Weberman trial - video

Weberman trial - Wall Street Journal

Wall Street Journal Weberman is accused of sexually abusing the girl dozens of times in his home and office over a three-year span beginning when she was 12 years old. The girl, who turns 18 next week, is not being identified because she is the victim of a sexual-abuse crime.

The teen testified she was taken to see Weberman after school leaders deemed her a problem after she questioned her religion.

“I had a lot of questions about religion. … How do you know God exists?” she said, adding that in response her teacher “yelled at me and sent me to the principal. It happened to me a lot of times.”

She started seeing Weberman in March 2007, first twice a week and sometimes up to four times a week.

Speaking in almost inaudible tones and at times struggling to hold back tears, she described the alleged abuse in detail for more than three hours.

“I just froze,” she said about their first encounter. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t know how to fight back. I was numb.”

“He would continue touching me all the time,” she said, adding later, “I wanted to die rather than live with myself.”

Weberman trial - first day of testimony

NYTimes   This time, people said that they came because they had read on victims’ advocacy blogs that the victim needed support or heard about her case through publicity surrounding a fund-raiser for Mr. Weberman in May. 

Though the young woman’s parents had asked her to drop the case as recently as this spring, the victim testified, about 20 members of her family came to show their support in court. 

“The anger has reached a level where people have decided to put an end to making the victim into the villain,” said Judy Genut, an advocate for abuse victims in Williamsburg. 

The testimony of the young woman, who turns 18 next week, lasted for hours. 

She recalled in detail her first meeting with Mr. Weberman, now 54, at an apartment he used as an office. Her father, she testified, had brought her there for counseling at age 12 because he falsely believed she was having a physical relationship with a 16-year-old neighbor named Shimmy.[...]

She said nothing to her father when he came to pick her up, she testified under cross-examination. Nor did she tell her family she wanted to stop going to sessions, though she said the abuse went on for years, in four-hour sessions that sometimes were held several times a week. In 2011, she reported being abused to a licensed therapist, who brought her to the police. 

Psychotherapy: Branding or product problem?

Time Magazine    In a recent Sunday’s  NY Times article a psychotherapist with a freshly hung shingle describes the challenges of earning clients in a market crowded with professionals willing to listen, but with a dwindling number of patients. Her solution? Turning to a “branding consultant” who advises her, among other things, to sell herself as a specialist treating a particular type of patient and to start doing “life coaching” instead. But the trend toward “branding” may be diverting attention away from deeper problems with psychotherapy that are dissuading people from trying it and discouraging insurers from paying for sessions.

In the article, therapist Lori Gottlieb writes:

    What nobody taught me in grad school was that psychotherapy, a practice that had sustained itself for more than a century, is losing its customers. If this came as a shock to me, the American Psychological Association tried to send out warnings in a 2010 paper titled, “Where Has all the Psychotherapy Gone?”

    According to the author, 30 percent fewer patients received psychological interventions in 2008 than they did 11 years earlier; since the 1990s, managed care has increasingly limited visits and reimbursements for talk therapy but not for drug treatment…Three months into private practice, I had exactly four regular weekly clients.

Her branding consultant tells her “Nobody wants to buy therapy anymore. They want to buy a solution to a problem.” [...]

[However] If therapists like Gottlieb want to attract patients, they need to consider that sometimes the problem isn’t the branding, but the product itself.

Jacob Ostreicher case: High Bolivian official arrested

Boston Globe   LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — A high-ranking Bolivian official was arrested Monday for alleged illegal enrichment from the sale of rice seized from a U.S. businessman who has been jailed for 18 months without charge.

The American, Jacob Ostreicher, was arrested in a money-laundering investigation but no evidence has been presented in court to support the case against him. He claims his incarceration has allowed corrupt officials to fleece him, seizing 18,000 metric tons of rice from his farming venture and selling most of it.

The man arrested Monday and accused of receiving $9,900 in proceeds in a personal bank account from the sale of some of Ostreicher’s rice is Jose Manuel Antezana, an official in the Presidential Ministry who was named to the board of directors of the state-run Cartonbol cardboard company in 2010.

Prosecutor Javier Monasterios told reporters that authorities were investigating others in the case.

Ostreicher told The Associated Press that prosecutors told him there would be more arrests and that 11 people ‘‘who work for the government are under suspicion’’ for allegedly abuses of authority in his case.

Weberman abuse trial starts in Brooklyn

NYTimes   The abuse began when the girl was 12 years old, prosecutors in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn said on Monday. She was sent to a prominent man in her ultra-Orthodox Jewish community for counseling, and prosecutors said the man sexually molested her over the next three years.

But lawyers defending the man, Nechemya Weberman, 54, of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, told a far different story during the opening arguments of his trial. The girl, a defense lawyer told the jury, had hatched the sordid tale of abuse as an act of revenge against Mr. Weberman and against a religious community she found stifling and rulebound. 

As proceedings began during the trial of Mr. Weberman, who is accused of 88 counts of sexual abuse of a minor, it became clear that the community itself, as well as Mr. Weberman, would undergo scrutiny during what is expected to be an emotional week of sexually explicit and culturally intricate testimony.

Both the prosecution and the defense informed the jury that the Satmar Hasidic community, to which Mr. Weberman and the girl belonged, was so rigid that questions from a young girl about something as simple as the proper length of a skirt could lead to mandatory counseling, and even expulsion from school. The accuser in this case, both sides said, was just that kind of girl: a free spirit whose questioning and challenges to authority landed her in trouble. [...]

רבי חיים במכתב: להוציא קובץ של הרב גרוס מהבית

Update 12/31/12:  Rav Simcha Bunim Lazerson kuntres resolves all issues

kikarhashabat   מרן שר התורה הגאון רבי חיים קניבסקי יוצא הבוקר במכתב חריף נגד קובץ תשובות הלכתי של גאב"ד 'חניכי הישיבות' הרב מרדכי גרוס, וקורא להוציאו מהבית בשל דברים שנדפסו בו של חילול שבת. בתגובה, הורה הרב גרוס לאנשיו לבטל את המנוי ל'יתד נאמן' (חרדים

ויכוח הלכתי סוער או קרע פוליטי חריף? נראה שבציבור הליטאי, בצורה זו או אחרת הכל בסופו של דבר קשור זה בזה.

בעיתון 'יתד נאמן' מופיע הבוקר (רביעי) מכתב חריף ממרן שר התורה הגאון רבי חיים קניבסקי שליט"א נגד קובץ תשובות הלכתי של גאב"ד 'חניכי הישיבות' הרב מרדכי גרוס.

update November 27 2012
דברי הרב דרזי

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