shadows cast by the events in your early lives.

But I feel that you have been abused many times over in this story - whether by the Friedmans, and by this movie, and by the timing of this filmmaker-funded appeal just weeks before the selection of Academy Awards; or if the police really coerced you into telling untruths, then by the police.

But the haunting quality you give to that movie seems to be haunting a larger canvas now. It has grown to include the landscape of all the kids who have ever been sadistically used by adults and then forced into ghostly, haunting backstory roles in this world.

You were children when this started. You are adults now. You can defend yourselves now - and those kids you used to be. Do it.

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Jacko Financial Crisis: Beatles Bill Due

By Roger Friedman

Fox News - Monday, January 12, 2004

... One of the highlights of last night's New York Film Critics Circle dinner was the appearance of director Quentin Tarantino. He came to present Sofia Coppola with the best director award for "Lost in Translation"; his date was Zoe Cassavetes, the daughter of late director John Cassavetes and actress Gena Rowlands.

Tarantino told me that we will not be seeing "Kill Bill: Vol. 2" until April instead of the planned February release. "To make that date I would have had to come back from promoting ['Vol. 1'] and go right back into editing," he said. "I had to take a break."

In that time, a DVD for "Vol. 1" will be released with a few extras, namely songs that were cut from the first chapter. "Eventually we're going to have one big DVD with both movies," he said. Other than the songs, though, "Vol. 1" will be a straight-ahead transfer to DVD.

More importantly, Tarantino is pondering more chapters in the series. "I've thought of prequels and sequels," he said. "I had this great idea where we wait five years and come back not with the Bride as the main character, but Vernita's (Vivica A. Fox) daughter as the main character. It would be fifteen years in the future, and the Bride (Uma Thurman) would be in a wheelchair."

Tarantino wasn't the only interesting character at last night's affair. O.J. Simpson criminal defense lawyer and DNA expert Barry Scheck was there; he's been doing some work for Jesse Friedman, the central character in "Capturing the Friedmans." He was at the same table as Nora Ephron and Nick Pileggi. Ephron revealed later that her sister had been a patient of the dentist-father of the boy who was involved in Michael Jackson's 1993 child molestation case. Ah, Hollywood! ...

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Awards a Glimpse of Oscars

By Robert Kahn - STAFF WRITER

Newsday - January 12, 2004

Hope Davis figured out one way to avoid anxiety on the set of "American Splendor." She asked Joyce Brabner, the real-life inspiration for her role, to go away.

"It made me very nervous to have Joyce on the set," Davis said last night at the 69th annual New York Film Critics Circle awards dinner in midtown, where she was honored with a best actress award for, among other projects, her work as the eccentric wife of Cleveland comic book artist Harvey Pekar.

"Joyce was standing beside the camera when I was first shooting, and I just felt like I couldn't be her while she was looking at me, so I asked her not to watch," Davis said.

Actors and directors had a chance to sound off among their peers and journalists at the ceremony, one of several notable precursors to the Academy Awards.

Sofia Coppola, honored by the New York critics with the best director award for "Lost in Translation," said she hired Bill Murray because of his reputation as an off-the-cuff comedian. Murray improvised an entire scene set in a Tokyo hospital emergency room waiting area, Coppola said.

"I wanted to send him out into Tokyo and have him just respond to the people we met," she said.

Director Andrew Jarecki was recognized with the best nonfiction film award for "Capturing the Friedmans." He explained why lawyers for Jesse Friedman are seeking a new trial for the Great Neck native, whose imprisonment for child molestation was chronicled in the film. "I have a moral obligation to provide his lawyers with information I discovered making the film."

Elijah Wood, Sean Astin and Liv Tyler accepted the Best Picture Award for "Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," the final installment in the trilogy.

Wood noted that fantasy films from "The Wizard of Oz" to "Star Wars" more often take home technical achievement nods - not Best Picture wins - during awards season.

"Of the three, this film was the most intense and emotional, the one most about the human experience, so I think that's why it's won more critical acclaim than the first two," he said.

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Complete list of 76th annual Academy Award nominations

The Associated Press/San Francisco Chronical - January 27, 2004

18. Documentary Feature: "Balseros," "Capturing the Friedmans," "The Fog of War," "My Architect," "The Weather Underground."

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Acclaimed Film Helps Convicted Sex Offenders at Victims' Expense

Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Contact: Joyanna Silberg, PhD, 410-938-4974

www.leadershipcouncil.org

A prominent coalition of national leaders in the field of child abuse condemns the misinformation in "Capturing the Friedmans", a film nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for best documentary.

According to the Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence, led by Paul J. Fink, MD, child sexual abuse is a major public health crisis affecting at least 27% of American girls and 16% of boys. Yet the film takes a skeptical attitude toward believing children and misinforms the public about both the Friedman case and child abuse in general.

"The movie minimizes the evidence against Arnold and Jesse Friedman," notes Paul J. Fink, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association. "While we applaud director Andrew Jarecki for addressing the important topic of sexual abuse," Dr. Fink states, "a straightforward documentary would have mentioned the 1989 Geraldo episode where Jesse tearfully confessed to the crimes, as well as the confession of a co-defendant, Ross Goldstein, whose existence is not revealed in the film."

Dr. Joyanna Silberg, PhD, a child psychologist and vice-president of the Leadership Council, notes that the film reinforces popular myths that protect offenders and harm victims. For example, the movie questions the victims' credibility because they did not come forward immediately. Yet, according to Silberg, delay in disclosing abuse is very common, particularly among boys. Silberg explains that sex offenders use a variety of grooming techniques to make their victims feel complicit in their own abuse. "Overwhelmed by feelings of guilt and shame, many boys hide what has happened to them. The priest scandal illustrates clearly how hard it is for male victims to come forward," Silberg points out.

Moreover, according to Silberg, the danger to children from this film is not just theoretical, but very real, because the film has been used to raise money to promote the release of convicted sex offenders from prisons around the country. An organization called the National Center for Reason and Justice, whose mission is to support sex offenders who claim to be falsely convicted, held a private screening of the film as a fundraiser in NYC to support their cause. Jesse Friedman, who now claims to be innocent, spoke at this event and director Jarecki was there to film it.

Jesse Freidman is submitting the DVD as part of the supporting evidence for his motion to overturn his conviction. "Evidence, however, is not determined by a film editor who cuts and pastes for dramatic effect," notes Seth Goldstein, a prominent attorney and forensic expert on child sexual abuse. "That is why we have courts of law."

"The popularity of the film sends a chilling message to abuse survivors by reinforcing the common fear that they will not be believed," warns Wendy Murphy, an adjunct professor at New England School of Law and national expert on victims' rights. "No matter how intriguing a story it tells, 'Capturing the Friedmans' hurts the most vulnerable among us by misleading the public about sexual crimes against children."

The Leadership Council on Child Abuse & Interpersonal Violence is a non-profit scientific organization composed of national leaders in the fields of mental health, law, medicine, public policy, and education. The Council is committed to supporting justice, protecting children, and promoting responsible research and information on child abuse and interpersonal violence.

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Capturing the Friedmans' victims ask Academy to deny documentary Oscar

By Deepti Hajela

Associated Press - February 17, 2004

NEW YORK -- Two men whom Jesse Friedman pleaded guilty to sexually abusing as boys have written an open letter to Academy Awards voters, speaking out against the Oscar-nominated documentary about the Friedman family.

"Capturing the Friedmans," by director Andrew Jarecki, is among the favorites to win best documentary at the Feb. 29 Oscar ceremony. It examines the cases against Arnold and Jesse Friedman, a Long Island father and son imprisoned in the late 1980s for sexually abusing dozens of children.

The victims, now in their 20s, wrote that Jesse Friedman was "being paraded like a celebrity." "If this film does win an Oscar, it will be won at the expense of silencing the plaintive voices of abused children once again, just as our own voices were silenced 16 years ago by the threats and intimidation of our tormentors, Arnold and Jesse Friedman," said the letter.

Jarecki said his film was a balanced piece, and that he had reached out to every child involved. He pointed out that the film's longest interview is with someone who has recollections of being abused.

"The film doesn't exclude that perspective in the slightest," he said Tuesday. "I didn't set out to make an advocacy film for the Friedmans, and I didn't make one."

However, Jesse Friedman, now 34, is seeking a new trial to overturn his conviction based on information revealed in the documentary. And in an earlier interview, Jarecki told The Associated Press that he was "very supportive" of Friedman's quest for a new trial, and that people "come away from the film thinking that Jesse was railroaded."

The men who wrote the letter list their ages as 24 and 27 and their occupations as graduate student and businessman, respectively. They did not reveal their names.

The judge who dealt with their case, Abbey Boklan, who is now retired from her Nassau County court, confirmed that the two men had been among the 13 children Jesse Friedman pleaded guilty to abusing.

A copy of the letter was provided to The Associated Press by Joyanna Silberg, a child psychologist and member of the Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence, which is conducting a campaign against the movie.

"Whether it was on purpose or whether Jarecki was misled, he presented a documentary that conveys an impression of the case that is erroneous," Silberg said.

"Capturing the Friedmans" won the documentary grand prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and was named best nonfiction film by the New York Film Critics Circle.

Jesse was 19 when he pleaded guilty to the sex abuse charges in 1988. Authorities said he and Arnold Friedman molested dozens of children during computer classes in their home.

Jesse was sentenced to 6 to 18 years and was paroled after 13 years in prison; he is now a registered sex offender who lives in Manhattan. His father, an admitted pedophile who was also convicted of sending child pornography through the mail, died in prison in 1995.

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Abuse experts assail movie

By Marina Pisano

San Antonio Express-News - Feburary 23, 2004

Oscar-nominated documentaries usually don't grab much attention amid all the megastar, big-budget films up for awards. But one is at the center of a controversy over the director's take on a well-publicized case of child sexual abuse.

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."

In "Capturing the Friedmans," director Andrew Jarecki weaves together many interviews with old 8 mm home movies and videos to tell the story of admitted pedophile Arnold Friedman and teenage son Jesse. In 1987, they were accused of multiple counts of child molestation of boys at their home in affluent Great Neck, N.Y. While film critics say Jarecki artistically captures a clearly dysfunctional family facing a maelstrom of horrendous accusations, child abuse experts and the judge in the case say he has not captured the truth.

"The film gives the impression truth is elusive and maybe the Friedmans didn't molest boys. It leaves out information that, if included, wouldn't leave that doubt," says Joyanna Silberg, child psychologist and vice president of the Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence.

Abbey Boklan, the now-retired Nassau County judge who presided over both cases, has raised concerns, too, insisting there are no doubts about the Friedmans' guilt. "There never was an issue as to whether they were guilty or not. To me it (the film) is deliberately slanted."

Arnold Friedman was a respected science teacher and musician who taught computer classes in his basement to children, mostly boys, ages 8 to 13. Police first investigated him in connection with child pornography found in his home, then began interviewing his students, slowly piecing together the case for sodomy and other acts of molestation.

In 1988, the Friedmans confessed and pleaded guilty to multiple counts. Arnold died in prison in 1995. Jesse admitted molesting 13 boys, served 13 years and was paroled in 2001.

The documentary reveals Arnold had abused his younger brother when he was 8 and admitted having sex with boys. Jesse confessed to his lawyer prior to his plea that he had abused boys and disclosed that his father, Arnold, had abused him. He made the same admissions on television, later recanting.

The two-disc DVD version of the documentary released in January includes additional material that fuels doubts about Jesse's conviction. In fact, citing the DVD, Jesse's defenders filed a motion in Nassau County Court in January to annul his conviction. Boklan calls the second disc on the DVD "pure propaganda."

Efforts to reach Jarecki for comment were unsuccessful.

The National Center for Reason and Justice, an organization that helps people it believes were wrongly accused and convicted of sex offenses against children and adolescents, calls the Friedman case a miscarriage of justice.

The Friedmans "never should have been charged, and they never should have been convicted," says journalist Debbie Nathan, who is on the board of the National Center for Reason and Justice but doesn't speak for the organization.

Nathan, who was a consultant on the movie, investigated false accusations in child sexual abuse cases for eight years. She is co-author of "Satan's

Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt," published in 1995. From 1998 to 2000, she was also a reporter for the San Antonio Current.

Over the years, Nathan argues, Arnold taught hundreds of children. Why didn't they come forward when they were raped?

Silberg, who has talked to victims in this case, says kids don't always tell. Arnold, like many pedophiles, "groomed" the pre-teen boys he thought would be likely to keep the secret. After molesting them, he threatened their families if they told.

Nathan became interested in the case when she read abstracts, which included statements from police investigators. She says documents show victims underwent hypnosis in therapy, which can trigger false accusations.

But Silberg and Boklan say the victims didn't undergo hypnosis until after they told their stories to police. They had hypnosis to deal with the effects of abuse, not to recall it.

In the end, Nathan says Arnold was a "nebbish," the kind of creepy guy kids stay away from. But she hopes the film succeeds in showing that he doesn't deserve to be demonized. "That guy should have never been around kids. That was so self-indulgent of him. But that's not what he was accused of."

Boklan says five victims have hired an attorney in the face of efforts to annul Jesse's conviction. She says the film "is great theater, but don't call it true."

Silberg says "whether or not Jarecki wins an Oscar, it is children in our society who are the big losers when the public is misled about sexual crimes against children. Films like this help to create an environment that keeps victims silent."

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Two Friedman victims send message

By Paul Vitello

Newsday - February 24, 2004

For the past year, Andrew Jarecki, the maker of the documentary movie "Capturing the Friedmans," has recommended his work to the attention of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with an energy and originality worthy of his film.

He has entered and won film competitions by the dozen. He has hosted panel discussions all over the country.

Most compelling of all, he has lent his moral support - though he insists not his money - to a legal appeal to overturn the 1989 sexual abuse conviction of Jesse Friedman, whose case is at the core of the film.

Jarecki says Jesse, who with his late father, Arnold, ultimately pleaded guilty to molesting 13 boys during computer classes in their Great Neck home, were victims of an overzealous prosecution by Nassau County authorities and a public hysteria concerning alleged child sex abuse.

The movie was nominated last month for an Academy Award.

There are many ways to win an Oscar. And exonerating a man is not a bad one, if your man is innocent.

But last week, with voting on the winners near a decision, two of the victims of Jesse and Arnold (Jesse, now 34, served 13 years; Arnold died in prison) published an open letter to the Academy recommending a different view of Jarecki's work.

"We are ... asking you to hear our side of the story, writing on behalf of the other victims and ourselves," they said. "We were abused, tortured and humiliated by Arnold and Jesse Friedman in computer classes in Arnold's basement. Many of us have physical scars from what was done to us. All of us have psychological scars. Although it has been 16 years, we live with the knowledge of these crimes every day of our lives."

It is a strange fact of life, but some of our deepest questions are addressed to some of our least qualified judges. Who killed JFK? Who killed Jesus? The movies reflect the Jungian unconscious of America; and for better or worse, we look to them for explanations.

In this case, in a movie about an alleged child sex ring we are told by a filmmaker, in effect: Haven't we gone too far with these child sex abuse prosecutions? The police questioned some of these kids 15 times before they were able to get statements out of them. Do you really believe that two men could sexually abuse dozens of boys for years, without any of the victims coming forward?

"Some of us have had bad dreams, some of us slept with baseball bats under our beds for years for fear of reprisals," the two former victims wrote jointly. They are now 24 and 27. Their identities were confirmed by the now-retired Nassau County Judge Abby Boklan, who presided at the trial of the Friedmans.

"Many years ago, we thought we could not tell what was happening to us because we felt too guilty and embarrassed and were constantly threatened. Our parents thought Arnold was calling our houses so often because he was such a concerned teacher. His calls were to make sure we were not telling and to repeat the constant threats."

At one panel discussion held at the 92nd Street 'Y' in Manhattan last month, Jarecki suggested that the Friedmans' case represented a sort of crime jackpot for the Nassau County police. He described them as a Mayberry-like force of officers who "spend a fair amount of time listening to the wind blow through the curtains."

He said children have been known to lie about these things - witness the McMartin case, the infamous California day-care trial. He said Jesse was forced to confess because the prosecutors threatened him with a virtual life term unless he did. He said the judge, Boklan, had made up her mind before hearing the evidence. He said Jesse was, as far as he could tell, the only real victim in this whole, sorry story.

"And now one of the men who tortured us, Jesse Friedman, is being paraded like a celebrity while we have been left in the shadows, powerless and voiceless once again," the two former victims wrote.

"We don't want the acclaim of this movie to keep other young boys who are being secretly abused silent for fear that their stories won't be believed. We don't want adults who might listen to the children turn a deaf ear, having seen the film and say, 'These children are probably lying or exaggerating just like those Friedman victims in the movie.' We did not lie. We did not exaggerate. We were never hypnotized to tell our stories ... We told the truth then and we are telling the truth now."

The Motion Picture academy sets few rules in its documentary category. Filmmakers are allowed to cover their subject as they see fit " ... as long as the emphasis is on fact and not fiction."

To the extent that Jarecki's film purports to show a miscarriage of justice, however, it seems to tilt into fiction. Will that matter when the awards are given out Sunday?

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Victims Say Film on Molesters Distorts Facts

By Sharon Waxman

New York Times - Feburary 24, 2004

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 23 — "Capturing the Friedmans," the Oscar-nominated documentary that raises questions about the guilt of a father and son convicted of child molestation, is being criticized by six of their former victims, who say the film omitted or distorted important information about their cases.

The six are suggesting that the director, Andrew Jarecki, created more ambiguity than actually existed about the case both to heighten the dramatic impact of the film and to elicit sympathy for the Friedmans. The film tells the story of the disintegration of a seemingly average Long Island family after the father, Arnold Friedman, and son, Jesse, were accused of molesting children in computer classes they held in the basement of their Great Neck home in the 1980's.

The film, an Academy Award nominee for best documentary, has been critically praised and brought intense debate at screenings, in editorials and on talk shows about the Friedmans' guilt and whether the case showed failures of the justice system.

Both Arnold and Jesse Friedman pleaded guilty to dozens of counts of child molestation in 1988. Arnold Friedman committed suicide in prison. Jesse Friedman, 34, who served 13 years in prison before being released, recently submitted a motion in Nassau County Court to vacate his conviction, citing disclosures in the film about police evidence that could have helped his case. The court motion has angered former victims and their families who had not previously attacked the film, which was released last May.

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. Her son gave grand jury testimony against Jesse Friedman in 1987. The New York Times has agreed to protect her identity and her son's.

Mr. Jarecki said in an e-mail interview that he had tried to reach each of the 13 accusers of Jesse Friedman by registered mail and Federal Express, though he said he may not have had correct addresses for all. Two are included in the film, one on camera and another on audiotape. Asked how many victims he spoke to, Mr. Jarecki said: "I don't know how many I spoke to. It was more than three." Mr. Jarecki said he had made 500 attempts to reach 100 of the Friedmans' former computer students.

The mother said that Mr. Jarecki's film omitted a third co-defendant, Ross Goldstein, a teenage neighbor who also pleaded guilty to charges of child molestation and who corroborated some of the children's accusations at the time and went to prison. She also said that Mr. Jarecki omitted a tearful confession by Jesse Friedman in prison on Geraldo Rivera's talk show in 1989. Mr. Friedman detailed how his father had molested him as a child. 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.

The mother of the accuser said: "What fame is there in making a film about a pedophile who's a pedophile? What gives it the added twist? That it wasn't true." She said Jesse Friedman was not innocent. "I'm very suspicious," she added. "I know the truth. I think it's clear. He had all the evidence, and for some reason he chose not to use it."

Mr. Jarecki responded by e-mail: "I had no agenda in making this film other than to tell the story in a way that related it in all its complexity. I did not see ambiguity as a tool. It was a natural outcome of a three and a half year process. I did not shy away from showing the disgusting nature of Arnold Friedman's pedophilia, and I did not shy away from showing the disturbing failures in the police investigation."

Mr. Jarecki said the material on Mr. Goldstein was left out because it duplicated statements by the 13 children but was included in the just-released DVD. He said he considered the Rivera interview unnecessary, since the film showed Jesse Friedman's confession in court.

But attacks on the film continue. Two former victims, including the son of the woman who spoke to The Times, wrote an open but anonymous letter last week to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which will give out the Oscars on Sunday. They said that the film portrayed the victims as if they had invented their stories to satisfy an overzealous Nassau County police force.

They wrote: "We did not lie. We did not exaggerate. We were never hypnotized to tell our stories." They said the director had twisted the facts in the film to make it appear that they had.

If the film wins an Oscar, they wrote, "it will be won at the expense of silencing the plaintive voices of abused children once again, just as our own voices were silenced 16 years ago by the threats and intimidation of our tormentors."

The signers are a 24-year-old law student and a 27-year-old businessman; their identities have been confirmed by the judge who presided over the trial, Abbey Boklan, who is now retired.

A spokesman for the academy had no comment. Voting for the Oscars closes on Tuesday.

Four other victims who have retained a lawyer to fight Jesse Friedman's motion to vacate his guilty plea also criticized the film. "I don't see the film as a representation of any type of investigation that was done," said Salvatore Marinello, their lawyer, who said the four men did not want to be interviewed.

"I see the film as a capsulized version of what was taking place in the Friedman household during the time the case was pending," Mr. Marinello said. "There's no doubt that it's fascinating. But why are we reliving these events? Because some director decided to make a movie. They believe the motion filed on Jesse's behalf was simply a result of publicity garnered from the movie, that there's no factual basis."

Mr. Marinello also said he knew of no attempt by the filmmaker to reach his clients.

Mr. Jarecki has been inconsistent in responding to some questions about his research. Asked repeatedly by The Times whether he knew of a lie-detector test that Jesse Friedman took and failed while he protested his innocence in the 1980's, Mr. Jarecki said he did not. But in an interview on a Web site, Mr. Jarecki spoke in detail about the lie-detector test, saying he considered it inconclusive.

The mother of the victim who spoke to The Times said her son appeared to recover quickly after he was molested at the age of 7 but had severe emotional problems when he became an adolescent.

The man, who is the 24-year-old law student who wrote to the academy, also wrote on Jan. 29 to the judge who presided over the case. "This director's cause is wrong and his purpose is self-serving at my expense as well as at the expense of other victims," he wrote to Ms. Boklan. The letter is posted on a Web site of psychologists who specialize in child molestation and find fault with the film (www.leadershipcouncil.org). "It was under the guise of an educator that Arnold and Jesse Friedman used computer technology to show young children pornography," the law student wrote. "I became afraid of everything beyond my control. My childhood curiosity was replaced with an inherent distrust for adults, authority figures and every unknown."

Last week Jesse Friedman released a statement saying he was not surprised that some of his accusers are standing by their statements to the grand jury. "There has never been any dispute about the fact that these statements were made," he said. "While I know these claims are untrue, I respect their right to make them, and I believe it is likely that they continue to believe these events took place."

But Mr. Friedman spoke differently in an interview on "Dateline NBC" last month, when he challenged former victims to come forward, as well as in an interview on the DVD release of the film, in which he says that he and his brother David cooperated with the film in the hope that his former accusers would recant.

"The whole purpose of this movie for David and I was to try to get my conviction overturned," Mr. Friedman says in a segment for the DVD shot in September, 22 months after his release from prison. He hoped the movie would "set up an environment where people in the computer class would come forward and say, `I know I said certain things to the grand jury, but those things weren't true.' "

Mr. Jarecki denies that he has become an advocate for Jesse Friedman. Still, Mr. Jarecki has submitted an affidavit on his behalf to the court.

"One of the hallmarks of a balanced film on a controversial subject is that advocates on both sides will never be satisfied that the film supports their agendas," he wrote by e-mail. "Unlike some documentaries that underscore a point of view, `Capturing the Friedmans' presents all the evidence and allows the audience to decide for themselves."

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Some fear `Friedmans' may capture Oscar

By Elaine Dutka

Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times - February 26, 2004

HOLLYWOOD -- Faced with the prospect that a provocative film about a case of child abuse may win the Oscar for best documentary feature, advocacy groups and some of the victims have launched a belated campaign to discredit "Capturing the Friedmans."

The film, directed by Andrew Jarecki, is one of the favorites in the documentary race, along with "The Fog of War," a portrait of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

Voting for the Academy Awards ended Tuesday, so it's unclear whether the groups' actions will have an effect on the outcome.

A notice that one of the groups posted Saturday on the Internet triggered responses from 1,700 people who e-mailed three top executives of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the producer of the Oscars show and the president of ABC television, which will air the ceremony Sunday.

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.

Jesse Friedman, who pleaded guilty to sexual abuse charges in 1988, was paroled after 13 years in prison. A registered sex offender, he is hoping that evidence revealed in Jarecki's documentary will help him obtain a trial in which his guilty plea will be retracted and his conviction overturned. In 1995, his father, an admitted pedophile who was convicted of sending child pornography through the mail, died in prison of an antidepressant overdose.

Irene Weiser, founder of New York City-based StopFamilyViolence.org, came across an Associated Press story late last week that raised questions about the movie's portrayal of the case. After contacting a psychologist quoted in the piece, she launched the Internet campaign.

"We're all for freedom of speech," Weiser emphasized, "but when a project receives the industry's highest recognition, that gives it credibility."

Last week, the Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence, a group of psychologists and other professionals, submitted to several newspapers an op-ed piece critical of the documentary.

"Clear evidence is omitted, facts distorted, and uncertainty is created about the guilt of these two confessed pedophiles," the letter said.

Abbey Boklan, a retired judge who presided over the Friedman case, has verified that the purported authors of the letter to the academy were among the 13 victims. She also said that "the movie was unfair."

Jarecki defends his work.

"People wanted me to take a position. ... `Did they do it or not?' But I wanted people to make up their own minds."

"The Friedmans couldn't have been pleased with my description of Arnold's affinity for pornography and the full-color portrayal of his guilty plea," he added. "And, though you can't reduce individuals to a single adjective, law enforcement would say that showing them as human beings is unfair. Everyone is unhappy, which is the earmark of a balanced piece."

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Capturing justice... on film?

By Mary Wiltenburg | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Christian Science Monitor (Arts & Entertainment Movies) - February 26, 2004

An Oscar-nominated documentary blends truth and art - angering some of the real-life participants.

The film is made, finished, a story you've spent years pursuing. Questionable cops, angry convicts, victims, perpetrators, passersby - you've lent them all your ear, given them a national audience and equal time. Sure, you're a storyteller looking for a good yarn, but your world isn't some kind of relativist nightmare. You believe there is truth out there, and you make this film to go after it.

But what do you do when you feel you've found it?

"Me, it was my job. I knew Randall Adams was innocent, and it was my job to prove it," says documentarian Errol Morris, who examined the murder of a Texas police officer in his 1988 film "The Thin Blue Line." On the basis of Mr. Morris's investigation and legal intervention, Mr. Adams walked free from death row. No film before or since has inspired such a reversal.

Now, as Oscar night draws near, "Capturing the Friedmans," a nominee easily as controversial as Morris's film, may be staking out similar territory.

The documentary examines the case of a father and son accused of molesting computer students in their Long Island home in the 1980s. On the basis of interviews by director Andrew Jarecki that reveal new information about the case, son Jesse Friedman - paroled after 13 years in prison - is seeking to have his guilty plea on 245 charges of sexual abuse vacated by the court that sentenced him when he was 19.

"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.

That puts Mr. Jarecki in a tough position. Critics overwhelmingly praised his film, released last summer, as evenhanded and provocative. Though it does imply an injustice has been done - that father Arnold Friedman, who died in prison in 1995, had previous sexual contact with minors but not his students, and that Jesse was probably innocent - it carefully balances opposing views.

Several hours of supplemental footage on a DVD version released in January, though, paint a more damning picture of the investigation.An interview with an alleged victim casts his testimony into strong doubt, and interviews with detectives underscore the extent to which they coaxed and bullied testimony from Friedman's 8- to 11-year-old students.

Last week, two of these former students, now in their 20s, wrote an anonymous letter to Academy Awards voters urging them not to reward the film for making Jesse Friedman a celebrity. "We did not lie. We did not exaggerate. We were never hypnotized to tell our stories," they wrote.

Jarecki insists that, with or without the extra footage, his film is no apology for Friedman. He has, however, submitted an affidavit on Jesse's behalf to the Nassau County Court and is allowing Jesse to present interview footage to a judge in the hopes of reopening his case.

"This kind of film isn't really the format for [advocacy]," Jarecki says, "but the information in the film is what it is, and if Jesse wants to use it in his motion, that's his right."

Once you've released a documentary on such a controversial subject, says Jarecki, its resonance and repercussions are out of your hands. "Now the issue is transitioning to a new setting," he says, "and it's not a setting in which I have much relevance because the stakes are not mine."

But here's the problem, filmmakers say: Telling a story, any story, demands a dizzying number of difficult, subjective editorial choices. First, you choose your interviewees - and though you try to be fair, you can't talk to everybody. Some days you just make your best guess.

Then, in the editing, 90 percent of what you've learned falls to the cutting-room floor. Worthless stuff? Crucial details? How will your audience ever know?

"There's so much power in editing," says documentary filmmaker Charlie Thompson of Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies. "About all we can hope for is to be aware of the editorial pitfalls along the way. That's what I always keep in my front pocket - the remembrance that we are staying true to everyone who grants us an interview."

Marco Williams, a documentarian and film professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, agrees. 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."

The style of documentary this implies - one that takes as a subject its director's own biases - is very much in vogue, and has proved wildly successful in films like Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine."

But the idea makes Morris uncomfortable.

In "The Thin Blue Line," he says, "you never see my investigation. You see the results of it, yes, but you don't see me following David Harris [who at the film's end obliquely confesses to murder] around for five months afraid for my own life."

That kind of exposure would have been gratuitous, Morris says, because everything about the film speaks to his own preoccupations and artistic vision.

Sometimes to a fault. Morris admits he walked a fine ethical line in researching the story. Trained as a private investigator, he used access to interviewees and records granted him as a filmmaker to conduct his own investigation of the case. In the end, he says, it was that meticulously gathered evidence, not the film, that got Adams's conviction overturned.

Though Morris did have qualms about his dual role, he says his certainty that Texas was preparing to execute an innocent man trumped those concerns.

"I'm not saying there's no such thing as a general ambiguity in the world, but I think there are some questions that have answers, and those answers have to be pursued," he says. "Thinking doesn't make it so. There is a real world out there, and I think it is our job to try to understand it."

Jarecki says as far as the Friedmans' story goes, though, his job has come to an end.

"The Friedmans are a complex group, and not much more fun to work with than they appear in the film," he says. "Still, they are entitled to the freedoms they have under the law."

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Troubling relationships surround case

By Ellis Henican

Newsday - February 27, 2004

"Capturing the Friedmans" may or may not win the Oscar Sunday night for best documentary film. That's in the hands of Academy voters.

But this much is certain, and it hits far closer to home: the troubling child-molestation case at the center of the movie continues its troubling tour through the Nassau County courts.

And now, as the hype swirls in Hollywood, police, prosecutors and judges who've been thrown on the defensive by the critically acclaimed film are faced with a soul-searching question: Can Jesse Friedman's plea to reopen the case ever get a fair shake on Long Island?

His lawyers say no.

They've filed court papers, citing a history of shoddy investigation and overzealous prosecution in the high-publicity case. They say prosecutors failed to turn over critical information casting doubt on the horrific allegations. They have statements from three eyewitnesses and two purported victims contradicting the claims of prosecutors and police. And the lawyers lay out a cozy web of personal relationships among various Nassau officials who are still connected to the case.

"Fundamental fairness" requires a change of venue, Friedman lawyer Mark Gimpel is telling the Nassau County Court.

The Friedman case was one of the most sensational on Long Island. It centered on Arnold Friedman, a computer teacher in close-knit Great Neck, who was found with a small cache of child pornography in his home. That launched a highly aggressive — and now equally controversial — investigation by the Nassau County Police Sex Crimes Unit. Not one student had complained of being molested at the Friedman home. But after the police got done with their interrogating, it seemed like half the boys in Great Neck had been forced into wild orgies. Stoked by constant media coverage, the community was demanding harsh justice.

Under the threat of life in prison, Arnold Friedman pleaded guilty. And so, eventually, did his 19-year-old son, Jesse. The father died in prison in 1995. Jesse was sentenced to six to 18 years in prison and is now on parole after serving 13.

"Capturing the Friedmans" asks: Were the wild charges believable? Were the victims coerced with suggestive interrogation techniques? Did the system bow to public hysteria, and most of all was young Jesse railroaded into his guilty plea? And can he get a fair hearing now?

So, on Oscar weekend, those questions have come off the movie screen and into court, thanks to this highly unusual post-plea, post-sentence change-of-venue motion. "Clearly, basic fairness and sound discretion support removing this volatile case to neutral ground," Gimpel writes.

In a publicity barrage, various officials in the case have been defending the way they handled it. They say they're sure the Friedmans were guilty. Assistant Nassau County District Attorney Judith Sternberg has filed papers opposing a change of venue. Friedman's lawyers did not meet the legal burden, she said, adding that one of the 17 judges in Nassau must surely be able to review the case fairly.

But hold on a second, Gimpel shoots back.

Look at the system — then and now — responsible for this case. There's Frances Galasso, who supervised the investigation as head of the sex-crimes unit. She's made several public statements — on NBC's "Dateline," on "Geraldo" and elsewhere — that the lawyers say cast real doubt on her objectivity. Galasso said "an enormous amount of child pornography" was found in the Friedman home. "You would just have to walk into the living room and it would be piled around the piano. There were literally foot-high stacks of pornography, in plain view, all around the house."

In fact just a few magazines were found, hidden away.

The judge who presided over the original case has proven to be just as one-sided, the lawyers say. They quote Judge Abbey Boklan as declaring publicly: "There was never a doubt in my mind as to their guilt."

Such comments, the lawyers argue, are "the very opposite of an appropriate judicial temperament... To make matters worse Judge Boklan and her husband to this day remain close friends with Det. Galasso and her husband, [Nassau County] Judge John Galasso, and even attended the premiere of the film 'Capturing the Friedmans' together."

One person who apparently did consider himself too close for comfort is Nassau County Judge David Sullivan, who stepped aside in January from hearing the post-trial motions. His explanation: He worked in the Nassau County DA's office when the case was there.

The case is now in the hands of Judge Richard Lapera. But he "is similarly unsuitable based on his having presided over a strikingly similar child sexual abuse case involving some of the same detectives," Gimpel contends.

The various officials in the case are already out defending themselves, sitting with sympathetic journalists, insisting they did everything by the book. They'll get no help from me.

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Mistrial - The Capturing the Friedmans DVD sheds new light on the case.

By Harvey A. Silverglate and Carl Takei

Newsday - Friday, Feb. 27, 2004

When a documentary filmmaker uncovers overwhelming evidence that the subject of his film was wrongly convicted, shouldn't he take a stand on the man's innocence? This is what one must ask of Andrew Jarecki's Oscar-nominated Capturing the Friedmans, particularly upon its recent release on DVD.

When Jarecki's film opened last year, it received mostly rave reviews and was praised for offering "an instructive lesson about the elusiveness of facts," as Roger Ebert put it. Still, its evenhanded stance disturbed some critics: "it is with [the] pose of neutrality that the film's troubles begin," Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times wrote.

Containing hours of previously unreleased footage and archival material, the DVD makes it clear that Jarecki decided to maintain a studied ambiguity. He had compelling evidence that the Friedmans had been railroaded by a criminal-justice system in the grips of hysteria. This evidence presumably was omitted for dramatic effect.

The 1989 Friedman prosecution, in which Arnold Friedman and his son Jesse were convicted of multiple charges of sodomy and sexual abuse, said to have taken place during a computer class taught by father and son, is strikingly similar to other mass sex abuse cases of the 1980s. (If you're not familiar with the film, read David Edelstein's Slate review.) Communities across the country exploded with outlandish accusations of day-care "sex rings" and multiple-victim child abuse by teachers—among them the McMartin family (preschool teachers accused of engaging in ritual Satanic abuse, including drinking the blood of babies) and Kelly Michaels (a day-care worker accused by 20 children of licking peanut butter from their genitals, shoving assorted objects—including a sword—up their rectums, amputating one boy's penis—never found to be missing—and turning another child into a mouse).

These spectacular allegations have since been exposed as utterly false. The convictions lacked physical evidence and relied on children's testimony obtained by discredited investigative techniques.

Jarecki was aware of the legal and social context for the Friedmans' case, but he mostly avoided addressing it in the film. (Disclosure: Harvey Silverglate has acted as co-counsel for Gerald Amirault, and both authors are working for the vindication and release of Bernard Baran. Silverglate has written about the Friedmans film before here.)

The new DVD material, however, elucidates just how flawed the Friedman investigation was. The police moved and manipulated evidence of pornography within the house. And they conducted coercive interviews with the children in the computer class. In the film, one of the detectives on the case, Lloyd Doppman, warns that it's dangerous to ask leading questions when dealing with suggestible children. Jarecki juxtaposes this statement by Doppman's colleague, Detective Anthony Squeglia, asserting that in questioning children you must imply the answer without room for denial or evasion: "You don't give 'em an option, really." Not included in the film, however, was the rest of the interview with Squeglia, in which Squeglia says that he had to hold four or five interrogation sessions before the children relented and became "a whole new ball of wax."

In addition, the DVD discloses that Jarecki had access to the contents of a tape recording surreptitiously made by one mother while detectives questioned her son (transcript available online). In that recording, the detectives made the mother leave the room while they told the boy that Arnold Friedman had confessed that "he sodomized a lot of children," and that two other boys "both say that they saw [you] engaged in it." When the boy continued to deny that he had seen any abuse, the detectives insinuated that he would become a homosexual unless he admitted to being abused. They told him that as an abused child he had a "little monster inside" that would "rear its ugly head" unless he "gets help and admits that he was victimized." The child continued to say nothing had happened. After additional failed attempts to pressure the child into speaking, the detectives ended the interview. As they left, one told the mother that her son "was a wise guy and I didn't like his answers."

The DVD includes startling outtakes from Jarecki's interview with one of the principal accusers. Reclining on a couch with his legs spread and his face hidden by shadows, the unnamed young man makes allegations that are even more bizarre and outlandish than those made in the movie. In the film, he described a regular "leapfrog" game, in which "our [the children's] asses would be in the air" and Arnold and Jesse would leap from student to student, "sticking their dicks in our asses." (No physical evidence of sodomy or penetration was ever documented.) In the DVD, we learn that, like many other false child-abuse accusers, the student lived in "a very destructive household" in which "my mom and my father were constantly fighting all the time." "My father," he says, "didn't really give two fucks about my life." As he goes into gruesome detail about a wide variety of sexual games in the Friedmans' computer classes, his voice becomes strangely excited. "If you were a favorite, you'd get your [his?] dick rammed up your ass for like 10 minutes. Then you'd have to swallow his semen or something like that, you know?" He appears to relish describing how one of the Friedmans put semen on a stick of gum and forced him to chew it, and how Arnold once ejaculated into a glass of orange juice and forced the class to drink it. 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.

This witness—the source of 35 sodomy counts brought against the Friedmans—"remembered" this abuse after undergoing hypnotic memory recovery. (As he said in the film, "I just remember that I went through hypnosis, came out, and it [the abuse] was in my mind.") Hypnotic recovery is notorious for creating false memories. (In the DVD's commentary track, Jarecki tells us that he had scheduled an interview with the hypnotists who "recovered" victim memories in the Friedman case, but the therapists canceled at the last minute.)

Those people who believe in the Friedmans' guilt often cite, as damning evidence, the film's failure to reveal that another young man, Ross Goldstein, was arrested for abuse. What the new DVD materials elucidate is just how spurious the case against Goldstein was. If anything, Goldstein's arrest bolsters the case for Jesse Friedman's innocence. Here, Jarecki reveals how Goldstein, then 18 and a friend of Jesse, was intimidated into becoming a witness against the Friedmans. When he initially refused to cooperate in interrogations, the police arrested him and charged him with being Jesse's accomplice. This meant that he could face up to 25 years in prison if convicted. The police then offered the teenager a plea bargain: In exchange for testifying against Jesse, Goldstein would receive a mere six-month sentence. Within a few weeks, he accepted this offer.

Admittedly, arguing the Friedmans' innocence is complicated by the fact that Arnold Friedman was a pedophile. (He admits to once having molested two boys, though he maintained that no molestation took place in Great Neck.) Still, the fact is that there is no evidence of mass molestation—nor any evidence of Jesse's being a pedophile. Indeed, Goldstein's story parallels the pressure and intimidation placed on Jesse to plead guilty—as he ultimately did. The anti-Friedman constituency cites his plea as conclusive evidence that the crimes occurred. But given the social hysteria of that moment—and the lack of physical evidence—Jesse's decision to plead guilty hardly seems definitive. Faced with the prospect of a trial before a judge and community who had apparently concluded his guilt before the fact, what rational person would not plead guilty in order to avoid the maximum sentence of 100 years in prison? (Indeed, by assembling so much new evidence on the DVD and in the film, Jarecki has enabled Jesse to file a motion to vacate his conviction.)

Why did Jarecki choose to present the Friedmans' case "evenhandedly," despite uncovering overwhelming evidence that no crimes occurred? Jarecki argues that he had to maintain balance so that the film would be taken seriously by viewers. This is not a frivolous point. But Richard Henkin, a co-producer and editor, makes a revealing comment on the DVD:

We tried to build the film like any dramatic film. I think we didn't think to ourselves, well, it's a documentary and therefore it needs to follow this structure that's based on historical information and putting it in the context of other cases like this. You know we knew this was a film about the family. It wasn't a film about a phenomenon. Or it wasn't a film about a period in American history. It was a film about a family.

In other words, the makers of Capturing the Friedmans made a studied decision to minimize the historical context of the charges for the sake of drama. Had the filmmakers placed the case in full perspective and included the overwhelming evidence they had uncovered against the prosecution, the movie would have been less evenhanded but perhaps more responsible. Jesse spent 13 years in prison for crimes that almost certainly never occurred—and to which he was forced to plead guilty because the hysteria of the moment made a fair trial impossible. Jarecki continues to maintain that if the film had been less evenhanded the audience would not have thought deeply about where the truth lay. We think, however, that Jarecki underestimates his audience.

Harvey A. Silverglate is a Boston-based criminal-defense and civil-liberties litigator and writer. Carl Takei, former columnist for the Brown Daily Herald, is a paralegal, writer, and soon-to-be law student.

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NEWS RELEASE

Academy Silences Child Sexual Assault Victims

Contact: Irene Weiser 607-539-6856

Stop Family Violence, Executive Director

February 28, 2004

New York, NY (February 28, 2004). Despite the nomination of three films that have child sexual abuse as a central theme, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences is ignoring 15,000 emails, the personal pleas of 200 victims, and the recommendation of 300 organizations and health care, law enforcement, academic, mental health and sexual assault professionals who asked the Academy to allow time on their awards show to air a public service announcement that would educate the nation about the tragic reality of child sexual abuse and tell people where to turn for help.

"The industry has made untold millions in profits this year byportraying the suffering of our nation's children as a form of entertainment," said Irene Weiser, executive director of Stop Family Violence, a national grassroots activist organization. "How shameful that they are unwilling to donate thirty seconds of their time to acknowledge that child sexual abuse is not entertainment, but rather a frightening and devastating reality for millions of our nation's children."

Weiser was notified of the Academy's decision not to air the educational television spots by Richard Wilson, administrative assistant to Mr. Frank R. Pierson, President, Board of Governors of the Academy, late Friday afternoon.

The three films nominated for Academy Awards this year that revolve around child sexual abuse are: "Capturing the Friedmans", "Mystic River" and "Monster". "Capturing the Friedmans" a documentary about child sexual abuse and pedophilia has been the subject of recent controversy. Abuse experts claim the film distorts the truth and perpetuates myths about child sexual abuse that will harm victims and benefit perpetrators. The film has been used to raise funds to free convicted pedophiles.

Last week, in response to the nomination of "Capturing the Friedmans" for best documentary, two of Jesse Friedman's victims issued an open letter to the Academy, which stated, in part "If this film does win an Oscar, it will be won at the expense of silencing the plaintive voices of abused children once again, just as our own voices were silenced 16 years ago by the threats and intimidation of our tormentors, Arnold and Jesse Friedman."

"Through the Academy's mercenary response in refusing to air a thirty second public service message, victims have just been silenced once again." Weiser said.

"While we appreciate the entertainment industry's telling victim stories in film and on television, we wish they would also tell people that solutions do exist. I'm saddened that the Academy did not use this opportunity for the public good," said Anne Lee, President and CEO of Darkness to Light, whose organization produced the public service announcements. "When these PSAs aired on other channels, calls to our hotline increased by a hundredfold. People need to know thatthey are not alone and where to turn for help."

Child sexual abuse is a national public health crisis. One in four girls and one in six boys will be sexually abused before their eighteenthbirthday; fewer than one in ten will tell. The shame at what has happened, and the fear that they won't be believed keeps them silent. The effects of child sexual abuse are devastating and can last a lifetime; victims have a higher incidence of school failure and dropout and are more prone to depression, suicide substance abuse, violence and adult criminality.

"The Academy once used the awards platform to give legitimacy to the suffering of millions who suffered from the once unspeakable, AIDS."said Dr. Joyanna Silberg, PhD, a child psychologist and vice-president of the Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence. "Child sexual abuse is today's unspeakable. The Academy has a powerful platform which they could have used to benefit society and the many victims of this crime."

Abuse experts from around the nation requested that the Academy:

Not award an Oscar to "Capturing the Friedmans"

Donate its time to air public service announcements that tell the truth about child sexual abuse and inform people where to get help.

Allow a celebrity spokesperson to speak about the seriousness of the issue of child sexual abuse in our society.

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Friedman documentary - Minimalist approach

By Lynn Crook

Tri-City Herald - Febuary 29, 2004

The 2/20 article on victims speaking out against the Oscar-nominated documentary "Capturing the Friedmans" raises a question. If a producer omits incriminating evidence from a documentary about a crime, will audiences depart convinced the defendants were railroaded?

Jesse Friedman and his father, Arnold, were convicted in the late 80s of molesting young students in Arnold's in-home computer classes. Both Friedmans spent time in prison. Many film critics appear convinced that Jesse was railroaded, and that his father also may have been.

Producer Andrew Jarecki told CNN last June, "All I really needed to do is to bring all the evidence to the audience for the film and let them have their own opinion."

But the producer failed to bring such evidence to the audience as:

(1) Jesse confessed not once, but twice;(2) Jesse failed two lie detector tests;(3) the children's' accusations underwent a grand jury investigation before charges were filed, and(4) there was no physical evidence, not because none was found, but because none was sought after the Friedmans pled guilty. (Source: http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/)

We'll find out what Academy members think of this minimalist approach to documentary production when the Oscars are announced today.

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Victims break their silence

By Victor Manuel Ramos

Newsday - Feburary 29, 2004

All these years later, he can still close his eyes and feel the haunting stare of the wiry young man who he said started fondling him a few weeks into computer classes when he was 10 years old.

Jesse Friedman, then 17 or 18, was supposed to be teaching the boy -- assigned the name "Gregory Doe" by law enforcement officials -- how to convert the basic binary language of the Commodore 64 computer for use on his own Apple IIc. "Uncle Jesse" -- as Gregory was told to call him -- was showing him other things as well, he recounted.

Right there in the middle of the class, out among the other students in the basement room of Arnold Friedman's Great Neck home, Gregory Doe said the abuse started when Jesse Friedman slid his hand onto his thighs and started rubbing. He told Gregory to relax then groped him some before reaching inside his pants.

All the while, Jesse's blue eyes were staring into his own.

"He touched me, you know, the wrong way ... " said Gregory, omitting some of the more embarrassing details of a story he told long ago to Nassau County law enforcement and now finds himself compelled to tell all over again. Sitting in a restaurant booth near his home, he described what he endured during those computer classes. Speaking of specific sexual acts, Gregory gagged, as if to vomit.

One of 17 boys

Today, he is a 27-year-old business manager, engaged to his girlfriend, hoping to build a life untainted by a past he would prefer to forget. He said he remains plagued by a persistent physical injury that has never healed. He asked not to be identified. And he moved more than 400 miles away from his family in Great Neck to put distance between himself and these crimes.

"The glassy eyes, I'd always remember," Gregory said. "You know, he had very glassy eyes."

In 1987, Gregory was one of the 17 boys who told Nassau law enforcement officials that they had been abused at the Friedmans' home on Piccadilly Road. Of these, 13 would later testify before a grand jury to substantiate criminal charges against Jesse Friedman, his father, Arnold, and another teenager, Ross Goldstein, 17. As their separate trials approached in 1988, father and son both changed their pleas from not guilty to guilty. So did Goldstein.

Now, in a turn of events none of the young men who testified would have foreseen, "Capturing the Friedmans," a controversial documentary about the case that has already won critical and commercial acclaim, makes them feel as if they're portrayed as liars.

Tonight, the film will compete for an Oscar for best documentary film. Many critics were enamored with the intensely intimate yet ultimately ambiguous look at the case and the voyeuristic pleasures it afforded viewers, by showing the Friedmans' turmoil through the family's own home videos. Director and co-producer Andrew Jarecki has been criticized by law enforcement officials, the boys who testified, and those close to them for allegedly manipulating crucial facts and leaving others out entirely to enhance the dramatic effect of the film. Goldstein isn't mentioned, and the accusers appear only briefly in the film.

Along with the success of the film has come a renewed effort to throw out the conviction of Jesse Friedman. Now 34, and after serving 13 years in prison, he has gone back to Nassau County Court asking that his conviction be overturned. Arnold Friedman died in state prison of an apparent suicide in 1995, after serving about 8 years of a 10- to 30-year sentence.

The film and the court challenge have brought pain and outrage to the young men in their 20s trying to rebuild their lives. It has reluctantly brought them out of their silence. And, for the first time since the case surfaced, many of them are commenting on the documentary and the court motion -- one in his own voice, one through an interview with his parents and his own written statement, and four through a lawyer hired to speak on their behalf and protect their privacy. The six reached by Newsday say the film is misleading, and they want Jesse Friedman's conviction to stand.

"My testimony was twisted in the movie, and I am here to set the record straight that this did happen and I am not afraid," said Gregory.

His main complaint with Jarecki's documentary -- which he cooperated with by sitting for extensive filmed questioning -- was that he came across as if he had not remembered any of the abuse until after hypnosis. In it, his face is in shadows, he is sloppily reclining on a couch and waving his arms as he speaks.

Two men who refer to themselves as victims -- Gregory and a man who is now 24 -- have written the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to say the film does not deserve an Oscar. "We were abused, tortured, and humiliated by Arnold and Jesse Friedman," the letter states, while complaining that Jesse Friedman "is being paraded like a celebrity while we have been left in the shadows, powerless and voiceless once again."

The retired detective who led the investigation, and appears in the film, now wishes she had never cooperated with Jarecki. "I regret the effect on the victims," Frances Galasso said.

"To call Jarecki's work an investigation is ridiculous because he didn't speak to most victims. How can you interview two victims ... to say it didn't happen," said retired Judge Abbey Boklan, who heard the original case.

Director's take

By all accounts, the documentary, which is the first full-length film by Jarecki, a multimillionaire entrepreneur, has been a critical and financial success. "Capturing the Friedmans" took the Sundance Film Festival's grand jury prize in January 2003.

In the documentary, the truth of what happened on Piccadilly Road is left to the viewer. 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.

At times, the documentary seems to strongly suggest the Friedmans are guilty. For example, Arnold Friedman is shown to collect child pornography, and the film tells of his admission that he was a pedophile. The film states that he had sexual relations with his brother when he was a child. The elder Friedman also states that he was worried when his sons were young that he would have difficulty keeping his hands off them. The film shows both Friedmans before the judge pleading guilty to the charges.

Then the point of view shifts, making suggestions that they weren't guilty. For example, the film shows the statements of some of the students saying they were not abused and did not witness abuse. A detective is shown saying he approached children by telling them he knew the abuse had taken place and asking leading questions. It shows the judge saying she "never" had a doubt about the Friedmans' guilt.

Jarecki strongly defended his documentary in this statement sent by e-mail Feb. 14. He said that "a man went to jail based on embarrassingly bad police work, and now Newsday continues to give [the police and the judge] credence. I worry for Jesse and I continue to do so."

The documentary also brings to light the use of hypnosis and group therapy techniques and how those practices could have created false memories in children. Jarecki uses a clip of Gregory Doe saying he underwent hypnosis to remember the abuse more clearly and then includes an expert who characterizes such methods as unreliable.

Released in May of last year, the film has attracted nonstop publicity with Jarecki's many media interviews and film-discussion appearances and his advocacy for the re-examination of Jesse Friedman's conviction. Industry reports put the documentary's box office sales at more than $3 million, not counting DVD proceeds.

Last month, Friedman filed a motion in Nassau County Court seeking "to vacate his conviction" -- which, if successful, would eventually clear him from his highest Level 3 violent sex offender status and the strict parole conditions he lives under. He filed a second motion last month in state appellate court in Brooklyn asking for a change of venue because Friedman and his legal team don't think he can get a fair hearing in Nassau County.

A student at Hunter College, Friedman must remain home between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m.; he cannot be around children without permission from his parole officer; his neighbors could be notified of his criminal history; and he isn't allowed beyond the five boroughs of New York City. He will be on the state sex offender registry until parole officials decide he is no longer a threat to children.

In his motion, Friedman's attorneys argue that prosecutors "violated his rights" by withholding exculpatory information.

The filing says that police prompted impressionable boys with suggestive questioning and that the children's therapists misused hypnosis, memory recovery and visualization techniques.

"We have presented a detailed 77-page legal motion to the Nassau County Court, with approximately 900 pages of exhibits, that provides compelling evidence that Jesse Friedman pled guilty to a crime he did not commit," Friedman attorney Mark Gimpel wrote in a statement sent to Newsday Friday. "The only way to resolve the conflicting claims is to have an open hearing before an impartial court."

Nassau District Attorney Denis Dillon said through a spokesman that his office would respond to all of the motion's allegations -- including the alleged use of hypnosis -- in court. His office's appeals bureau is preparing a written response.

Friedman did not respond to repeated requests for an interview for this story. In a short interview last month, he called for more former computer students to come forward and confirm that nothing inappropriate went on when they were in class. "I am not a child molester," he said.

For the DVD release of "Capturing the Friedmans" last month, Jarecki added new material. There is an option available on the DVD whereby you can hear Jarecki explain how he made his editing decisions as you watch the documentary. In all-new footage, he sits with Jesse Friedman, speaking about Jesse's new motion, the film and the original case.

"Who do you believe?" asks the film's promotional materials, seen plastered on the inside of New York City subway cars.

The case against them

It all started by mail.

Sometime around the mid-1980s, U.S. customs officials intercepted a child pornography publication from overseas addressed to Arnold Friedman in Great Neck. The incident triggered a U.S. Postal Inspection Service sting operation. Arnold Friedman, then the 56-year-old father of three boys who had recently retired from his Bayside High School teaching job, answered the requests of an investigator posing as a pedophile in 1987. Friedman was arrested and charged with sending and receiving child pornography by mail.

"I dressed up as a mail carrier, had him sign his name, then I went back in after half an hour, to execute the search warrant," recalled John McDermott, who currently heads the agency's Long Island fraud team. Assorted pornography and erotic computer games were found at the home, according to court records. Inspectors referred the case to the Nassau Police Department when they realized that Arnold Friedman taught mostly school age and preadolescent boys how to use computers from a makeshift lab in his basement.

Sex squad detectives conducted their own search of the house and spread throughout Great Neck in teams of two, interviewing boys who would eventually say enough for police to amass 343 charges ranging from child endangerment, sexual abuse, attempted sodomy and sodomy against Arnold Friedman and his youngest son, Jesse Friedman, who was 18. 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. His willingness to testify against Jesse Friedman helped to break the case. Goldstein did not answer repeated requests for an interview.

The Friedmans' arrests came the day before Thanksgiving in 1987, unleashing one of the largest child sex abuse investigations to date in Nassau County. Initially, the accused pleaded not guilty. By the following March, Arnold Friedman had changed his plea to guilty, admitting before the court that he abused the children.

When he pleaded guilty against his attorney's advice the following December, Jesse Friedman made a short statement admitting his guilt and saying he too was a victim of his father's abuse.

Jesse Friedman spoke to Newsday and to then-talk show host Geraldo Rivera in separate interviews while incarcerated in 1989. He said some children were abused while others witnessed the abuse. He said his father started abusing him by fondling him while reading him bedtime stories and then escalated to outright incest by the time Jesse hit puberty. In the interviews, Jesse admitted he later became the abuser, forcing children to assume sexual positions and to perform oral sex.

Before the year was out, Jesse Friedman had recanted everything. In a later interview with Newsday, he said he lied about his father abusing him, and said he did not abuse any of the children. He said he lied to manipulate the media so people would feel sorry for him.

Documentary

Jarecki did not set out to make "Capturing the Friedmans." He said he just wanted to return to his first love of filmmaking after making millions of dollars as a businessman.

The 1985 English graduate from Princeton University said he had directed plays in school but went into business instead in 1989. Jarecki and two friends co-founded Moviefone, the movie listings company.

The company went public in 1994 and was later sold to AOL for $388 million. Jarecki was the largest shareholder and thus netted the largest sum. Before the business was sold, he made his first attempt at making a film -- a short called "Swimming" -- about children in a Harlem swimming group.

The project he started in early 2000 -- on the lives of birthday party clowns -- was to be his first full-length documentary. Working on that idea, he met Arnold Friedman's oldest son, David Friedman, a clown known on the Manhattan birthday party circuit by the stage names Silly Billy and Doctor Blood. Jarecki said David Friedman hinted at his family's problems just enough to trigger his curiosity. Jarecki began researching the Friedmans' sexual abuse case and dropped the clown project when David Friedman handed over a treasure trove of family home videos taken throughout the time of the case. Soon after, Jarecki had the first of many interviews with Jesse Friedman, in an upstate prison.

The documentary that resulted is largely the Friedman family's story, as told by their own family video history. In the film, Jarecki focuses on the idea that several of the accusers had been hypnotized or had participated in group therapy, a practice he criticizes as unreliable. Law enforcement officials said those techniques were not used in the gathering of evidence or grand jury testimony for the case against the three co-defendants. Instead, they said some of the methods were used by mental health experts in therapy after the children had provided their statements of abuse.

Last year, Jarecki told Newsday that he started believing Jesse Friedman because of his openness during the making of the documentary: "Many people made an effort to obfuscate in this case and in the end I found Jesse Friedman was the most open with me," Jarecki said.

At his many appearances promoting the film, Jarecki has stopped short of saying that Jesse Friedman is innocent, but he has clearly taken his side.

"It is a sensitive time for the case because it is pending in front of the court, so I'm not sure if it's smart for me to be commenting," Jarecki wrote in an e-mail response to questions Newsday posed earlier this month. "I have no agenda -- the motion is Jesse's and speaks for itself." In another e-mail, Jarecki said that "unnamed alleged victims" should not get to make anonymous claims against Jesse Friedman, even though this is common treatment for victims in child sex abuse cases. Jarecki himself gave them and other sources anonymity in his film and in the outtakes included in the DVD. Thirteen boys testified before the grand jury. One of the 13 is featured recanting in the documentary.

Ross Cheit, a political science professor at Brown University who studies the media's portrayal of sexual abuse cases and has researched court documents in the Friedmans' case, said "Capturing the Friedmans" follows a pattern of journalism where complicated abuse cases are oversimplified for the sake of telling a good story.

"The actual facts are far more complicated than what Jarecki explains in the film. It is clear that he leaves out a whole lot of important evidence," Cheit said. "I think it makes a very compelling story. The wrongful conviction story is very compelling and more so than saying a convicted man is guilty as charged. That's not a good story."

A family nightmare

Just the mention of his name can bring back nightmares.

"Jesse was the scariest of all of them to my son," one Long Island mother of a then-7-year-old boy told Newsday. She and her husband both asked that their identity be withheld to protect their son's privacy. "Jesse is the bogeyman in the covers, the bogeyman under the bed. Even when he is fifty years old, Jesse will be the bogeyman under the bed."

She said the popularity of the documentary and Friedman's return to court asking that his conviction be overturned was "disgusting" and "nauseating."

Innocence was what her son lost, she said.

"I see this media circus that Jarecki has generated to promote this film as an unjustified and cynical attack on the defenders of these children and therefore supportive of those who would victimize them," she said.

'I only understood fear'

She and her husband enrolled their son in the computer class for several months in early 1987 after her husband attended the adult program and met Arnold Friedman. Looking back, she said she remembers thinking it was odd that parents were never allowed inside the classroom.

Soon after enrolling in the class, she said, her son's behavior changed. He began drawing sharks and believed they were swimming in his bedroom floor's blue rug. Once, when she asked her son what he was learning in the class, he and a classmate looked at each other with "sheepish grins on their faces" and giggled.

At the end, she said, it was Jesse Friedman's suspicious behavior, and her son's unwillingness to return for another season, that led her and her husband to pull him out of the school before the scandal broke.

All these years later, she still has vivid images of Friedman. "You know, Jesse had this hair," she said. "It was all greasy hair, black hair. He had it always over his eyes. He would never look at you. I just have this picture flashing in my head of Jesse opening the door. ... He would look to one side, he would open the door and he'd look over here and he'd say, 'Oh, we'll be done soon.' And I'd say, 'Well, can I wait inside?' and he'd say, 'No, no, no, no, no. ... ' Never would let me in."

When the case broke, her son told detectives that he witnessed when another child, who was overweight and reportedly the frequent target of humiliation, was sodomized in front of the class -- an event supported by that other child's detailed statement to police. Her son told of being taken to the bathroom, where Arnold Friedman attempted undressing him but had trouble taking off the belt he was wearing.

Eventually, he told detectives and his parents that he was photographed urinating and was subjected to sexual abuse. The way her son described it at the time was that "they did things to him that made him feel like he was going to go to the bathroom," his mother said.

Their son freely volunteered information without any pressure from detectives, with both parents nearby, she said.

The years have not diminished the horror, the father said in an interview with Newsday. Because of the case, he said he still has trouble communicating with his son and sometimes blames himself for enrolling him in the classes.

"I saw a huge, huge amount of anger that was harbored inside his heart towards Arnold Friedman and his son Jesse, and to Ross Goldstein," said the father. Finally, when his son told him what had happened, he came to understand his son's anger. Now a law student, the son declined to be interviewed for this story. But he provided a written statement saying that the documentary, and the resulting flurry of interest in the case, is cruel and unfair to him and the others who said they suffered abuse.

"Arnold and Jesse Friedman violated my trust for them as educators by sexually abusing my classmates and I at their home," he wrote. " ... I was seven years old when I was in the custody of Arnold and Jesse Friedman. At that time I did not understand the dynamics of human sexuality. I only understood fear."

To ensure secrecy, Arnold and Jesse Friedman told some of the boys who testified they suffered abuse that they would burn down their houses, kill them, and hurt their parents if they revealed the abuse, according them, investigators and some parents.

If Friedman's effort to have his conviction thrown out proceeds, the man said he does not want to have to testify, and once again relive the horror of the abuse. He has rebuilt his life, he said, adding that the "victims are entitled to closure."

To the father, the uncovering of what had happened to his son has shattered any illusions of the innocence of youth.

It "taught me that life was . .. not pristine, people were not pristine, and there are people out there who would willingly violate the privacy of a child and the innocence of a child. That was a very, very difficult pill to swallow as a parent, that our children could be so vulnerable."

A possible return to court

Others who testified in the first case aren't looking forward to the possibility of having to relive the abuse in court. It is unclear whether Friedman's motion to overturn will come to that.

Sal Marinello, the Mineola lawyer who says he represents "four victims," said his clients do not want to step backward to a time they have tried to forget. He said it was the responsibility of Friedman's attorneys to demonstrate that they have compelling new evidence to justify calling witnesses.

"Why should members of the public, their colleagues, family members, friends, hear about this now?" Marinello said. According to the recent motion, one of the 13 victims who testified of abuse before the grand jury has recanted. Friedman's lawyers have used transcripts from the documentary as evidence in the motion. Identified in court records as Dennis Doe, the witness appears in the movie saying police pressured him to speak up.

"I kind of broke down. I started crying," a voice attributed to Dennis Doe says in the film. "And when I started to tell them things, I was telling myself it was not true. I was telling myself, 'Just say this to them to get them off your back.' "

Friedman's motion includes eight people somehow connected to the computer classes who say they never witnessed any abuse at the Friedman house.

The joint letter of the two young men to the Academy Awards panel said, in part, "We did not lie. We did not exaggerate. We were never hypnotized to tell our stories. The director twisted the facts in the film to make it appear that way."

Gregory Doe said he does not need hypnosis to remind him of what the Friedmans did to him. His family sent him to a private therapist after he provided his statement to police but prior to his appearance before the grand jury. The therapist used hypnosis, he said, to try and get him to the point where he could talk about what had been done to him without throwing up.

He said Jesse Friedman abused him first, followed by Arnold and Goldstein, and that he was made to undress, assume sexual positions and perform and receive oral sex.

The most horrid abuse took place during one-on-one makeup sessions when he was left alone with Arnold Friedman. He said both father and son committed forcible sodomy on him multiple times. He said Arnold and Jesse made him and others play leapfrog naked.

Galasso, the retired chief detective on the case, said Gregory's interview with Newsday was consistent with his original statement to police.

For Gregory, the hullabaloo over Jarecki's film -- and whether the director will pick up an Oscar tonight -- is a sideshow to the legacy of the abuse. Even now, Gregory said he sometimes wakes up at night shaking, especially after hearing of other child abuse cases on the news or elsewhere. What would be passing news to others, hits home for him.

Diagnosed in his preteen years, Gregory said he has persistent rectal bleeding from the abuse. Memories aside, the physical scar will never let him forget. "This is the constant reminder I live with every day," Gregory said, "that I was abused."

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Capturing the Friedmans

By Kevin Canfield

The New York Journal News - February 29, 2004

Some have called "Capturing the Friedmans" the best American film of 2003. That's debatable, but this is certain: It is surely one of the most controversial movies this side of "The Passion of the Christ."

If the film takes home an Academy Award tonight — it's nominated for Best Documentary Feature — there will be rejoicing in some quarters but dismay in others.

Director Andrew Jarecki and producer Marc Smerling — New Yorkers, both — believe their film, the story of a Long Island family left in ruins by a child molestation scandal, is fair to all involved. "We felt strongly for everyone's purposes that the film should be as objective as possible," Jarecki said, as the men sat for a recent interview.

But Abbey Boklan, the Suffolk County judge who sent Arnold Friedman and his son Jesse to prison in the late 1980s, is among those who say the film is a simplified account of a complex case. "It was good theater," Boklan said last week, "but it was inaccurate, unfair and untrue."

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. A visually and emotionally arresting movie, it blends contemporary footage with home movies shot by family members who knew their lives were imploding as the camera rolled.

The family's collapse began in 1987, when police arrested Arnold Friedman, a husband and the father of three boys, on charges he sexually abused boys during computer classes he taught at home. A case that initially focused on the family patriarch was soon expanded to include Arnold and Elaine Friedman's youngest son, Jesse, who was then a teenager.

After lengthy intra-family negotiations that oldest son Dave Friedman thought necessary to get on videotape, both Arnold and Jesse pled guilty. Arnold Friedman committed suicide seven years into a sentence that would have kept him in prison for up to 30 years. Jesse Friedman served a 13-year sentence.

Jesse Friedman was released in 2001. For a while last year he was on Smerling's payroll. Smerling's Notorious Pictures, a film production company based in New York and Los Angeles, hired Friedman to do basic office chores. The idea, Smerling said, was to help Friedman get back on his feet and restore some order to his life.

The revelation that Friedman was an employee of the film's producer will do nothing to dissuade the movie's opponents from believing that it guides the viewer toward the belief that Jesse Friedman was innocent. In addition to Boklan and many police officers who believe their work was unfairly depicted, the film has also angered some of the men who, the court found, were abused as boys by the Friedmans.

Two victims, the Associated Press reported last week, wrote an open letter to Oscar voters asking them not to vote for the film. "If this film does win an Oscar," they wrote, "it will be won at the expense of silencing the plaintive voices of abused children once again, just as our own voices were silenced 16 years ago by the threats and intimidation of our tormentors, Arnold and Jesse Friedman."

Raising doubts?

The film leaves the viewer with the feeling that Arnold Friedman, a confessed pedophile, was probably guilty of at least some form of molestation. But the evidence, at least as presented in the "Friedmans," is less convincing on the matter of Jesse Friedman's conviction. For one thing, on-camera comments from police are often inconsistent with the evidence presented at trial. The police, too, questioned potential victims in a manner that, at least as purported in the movie, was designed to elicit sworn statements that would make it easier to convict Jesse Friedman. And the film is bereft of almost anyone who says they were victimized by Jesse.

That, Jarecki and Smerling said, is because they were able to locate only one victim — he appears in the film sitting on a dimly lit couch in order to protect his identity — willing to talk about Jesse Friedman's alleged crimes.

"After four years of this, we couldn't find anyone — except for that boy on the couch — who even told us that Jesse Friedman had done anything bad to them," said Jarecki over a recent lunch on the Upper East Side. "And that boy on the couch says he only recalled this after he was hypnotized. Based on that, it's hard to imagine how an 18-year-old kid went to jail for almost as long as he'd been alive (13 years) on that kind of evidence."

Added Smerling, who lives in Irvington, "I think we both agree that we never found anything in our research that made us think that Jesse was guilty."

(Jesse Friedman has filed court documents seeking to overturn his conviction. He writes about the case on his Web site, freejesse.net.)

Boklan, though, says the film paints an incomplete portrait of the case against Jesse Friedman. The judge, who has since retired, said moviegoers who believe Jesse Friedman innocent might've come to a different conclusion had Jarecki included footage of Friedman's confession on Geraldo Rivera's talk show or noted that Friedman failed two lie detector tests administered by his lawyer.

"His investigation was tremendously flawed," he added, "because he interviewed so few children."

Apprised that Boklan was speaking out against the film, Jesse Friedman's lawyer, Mark Gimpel, released a statement that read, in part: "We have presented a detailed 77-page legal motion to the Nassau County Court, with approximately 900 pages of exhibits, that provides compelling evidence that Jesse Friedman pled guilty to a crime he did not commit. We have also asked that the proceedings be moved to another county because we fear Mr. Friedman cannot get a fair hearing there given the unfortunate history of this case and how the police, prosecutors, and original trial judge handled it improperly."

What is perhaps most interesting about the film is how it has consistently provoked such strong reactions. Shortly after it began appearing on screens across the country last May, Smerling and Jarecki began receiving reports from theater owners who found that audiences were sticking around after the closing credits to discuss the movie. So they embarked on a sort of barnstorming tour in which they fielded questions from audience members and explained their motivation for making the movie.

"We felt that people were seeing the film and they were kind of getting like this," said Smerling, balling his fists and pulling his arms close to his body. "They were getting sort of folded up and they needed to be unfolded a little bit. They needed to feel like they could talk about it. The Q&A's ended up being extremely active, participatory."

Some of that is captured in the two hours of extras that accompany the just-released DVD version of the film. In addition to a primer on the cases against Arnold and Jesse Friedman, answers to questions often asked about the film and additional scenes that didn't make it into the 107-minute documentary, Jarecki and Smerling included comments — some quite critical — from people who attended the film's premieres at New York theaters.

"The film has got a debate started in a place where there wasn't one before," Jarecki said. "The debate is the most interesting thing to me. I love having captured some of the debate on film permanently."

Tears of a clown

That Jarecki, the founder of Moviefone, would be in such a position seemed improbable just a few years ago. In 1999 he sold the film listings company to AOL for a figure reportedly close to $400 million, leaving him with lots of money and free time. Around that time he approached longtime friend Smerling about his idea for a documentary about children's birthday clowns.

As it turned out, the most prominent clown in the business was David Friedman, Jesse's older brother. During hours of interviews with David Friedman, Jarecki learned the family's history, and a film about kids' entertainment became one about alleged crimes against children. (The original film, "Just A Clown," is being released as a documentary short this year.)

It was in working with David Friedman that Jarecki discovered the cache of family videotapes. The home footage, shot 15 years ago as the family was coming apart, makes up a significant part of the story. Anyone who has seen the movie knows that it would be a much different film without so many strikingly candid moments caught on camera.

This, Jarecki said, is where documentaries are headed, with so many families and potential filmmakers equipped with home videotaping gear.

"I think, in a way, 10 years from now, all documentaries will have a much higher percentage of found footage," he said. "Nowadays we film everything. We don't just film birthday parties, we film all kinds of things in our lives. ... I think this the beginning of a new direction for documentary, which is going to be much more about capturing real life in ways that were not designed by a director, necessarily."

Still, there is the matter of the here and now. The best documentary of the year? Or propaganda for a pedophile? That's one debate Oscar doesn't seem likely to settle.

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Film undermines efforts to fight child abuse

By Jennifer Freyd

The Register-Guard (Eugene, Oregon) - February 29, 2004

We are in serious denial, as a culture, about child abuse and its brutal costs - both to our youth and to our nation. The latest sign of our collective denial is the nomination of a seriously flawed film for an Oscar.

In the late 1980s a jury in Great Neck, on New York's Long Island, found three people guilty of multiple counts of child abuse. The details, as always, are sordid.

The perpetrators pretended to be teaching computer literacy to young boys in their basement. In fact, they were showing them pornography and inducing them to commit various sexual acts. Thirteen of the victims came forward to accuse the perpetrators, who confessed and were convicted.

Almost 20 years later, filmmaker Andrew Jarecki stumbled onto this case and made a documentary about it: "Capturing the Friedmans." This film is a favorite to win an Oscar for best documentary when the Academy Awards are televised tonight.

On the surface, the film seems like a fair-minded treatment. However, while the film self-consciously proclaims itself a balanced documentary, on close examination it implicitly takes an advocacy position that undermines our legal system's response to child abuse.

In fact, most reviewers and much of the public apparently believe the film chronicles a miscarriage of justice. The filmmaker has even jumped on the false-accusation bandwagon and is supporting an attempt to overturn the conviction of one of the perpetrators.

Scholars familiar with the case point to many instances where the filmmaker left out crucial evidence. The New York Times reports that six victims have objected to the film's nomination because it distorts reality. Two of the victims objecting to the film wrote, in an open letter to the Academy Awards Committee, "Don't use our story to promote the agenda of a confessed child molester who destroyed our childhood and confessed numerous times."

The case against the Friedmans was airtight, yet the filmmaker has intentionally reframed it as ambiguous, simply by omitting incriminating evidence.

Perhaps the lesson here is that the term "unbiased documentary" is an oxymoron. However, I fear that incredibly strong forces are at work to deny both the extent of child abuse and the significance of its human and social costs.

This film reopens the Friedman case by raising the question of guilt or innocence in the context of a possible miscarriage of justice. Since the film's release, media accounts of the case have actually used terms such as "alleged victims" and "accused perpetrator," as though there had been no conviction.

While I embrace the concept of suspects being innocent until proven guilty, this case involves people already convicted of child abuse in a court of law. At some point in wrongdoing, the truth is not about balance or neutrality, but simply the undisputed facts.

A film that pretends to be neutral in order to reinforce a biased viewpoint can be more powerful than one that openly takes an advocacy position. The practical impact of the film has been to discredit the victims, to create confusion about the conviction of the perpetrators and to generally support the mistaken view that people often are falsely convicted of child abuse.

As the two victims noted in their open letter, "If this film does win an Oscar, it will be won at the expense of silencing the plaintive voices of abused children once again, just as our own voices were silenced 16 years ago by the threats and intimidation of our tormentors, Arnold and Jesse Friedman."

Recasting this case, as director Jarecki does, would be the moral thing to do if there had truly been a miscarriage of justice. However, since there is no question that justice has been served, this film causes new harm to the victims and further muddies the public perception of the realities of child abuse.

Shame on the Academy if this film wins an Oscar. Shame on the media, for being so easily taken in by this lambskin-clad wolf.

Jennifer Freyd is a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. She led a symposium on the science of child abuse for the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting in Seattle earlier this month.

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Capturing Friedmans documentary fails to win Academy Award.

February 29, 2004 (11:09 PM)

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The redemption of Jesse Friedman .

by Bradford R. Pilcher

Jewsweek.com March 9, 2004

A convicted child molester went to jail and his story to the silver screen. Now, he's free and hoping to clear his name. Bradford R. Pilcher catches up with Jesse Friedman on the road to salvation

Imagine a man who pled guilty to serial child molestation. Imagine a champion of the wrongfully convicted. Imagine they are one and the same. The odds are, you wouldn't imagine Jesse Friedman.

Nevertheless, the bookish thirty-something whose story formed the heart of the award-winning documentary, Capturing the Friedmans, is both of those things and quite a bit more. Speaking to him the day after the documentary of his alleged crimes and subsequent imprisonment lost its bid for the Best Documentary Oscar, Jesse came off as everything you'd least expect.

Everything you'd least expect must have been a bit like it seemed in 1988, when he was accused of molesting dozens of children in his father's computer class. The young Jesse had only just entered college when police entered his home and carted he and his father off to jail. He was eighteen, but he looked every bit the overwhelmed boy. It must have been at least somewhat difficult to imagine this nice Jewish boy from Long Island was a serial child molester.

Despite having been jailed for a sizeable portion of his life, and despite his protests that he was an innocent railroaded by police, prosecutors, and the media, Jesse seems quite willing to refrain from anger and disdain. Of the police he says, "You know, they were doing their job. They thought they were doing a good thing ... it's hard to really find fault or blame."

On the criminal justice system he states, "It's a human system. It's not perfect. It tries to be as good as it can be, and it can't be any better than that." While he admits there's need for reform, he isn't sure what that reform should be, even while he advocates for the wrongly accused through the National Center for Reason and Justice.

"There is certainly some conciliatoriness that comes with time," he says after some moments of contemplation, "but we didn't know in 1988 what it was that the police had done, or what the children had done, or how it was that people made these statements that caused me and my father to get arrested."

Evidence of injustice

All of which is true. In 1988, it wasn't fully understood how hypnosis could implant false memories in children. Had such evidence been readily available, perhaps the testimony of children who'd admitted to abuse only after undergoing hypnosis would have been voided. In 1988, Jesse didn't know that some materials were never turned over to the defense. Nobody knew that a string of similar cases around the country would be overturned, ending what had been a hysteria of child sex ring accusations.

But now, in 2004, these things and more are not only known, they've been widely publicized in books and in the film Capturing the Friedmans. Jesse, for his part, has spent much of the past years amassing evidence to exonerate himself. Among other statements, he has "affidavits from three people who were in the computer classes, who remember speaking to the police, and remember telling the police nothing happened." He also has notes from an interview with one of the police detectives "who says she had to go back fifteen times to a particular child before the child gave a statement of having been molested."

"He kept it deep inside. I drew it out again," the detective is alleged to have said.

The recently released DVD includes that much more information. Extended interviews with detectives yield unsettling insights into their methods. One investigator claims when interviewing the children, "You don't really give them an option." Another transcript recorded by one of the children's mother shows detectives telling a boy he'll become a homosexual if he doesn't admit to being abused.

"Your son was a wise guy, and I didn't like his answers," Detective Hatch tells the mother after the boy adamantly denies ever being abused or witnessing abuse.

Another extended interview with an alleged victim who still claims abuse, is even more damning for the prosecution. The young man admits to remembering his abuse only after hypnosis and claims he came from a destructive family environment where his parents constantly fought. That these are instant red flags common to other false-child abuse accusers never occurs to him.

His face darkened while he reclines on a sofa, he then proceeds to make claims so outlandish in their scope as to be utterly unbelievable. 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.

With that evidence, and scores more unearthed in the making of the documentary, Jesse has filed a motion to have his case overturned. "There's no way to know at this point what that will mean," he explains to Jewsweek. "The judge could order the attorneys to come into court and make oral arguments. The judge could deny it outright [or] grant it. It could be almost anything."

Appealing a guilty plea?

Despite the evidence, there is that nagging question: Why did Jesse plead guilty if he was innocent? He didn't just plead guilty either. He got up in open court and tearfully claimed his father molested him. He went on national television to tell Geraldo Rivera he was guilty.

"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. Other high profile child molestation cases, such as the McMartins ended in a complete dismissal of the charges. "I left a lot of people in prison when I was paroled who went to trial and lost. One guy was sentenced to 275 years in prison and he's still there, with no more appeals."

Jesse's explanation of his guilty plea is a simple one, and it makes sense if you think about it in the context of what was happening in Great Neck in 1988. He was faced with vigilante parents, a trial that seemed like a no-win situation, a judge who'd indicated she believed he was guilty, and the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison. He cut a deal, but in order to garner sympathy and perhaps secure an earlier release, he had to come off as the victim.

His brother David indicated it was Jesse's lawyer, Peter Panaro, who encouraged Jesse to claim his father had molested him and forced him to participate in the abuse of the young boys. Whoever had the idea, Jesse admits to the strategy. If he claimed he was innocent, the parole board would consider him a potential repeat offender and keep him in jail. If he claimed he'd done it, he'd be no better off. Better to play the victim.

"When I saw that wasn't going to change anything, I stopped saying it," he claims.

If what he says is true, it definitely complicates his appeal. "It certainly complicates matters, because there's sort of a general prejudice," he says. "Some people look at it and say he's trying to beat it on a technicality. We do make our claim that the charges are not true, but the legal basis for the motion is not strictly that Jesse's innocent." Instead, his case focuses on constitutional violations.

Finding redemption for us all

Today, sixteen years after he was accused of child molestation, Jesse is out of jail. He is forced to wear an electronic tracking device around his ankle and has a curfew. Under Megan's Law, he must not be alone with anyone under eighteen years of age without their parent's consent, and they must always be informed of his criminal record.

He pursues his appeal and works with the National Center for Reason and Justice to support others who've been wrongly convicted of crimes they did not commit. But that sense of the least expected hasn't left Jesse. What is most striking is not his case, nor even his appeal. It's who he is as a person, his way of approaching everything in his life.

Andrew Jarecki, the director of Capturing the Friedmans, has been criticized for not making a film more strongly advocating Jesse's position. A recent article in Slate took him to task for making a "studied decision to minimize the historical context of the charges for dramatic effect," and failing to fully disclose the evidence that so clearly supported Jesse.

"Jarecki continues to maintain that if the film had been less evenhanded the audience would not have thought deeply about where the truth lay," the article closed. "We think, however, that Jarecki underestimates his audience."

Nevertheless, it's easy to understand why Jarecki chose to focus on the family breakdown rather than the facts of Jesse's defense. The family is so fascinating in their dysfunction, so horrifying and captivating in their own personalities, any filmmaker would likely have been drawn to that aspect of the story.

Jesse is the most perplexing of the bunch. His mother comes off as partially insane and insensitive at best. His brother David comes off as a man so gripped by anger and disappointment that he starts to believe his own claims, even when they can't possibly be true. The father, Arnold, is the admitted pedophile. Jesse is perhaps the healthiest Friedman, but he's not just well adjusted. His approach and feelings are more balanced than perhaps any of us could be under similar circumstances.

Responding to the controversy over Jarecki's evenhandedness, Jesse offers this compromised position: "I go back and forth on that. Sometimes I respect the fact that a front line expose would have gone a long way to establishing my innocence, but that doesn't mean that many people would've ended up seeing it. I think Capturing the Friedmans is a marvelous film, and because it's a marvelous film so many more people are seeing it, and that's only a good thing for me."

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. You'd expect the discussions about his family, the facts of his case, would've been more difficult. Ultimately, Jesse surprised even on this point, but nothing was more surprising than what he had to say next.

When asked how he could stay so positive, he never hesitated: "I'm very lucky. What can I tell you? I feel very fortunate."

In defense of Jesse, the symbol

In the end, after the interview with Jesse, the questions still lingered. He had pled guilty to child molestation. He'd gone on national television to make the same admission, but then he recanted. 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.

In the end, nobody really knows if Jesse Friedman is guilty other than Jesse Friedman. Even the alleged victims don't agree with each other on whether any abuse took place, but you have to hope he gets another shot at justice. No jury ever sat in judgment over Jesse. Given the evidence that has been made available, it's hard to imagine twelve people could overcome the reasonable doubts, but that's long since ceased to be the point of Jesse's story.

For those of us who don't have to live with his burden, Jesse Friedman has become something more. Even while he strikes a conciliatory tone, he never retreats from any of the evidence or any of the wrongs he feels have been done to him by police investigators, the judge, or others. He's not self-absorbed, advocating for a second look at our justice system and the basic human sympathy to believe that at least some of our prisoners might be innocent.

"You know, if there's two million people in prison," Jesse explains, "and if you say the criminal justice system is 99.9 percent efficient, there's still two million people in prison and there's no way it's 99.9 percent efficient."

In short, Jesse has found his own redemption, and it's awe-inspiring. Perhaps he is guilty. Perhaps he is fooling us all, but it doesn't matter. He's become a symbol for how truth can elude us, how humans can err, and how even the best of intentions can lead us astray. Most of all, he's become a symbol for forgiveness without the need to forget injustice.

Perhaps Capturing the Friedmans wasn't an apt title. Perhaps the Friedmans captured us.

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Capturing the truth: When pedophilia stirs hysteria, truth can be silenced

By James Norman.

The Age, Australia - March 20, 2004

When New York documentary makers Andrew Jarecki and Marc Smerling set out to make a film about children's party entertainers, they stumbled upon a story from the annals of American legal history more heartbreaking than anything they could have imagined.

Jarecki had been pursuing one of New York's most successful party clowns, David Friedman (aka Silly Billy) for months. Things got murky when the filmmakers asked him a harmless question about his childhood. "I have the best memories of my childhood," Friedman began, before trailing off. "There's a lot ... well, there are some things I don't want to talk about."

The interview, on a New York sidewalk, became the starting point of the Sundance Jury Prize-winning, Oscar-nominated documentary Capturing the Friedmans. "We had that interview fairly early on, and figured out that David had a secret story," says producer Marc Smerling.

Capturing the Friedmans has little to do with New York party entertainers and everything to do with David Friedman's secret story. It has to do with the sins of his father, Arnold Friedman, the slippery nature of memory, and the dangers of unchecked media and community hysteria. But mostly, it has to do with the disintegration of a family.

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. And how Jesse Friedman, 18 at the time, pleaded guilty as his accomplice and spent 13 years behind bars.

In the pre-internet, pre-reality television era of the late '80s, the inside story of the Friedman family's disintegration was remarkably and shockingly captured on film. They were fans of the amateur home movie, and David Friedman filmed hours of raw footage of his family's destruction, footage that makes reality-TV programs such as The Osborne's look tame and contrived by comparison.

The film splices the family's home movies with extensive interview material from all players in the criminal case against Arnold and Jesse Friedman - remaining family members, the judge, the retired sergeant who led the investigation, and a number of alleged victims, some who deny it ever happened, others who describe the abuse in graphic detail. The viewer is drawn in to an intensely private realm and invited to make their own judgements.

Arnold Friedman was caught by an FBI agent who had been tipped off by the postal department. The agent posed as a postman to deliver a package containing child pornography Friedman had ordered from Amsterdam. Then the authorities discovered Friedman ran after-school computer classes for boys from his home. The alarm bells started ringing.

Soon after, a thanksgiving gathering is interrupted when the doors of the family home are kicked in, the home searched, and Arnold and Jesse are handcuffed and led away through a scrum of reporters and TV crews.

The film takes so many twists and turns that it constantly challenges the viewer to change their position. The facts are revealed to the viewer as they were to the filmmakers, leaving us at the mercy of each new revelation.

One of the criticisms levelled at Capturing the Friedmans is that Arnold Friedman is very much humanised. We see him, through the home movies, playing on the beach with his kids, opening presents, etc.

The film forces you to look at Arnold as a man who is not just a monster, to realise that humans are very complicated beings, says Smerling. "We know he did order the magazine, and we found out later that he did molest these two children up at Wade River. So Arnold Friedman is a criminal who deserved to be punished. But it was certainly the era of hysteria."

Jesse Friedman emerges as the real victim. At one point, the prosecution had gathered more than 400 charges against him. At the time, he felt he had simply "run out of options", and a guilty plea under the US plea-bargaining system seemed his only chance of ever being released.

"I was convicted the moment the police came to our house," Jesse Friedman told The Age. "I met a lot of people in prison who were innocent, took their case to trial and lost. One guy was in for 274 years with no recourse to appeal. I would have lost that trial. I'd still be locked up."

Now 34, Jesse Friedman spent 13 years behind bars and is today electronically tagged and forbidden from living in an apartment where children also stay. "I know that the things my father and I were charged with didn't happen," he says. "I know this because I was there. But my father was a pedophile, he bought child pornography. I can't deny that. I can't condone it, I'm not happy about that fact. Unfortunately, that fact resulted in me getting arrested and charged as a serial child rapist."

Jesse Friedman is fighting to have the case reopened to prove his innocence, and in that regard, the film has helped his case.

Capturing the Friedmans screens from March 25. Capturing the Friedmans: who do you believe? Special opinion-makers screening: Sunday, March 28 at Rivoli Cinemas, 200 Camberwell Road, Hawthorn. Screening at 2pm, panel discussion at 4pm. Panellists include Tom Ryan (Sunday Age), John Silvester (The Age/publisher), Sue Turnbull (Sisters in Crime, lecturer, La Trobe University) Dr Alison Talbot (Counselling Pyschologist): $20 each. Bookings: 9882 1221.

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'I'm not done yet'

A family member convicted of child sex abuse tells Oliver Burkeman how Capturing the Friedmans is helping him clear his name

Guardian, UK - Friday March 19, 2004

The voice on the phone from New York is tremulous, unfailingly polite, marked by hesitations and bursts of nervous laughter. "We're not the Osbournes," Jesse Friedman says quietly, trying to explain how his family came to videotape its own collapse. "We were going through an unbelievable experience ... and we wanted some kind of record."

Friedman is 33 years old; he studies economics and politics at a local college, and he has been dating the same person steadily for more than a year. In almost every other respect, though, he parted company with normality long ago, when he and his father Arnold were jailed in the late 1980s on horrific charges of child sexual abuse alleged to have taken place at computer classes run from their home on Long Island.

Andrew Jarecki's documentary Capturing the Friedmans, which relies heavily on videos of the family's life during Arnold and Jesse's last months of freedom, refuses to offer any easy answers.

On the one hand, Arnold, who killed himself in jail, was a self-confessed

paedophile; on the other, their film contains much persuasive evidence that both men were wrongly convicted. But for Jesse Friedman, who has been on parole since 2001 after spending 13 years in prison, the film's message is extremely simple. "The more people who see it, the more people will know I'm not a child molester," he says.

Friedman was talking to his brother David from a prison-yard telephone, he recalls, when he first discovered that Jarecki's film - originally about New York party clowns, David among them - was about to change direction radically. "Nobody in my family wanted anything to do with a movie that was just going to be some tabloid sensationalism," he says.

But Jarecki already had the home videotapes in his possession. "We hired a lawyer, we tried to get injunctions against him," Friedman says. "But then Andrew did his homework. 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."

In fact, Jarecki has studiedly refused to make any explicit pronouncements on the Friedmans' guilt or innocence. But Jesse Friedman believes the documentary speaks for itself, and says he has received only one critical email from audience members, compared with 500 supportive ones. He has launched an appeal to clear his name based in large part on Jarecki's evidence, which suggests that police detectives, lacking any physical evidence, aggressively interrogated children over periods of weeks until their firm denials gave way to false but incriminating testimony.

"I was convicted before the cops even put the handcuffs on me," Friedman insists today. "This has been 15 years of fighting and I'm not done yet. I'll spend every last dime of my father's life-insurance money if that's what it takes, but I'm not going to quit."

Nevertheless, the documentary's success - including an Oscar nomination - has not all been in the Friedmans' favour. The New York Times recently described how Jarecki omitted to mention a lie-detector test that the younger defendant reportedly failed during preparations for the trial.

Friedman argues the test was inconclusive, and that his defence lawyer may have misrepresented it to him in an attempt to persuade him to plead guilty, as he eventually did. More prosaically, David Friedman's career as a party clown has not exactly flourished through association with the subject of child abuse. "There has certainly been a drop-off in bookings," Jesse says drily.

And even those who leave the film completely convinced of the Friedmans' innocence may still be perturbed by their decision to chart their family's disintegration on video. "I think what strikes people about the footage is that we're not talking to the camera, and that is somewhat eerie," Friedman concedes. "But the whole point why David went out and bought the video camera was because we knew that dad was going to be going to prison, that he was probably never getting out. There was never any sense that anyone else was ever going to see these tapes."

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"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." –– Margaret Mead

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Thursday, November 26, 1987

Case of Arnold Friedman

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