DA upholds Friedman sex abuse charges

Dan Glaun

A report from the Nassau County District Attorney’s office has reaffirmed the 1988 court judgment against Jesse Friedman, a Great Neck native whose conviction for the sexual molestation of children was disputed in an Oscar-nominated documentary and questioned by an appeals court in 2010.

Friedman, who along with his father Arnold Friedman was convicted of sexually assaulting more than a dozen children who attended computer classes at the Friedman family home, had long contested the ruling, saying the case against him was marred by overzealous police work and that he made a false confession to avoid a longer prison sentence. 

But the District Attorney’s three-year review of the case, commissioned at the urging of an appeals court in 2010, concluded that Friedman’s conviction was rightful and he had likely assaulted additional children beyond the 13 who testified against him at his trial.

“Instances of wrongful conviction are real and exist in far greater numbers than any of us would like to admit. Wrongful convictions undermine public safety, and they pose the greatest threat there is to the integrity required of our justice system. But the case against Jesse Friedman is not one of them,” said District Attorney Kathleen Rice in a statement. “I came to this case without an agenda or any personal stake in its outcome, and without any interest outside of searching for the truth. We were fully prepared to exonerate Mr. Friedman if that’s where the facts led us. But the facts, under any objective analysis, led to a substantially different conclusion. This exhaustive and impartial process has only strengthened the justice system’s confidence that Jesse Friedman was involved in the sexual abuse of children.”

In an statement to Blank Slate Media, Friedman said the report was riddled with falsehoods and continued to maintain his innocence.

“It was lies which sent me to prison 25 years ago.  This report is filled with malicious lies, outright fabrications, and demonstrates the callous assault on truth that law enforcement perpetrates on all American citizens,” wrote Friedman in an e-mail. “I am eager to return to court with an opportunity to put all the evidence before an open court instead of the previous closed-door sham which has stolen three more years of my life waiting for justice. No children were ever sexually abused during my father’s computer classes. I know this because I was there and we have spoken to 25 other people who were also present during computer classes when the police claim children were being raped, and they all report having never witnessed anything inappropriate.”

Friedman appealed his conviction after the release of filmmaker Andrew Jarecki’s 2003 documentary “Capturing the Friedmans,” which included interviews with detectives and trial witnesses that suggested prosecutors used coercive interrogation techniques and hypnosis to get children in the computer class to testify against the Friedmans. 

In 2010, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Jesse Friedman’s conviction but recommended opening an investigation into the case

The case at the heart of the report shook Great Neck in the late 1980s, with hundreds of counts of sexual assault filed against the Friedmans for allegedly molesting and sodomizing young boys who attended computer classes at their family home. Jesse Friedman said after the trial that his father Arnold Friedman, who died in prison in 1995, sexually assaulted him, but has denied that any molestation took place at his father’s computer classes.

Friedman’s supporters have compared his case to the rash of allegations of Satanic child abuse during the 1980s which were later proven false. 

The DA’s report rejected the comparison, stating that the Friedman accusers were older than those in discredited cases and that the allegations in Great Neck were more plausible than their Satanic counterparts.

Rice’s 177-page report, which was overseen by an independent panel that included prominent defense lawyer and Innocence Project founder Barry Scheck, disputed the evidence presented in the documentary, concluding that police conduct did not undermine the case against Friedman and that many of Friedman’s alleged victims still maintain his guilt.

“By any impartial analysis, the re-investigation process prompted by Jesse Friedman, his advocates, and the Second Circuit, has only increased confidence in the integrity of Jesse Friedman’s guilty plea and adjudication as a sex offender,” the report said.

The report states that improper police work did not harm the investigation, arguing that numerous children made allegations in the early stages of the investigation, many complainants interviewed by the review team did not report leading questioning by police, and claims by one witness that he was subjected to hypnosis were not credible.

A co-defendant in the case, Ross Goldstein, wrote a letter to the report’s review team in March recanting all allegations of abuse and saying he was coerced into confessing. The report casts doubt on Goldstein’s credibility, noting that it took three years for the team to secure an interview with Goldstein and arguing that his previous detailed descriptions of his role in the alleged abuse were not consistent with coerced testimony.

The report also puts forward other information the authors say provide evidence of Friedman’s guilt, including interviews with accusers who confirmed their accounts and prison disciplinary records that describe him possessing a magazine photograph of two nude children.

Friedman’s attorney Ronald Kuby has attacked the credibility of the report, criticizing the legitimacy of having the District Attorney’s office review its own investigation.

“Notwithstanding the appointment of a review panel, District Attorney Rice has been the investigator, interpreter of the evidence and sole decision maker,” Kuby told the Associated Press. “Such power should not rest in the hands of people who have demonstrated they cannot fairly review their own work.”

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