Friedman continues to dispute findings of guilt

Dan Glaun

Great Neck native Jesse Friedman, whose 1988 conviction for sexually molesting children was reaffirmed in a lengthy report last month by the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office, is contesting the legitimacy of the report and has petitioned a court to force the DA’s office to turn over records from his case.

Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice commissioned a review of the case after an appeals court expressed concerns about the conviction in 2010. The review unequivocally upheld Friedman’s conviction and accused Friedman and his defense team of cherry-picking evidence and being misleading, but now Friedman’s lawyer, defense attorney Ron Kuby, is flipping those allegations onto Rice herself.

“Nothing will ever change DA Rice’s conclusions about this case. There is no amount of evidence that she will not distort, minimize or ignore,” Kuby said in an interview. “We never expected to change her mind. Although it was [former] DA [Denis] Dillon who prosecuted Jesse Friedman, it was DA Rice who consistently over a period of many years used technicalities to prevent Friedman from having his day in court.”

The complaint also alleges that Rice’s office withheld information from the independent board that reviewed the report and ignored exculpatory evidence – claims that the DA’s office rejects.

DA spokesman John Byrne described the petition as the latest in a series of unsubstantiated complaints by Friedman.

“There’s absolutely nothing new in this filing. A mountain of evidence, a list of victims, a guilty plea and an independent panel support the integrity of this conviction and review process,” Byrne said in a statement. “His complaints are self-serving, repackaged allegations that have been rejected by the justice system for more than two decades. The victims deserve to be able to move on.”

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. 

The 2010 appeals court ruling asked the DA’s office to review the charges in the wake of an Oscar-nominated documentary that alleged police misconduct and harsh interrogation of children who testified against Friedman.

Friedman is petitioning state Supreme Court Justice Dana Winslow to force the DA’s office to turn over information that has remained sealed since the 1988 trial.

“DA Rice appointed a special Advisory Panel to ensure a fair and thorough review, but then chose to withhold from them the evidence most essential in a case based upon child testimony, including the unredacted witness statements, police interview notes, records of when and how the statements were taken, in addition to the grand jury testimony that formed the basis for the indictments,” wrote Friedman’s legal team in the petition.

The petition also includes an affidavit from Kenneth Lanning, a former FBI special agent who is now a consultant on crimes against children. Lanning stated in the affidavit that the DA’s review panel should have included someone with expertise in child sex-ring cases and that the DA’s report mischaracterized his research when describing Friedman’s efforts to “groom” children.

The Friedman case was reopened after the release of “Capturing the Friedmans,” a 2003 Oscar-nomiated documentary that alleged police misconduct and coercive testimony in the initial investigation of Friedman. In 2010, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld 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.

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