NYTimes Jesse Friedman,
the Great Neck, N.Y., teenager whose role in a sexual abuse case a
quarter-century ago was portrayed in the Oscar-nominated documentary “Capturing the Friedmans,”
and came to symbolize an era of sensational, often-suspect accusations
of child molestation, was properly convicted and should not have his
status as a sexual predator overturned, according to a three-year review
that was released on Monday.
In a 155-page report written with very little ambiguity, the Nassau County district attorney, Kathleen M. Rice, concluded that none of four issues raised in a strongly worded 2010 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit were substantiated by the evidence.
Instead, it concluded, “By any impartial analysis, the reinvestigation
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 review concludes another chapter in a case that came to national
attention after the 2003 release of the film, which portrayed both the
breakup of a deeply troubled family and what was characterized as a
flawed, biased police investigation and judicial process. The case led
to guilty pleas in 1988 by Jesse Friedman, then 18, and his father,
Arnold Friedman, who ran a popular computer class at his house on
Piccadilly Road in the affluent Long Island community of Great Neck.
The report’s conclusion was not entirely unexpected, even by Mr.
Friedman and his advocates, given the explosive nature of the charges,
the impossibility of a definitive finding on many of the allegations
more than 25 years in the past and the high bar for prosecutors to
overturn convictions, especially those based on confessions.
Still, Mr. Friedman; his lawyer, Ron Kuby; and the film’s director,
Andrew Jarecki, reacted with disappointment and anger, saying the report
was a biased whitewash by the office that originally botched the case.[...]
The Abuse Industry will never admit their mistakes and terrible failings that destroy innocently accused men's lives.
ReplyDeleteJesse Friedman was not "innocently accused," he was and remains a predatory pedophile. Every claim of that bogus crockumentary film has been proven to be a lie: the witnesses were never hypnotized, they stand by their stories, and an enormous amount of evidence was willfully omitted from the film precisely for the sake of making it more artificially ambiguous to make a stronger narrative at the expense of the facts.
ReplyDeleteIt is time for the "Capturing Cult" to admit they were wrong, apologize, and end their vendetta of re-victimizing all those poor boys Jesse and Arnold brutally raped, tortured, and threatened.