Great Neck native Jesse Friedman on Monday filed a legal brief asking the Nassau County Supreme Court to annul his 1988 guilty plea and overturn a prior court’s ruling that he molested children in his Great Neck home.
Ron Kuby, Friedman’s lawyer, claims in the brief that Friedman was forced to “plead guilty to crimes that never occurred” and that the evidence and testimony used to convict Friedman was “questionable.”
The brief claims that since Friedman’s release from prison in 2001 he and his wife, Lisabeth Walsh, have “been denied access to four religious congregations, have been evicted from multiple apartments when landlords learned of [Friedman’s] legal status” as a “violent sexual predator.”
Kuby asks the court to strip Friedman of that title.
District attorney spokesman Shams Tarek said in a statement “Independent prosecutors have spent hundreds of hours performing an exhaustive review of this decades-old case and guilty plea, a review that an independent advisory panel has declared to be as thorough and fair as possible. The papers filed today don’t change this but we’ll review them and respond as needed in court.”
Friedman and his father, Arnold Friedman, were arrested and pleaded guilty in 1988 to sexually abusing young boys enrolled in a computer class in their family’s Great Neck home.
Jesse Friedman was released on parole in 2001 and soon retracted on his guilty plea, claiming that his confession was coerced from law enforcement officials and that police manipulated false abuse claims from the alleged victims.
Those claims were chronicled in an award-winning documentary “Capturing the Friedmans.”
The brief asking the court to overturn Friedman’s conviction comes four days after he filed a lawsuit against Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice and two of her public information officers, claiming her office libeled him by alleging that he possessed pornography wile serving a state prison for the molestation charges.
The lawsuit, filed on June 19 in Nassau County Supreme Court, states that comments made and distributed by Rice’s office “did harm Friedman in his reputation, enjoyment of life, quality of life and economic interests” and that they “constitute the tort of libel.”
A report released in 2013 by Rice’s office after a three-year review of the case reaffirmed Friedman’s 1989 conviction. Rice conducted the review of Friedman’s case after a Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in 2010 indicated that some evidence suggested he might have been wrongfully convicted.
The June 19 lawsuit states that within Rice’s report, the district attorney, who on Tuesday defeated Nassau County Legislature Minority Leader Kevan Abrahams for the Democratic nomination for the 4th congressional district, made “materially false statements about Friedman and his prison disciplinary record” that she “knew were false.”
Among those statements, the lawsuit states, is that Friedman wrote pornographic stories during his time in prison “that described violent and disturbing sexual acts.”
The lawsuit also names John Byrne, Rice’s former public information officer, and Tarek, the current public information officer, as defendants for allegedly disseminating the information and other “false” statements to the New York Times, New York Post and other media outlets.
Kuby is asking the courts to award Friedman “damages to be determined at trial” and “ordering the retraction and correction of those statements” listed in the lawsuit.
Efforts to reach Kuby for further comments on the lawsuit were unavailing.
District Attorney spokesman Paul Leonard said in a statement that all three defendants view the libel lawsuit as “meritless and will defend zealously against its allegations.”
In an ongoing effort to clear his name, Friedman has requested that Rice hand over his criminal case file.
Justice Dana Winslow, a state Supreme Court Judge in Mineola, ruled in August that Rice had to hand over “every piece of paper” of Friedman’s case file, with the exception of the victims’ names.
Rice appealed Winslow’s ruling in October.
Friedman and Kuby on Dec. 20 filed a legal brief asking the Appellate Division in Brooklyn to uphold Winslow’s decision.
Kuby said in a December interview that Winslow’s ruling on his and Friedman’s Freedom of Information request “accurately and fairly gave voice to the concerns the defense has always had.” The ruling, he said, was one of the “high points” in Friedman’s attempt to clear his name.
In response to the brief, a spokesman for Rice’s office said in an e-mail “The question here is whether Mr. Friedman, after pleading guilty to and serving time for these very serious crimes, should have access to witness statements and grand jury records that are generally deemed confidential by law – law intended to protect the privacy of crime victims and to keep them from being victimized again.”
