Six young men step out of the shadows to address critically acclaimed movie that opens old wounds
BY VÍCTOR MANUEL RAMOS. STAFF WRITER
Newsday (c), Feb. 28, 2004
All these years later, he can still close his eyes and feel the haunting stare of the wiry young man who he said started fondling him a few weeks into computer classes when he was 10 years old.
Jesse Friedman, then 17 or 18, was supposed to be teaching the boy — assigned the name “Gregory Doe” by law enforcement officials — how to convert the basic binary language of the Commodore 64 computer for use on his own Apple IIc. “Uncle Jesse” — as Gregory was told to call him — was showing him other things as well, he recounted.
Right there in the middle of the class, out among the other students in the basement room of Arnold Friedman’s Great Neck home, Gregory Doe said the abuse started when Jesse Friedman slid his hand onto his thighs and started rubbing. He told Gregory to relax then groped him some before reaching inside his pants.
All the while, Jesse’s blue eyes were staring into his own.
“He touched me, you know, the wrong way…” said Gregory, omitting some of the more embarrassing details of a story he told long ago to Nassau County law enforcement and now finds himself compelled to tell all over again. Sitting in a restaurant booth near his home, he described what he endured during those computer classes. Speaking of specific sexual acts, Gregory gagged, as if to vomit.
One of 17 boys
Today, he is a 27-year-old business manager, engaged to his girlfriend, hoping to build a life untainted by a past he would prefer to forget. He said he remains plagued by a persistent physical injury that has never healed. He asked not to be identified. And he moved more than 400 miles away from his family in Great Neck to put distance between himself and these crimes.
“The glassy eyes, I’d always remember,” Gregory said. “You know, he had very glassy eyes.”
In 1987, Gregory was one of the 17 boys who told Nassau law enforcement officials that they had been abused at the Friedmans’ home on Piccadilly Road. Of these, 13 would later testify before a grand jury to substantiate criminal charges against Jesse Friedman, his father, Arnold, and another teenager, Ross Goldstein, 17. As their separate trials approached in 1988, father and son both changed their pleas from not guilty to guilty. So did Goldstein.
Now, in a turn of events none of the young men who testified would have foreseen, “Capturing the Friedmans,” a controversial documentary about the case that has already won critical and commercial acclaim, makes them feel as if they’re portrayed as liars.
Tonight, the film will compete for an Oscar for best documentary film. Many critics were enamored with the intensely intimate yet ultimately ambiguous look at the case and the voyeuristic pleasures it afforded viewers, by showing theFriedmans’ turmoil through the family’s own home videos. Director and co-producer Andrew Jarecki has been criticized by law enforcement officials, the boys who testified, and those close to them for allegedly manipulating crucial facts and leaving others out entirely to enhance the dramatic effect of the film. Goldstein isn’t mentioned, and the accusers appear only briefly in the film.
Along with the success of the film has come a renewed effort to throw out the conviction of Jesse Friedman. Now 34, and after serving 13 years in prison, he has gone back to Nassau County Court asking that his conviction be overturned. Arnold Friedman died in state prison of an apparent suicide in 1995, after serving about 8 years of a 10- to 30-year sentence.
The film and the court challenge have brought pain and outrage to the young men in their 20s trying to rebuild their lives. It has reluctantly brought them out of their silence. And, for the first time since the case surfaced, many of them are commenting on the documentary and the court motion — one in his own voice, one through an interview with his parents and his own written statement, and four through a lawyer hired to speak on their behalf and protect their privacy. The six reached by Newsday say the film is misleading, and they want Jesse Friedman’s conviction to stand.
“My testimony was twisted in the movie, and I am here to set the record straight that this did happen and I am not afraid,” said Gregory.
His main complaint with Jarecki’s documentary — which he cooperated with by sitting for extensive filmed questioning — was that he came across as if he had not remembered any of the abuse until after hypnosis. In it, his face is in shadows, he is sloppily reclining on a couch and waving his arms as he speaks.
Two men who refer to themselves as victims — Gregory and a man who is now 24 — have written the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to say the film does not deserve an Oscar. “We were abused, tortured, and humiliated by Arnold and Jesse Friedman,” the letter states, while complaining that Jesse Friedman “is being paraded like a celebrity while we have been left in the shadows, powerless and voiceless once again.”
The retired detective who led the investigation, and appears in the film, now wishes she had never cooperated with Jarecki. “I regret the effect on the victims,” Frances Galasso said.
“To call Jarecki’s work an investigation is ridiculous because he didn’t speak to most victims. How can you interview two victims … to say it didn’t happen,” said retired Judge Abbey Boklan, who heard the original case.
Director’s take
By all accounts, the documentary, which is the first full-length film by Jarecki, a multimillionaire entrepreneur, has been a critical and financial success. “Capturing the Friedmans” took the Sundance Film Festival’s grand jury prize in January 2003.
In the documentary, the truth of what happened on Piccadilly Road is left to the viewer. And that is something Jarecki is proud of: “Unlike some documentaries that underscore a point of view, ‘Capturing the Friedmans’ presents a variety of perspectives and allows room for audience members to draw their own conclusions,” Jarecki wrote in an e-mail sent to Newsday on Thursday.
At times, the documentary seems to strongly suggest the Friedmans are guilty. For example, Arnold Friedman is shown to collect child pornography, and the film tells of his admission that he was a pedophile. The film states that he had sexual relations with his brother when he was a child. The elder Friedman also states that he was worried when his sons were young that he would have difficulty keeping his hands off them. The film shows both Friedmans before the judge pleading guilty to the charges.
Then the point of view shifts, making suggestions that they weren’t guilty. For example, the film shows the statements of some of the students saying they were not abused and did not witness abuse. A detective is shown saying he approached children by telling them he knew the abuse had taken place and asking leading questions. It shows the judge saying she “never” had a doubt about the Friedmans’ guilt.
Jarecki strongly defended his documentary in this statement sent by e-mail Feb. 14. He said that “a man went to jail based on embarrassingly bad police work, and now Newsday continues to give [the police and the judge] credence. I worry for Jesse and I continue to do so.”
The documentary also brings to light the use of hypnosis and group therapy techniques and how those practices could have created false memories in children. Jarecki uses a clip of Gregory Doe saying he underwent hypnosis to remember the abuse more clearly and then includes an expert who characterizes such methods as unreliable.
Released in May of last year, the film has attracted nonstop publicity with Jarecki’s many media interviews and film-discussion appearances and his advocacy for the re-examination of Jesse Friedman’s conviction. Industry reports put the documentary’s box office sales at more than $3 million, not counting DVD proceeds.
Last month, Friedman filed a motion in Nassau County Court seeking “to vacate his conviction” — which, if successful, would eventually clear him from his highest Level 3 violent sex offender status and the strict parole conditions he lives under. He filed a second motion last month in state appellate court in Brooklyn asking for a change of venue because Friedman and his legal team don’t think he can get a fair hearing in Nassau County.
A student at Hunter College, Friedman must remain home between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m.; he cannot be around children without permission from his parole officer; his neighbors could be notified of his criminal history; and he isn’t allowed beyond the five boroughs of New York City. He will be on the state sex offender registry until parole officials decide he is no longer a threat to children.
In his motion, Friedman’s attorneys argue that prosecutors “violated his rights” by withholding exculpatory information.
The filing says that police prompted impressionable boys with suggestive questioning and that the children’s therapists misused hypnosis, memory recovery and visualization techniques.
“We have presented a detailed 77-page legal motion to the Nassau County Court, with approximately 900 pages of exhibits, that provides compelling evidence that Jesse Friedman pled guilty to a crime he did not commit,” Friedman attorney Mark Gimpel wrote in a statement sent to Newsday Friday. “The only way to resolve the conflicting claims is to have an open hearing before an impartial court.”
Nassau District Attorney Denis Dillon said through a spokesman that his office would respond to all of the motion’s allegations — including the alleged use of hypnosis — in court. His office’s appeals bureau is preparing a written response.
Friedman did not respond to repeated requests for an interview for this story. In a short interview last month, he called for more former computer students to come forward and confirm that nothing inappropriate went on when they were in class. “I am not a child molester,” he said.
For the DVD release of “Capturing the Friedmans” last month, Jarecki added new material. There is an option available on the DVD whereby you can hear Jarecki explain how he made his editing decisions as you watch the documentary. In all-new footage, he sits with Jesse Friedman, speaking about Jesse’s new motion, the film and the original case.
“Who do you believe?” asks the film’s promotional materials, seen plastered on the inside of New York City subway cars.
The case against them
It all started by mail.
Sometime around the mid-1980s, U.S. customs officials intercepted a child pornography publication from overseas addressed to Arnold Friedman in Great Neck. The incident triggered a U.S. Postal Inspection Service sting operation. Arnold Friedman, then the 56-year-old father of three boys who had recently retired from his Bayside High School teaching job, answered the requests of an investigator posing as a pedophile in 1987. Friedman was arrested and charged with sending and receiving child pornography by mail.
“I dressed up as a mail carrier, had him sign his name, then I went back in after half an hour, to execute the search warrant,” recalled John McDermott, who currently heads the agency’s Long Island fraud team. Assorted pornography and erotic computer games were found at the home, according to court records. Inspectors referred the case to the Nassau Police Department when they realized that Arnold Friedman taught mostly school age and preadolescent boys how to use computers from a makeshift lab in his basement.
Sex squad detectives conducted their own search of the house and spread throughout Great Neck in teams of two, interviewing boys who would eventually say enough for police to amass 343 charges ranging from child endangerment, sexual abuse, attempted sodomy and sodomy against Arnold Friedman and his youngest son, Jesse Friedman, who was 18. A neighbor, Goldstein, then 17, was charged with 118 counts of various sexual abuse charges and later pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree sodomy, and one count of using a child in a sexual performance, receiving a 2- to 6-year sentence. His willingness to testify against Jesse Friedman helped to break the case. Goldstein did not answer repeated requests for an interview.
The Friedmans’ arrests came the day before Thanksgiving in 1987, unleashing one of the largest child sex abuse investigations to date in Nassau County. Initially, the accused pleaded not guilty. By the following March, Arnold Friedman had changed his plea to guilty, admitting before the court that he abused the children.
When he pleaded guilty against his attorney’s advice the following December, Jesse Friedman made a short statement admitting his guilt and saying he too was a victim of his father’s abuse.
Jesse Friedman spoke to Newsday and to then-talk show host Geraldo Rivera in separate interviews while incarcerated in 1989. He said some children were abused while others witnessed the abuse. He said his father started abusing him by fondling him while reading him bedtime stories and then escalated to outright incest by the time Jesse hit puberty. In the interviews, Jesse admitted he later became the abuser, forcing children to assume sexual positions and to perform oral sex.
Before the year was out, Jesse Friedman had recanted everything. In a later interview with Newsday, he said he lied about his father abusing him, and said he did not abuse any of the children. He said he lied to manipulate the media so people would feel sorry for him.
Documentary
Jarecki did not set out to make “Capturing the Friedmans.” He said he just wanted to return to his first love of filmmaking after making millions of dollars as a businessman.
The 1985 English graduate from Princeton University said he had directed plays in school but went into business instead in 1989. Jarecki and two friends co-founded Moviefone, the movie listings company.
The company went public in 1994 and was later sold to AOL for $388 million. Jarecki was the largest shareholder and thus netted the largest sum. Before the business was sold, he made his first attempt at making a film — a short called “Swimming” — about children in a Harlem swimming group.
The project he started in early 2000 — on the lives of birthday party clowns — was to be his first full-length documentary. Working on that idea, he met Arnold Friedman’s oldest son, David Friedman, a clown known on the Manhattan birthday party circuit by the stage names Silly Billy and Doctor Blood. Jarecki said David Friedman hinted at his family’s problems just enough to trigger his curiosity. Jarecki began researching the Friedmans’ sexual abuse case and dropped the clown project when David Friedman handed over a treasure trove of family home videos taken throughout the time of the case. Soon after, Jarecki had the first of many interviews with Jesse Friedman, in an upstate prison.
The documentary that resulted is largely the Friedman family’s story, as told by their own family video history. In the film, Jarecki focuses on the idea that several of the accusers had been hypnotized or had participated in group therapy, a practice he criticizes as unreliable. Law enforcement officials said those techniques were not used in the gathering of evidence or grand jury testimony for the case against the three co-defendants. Instead, they said some of the methods were used by mental health experts in therapy after the children had provided their statements of abuse.
Last year, Jarecki told Newsday that he started believing Jesse Friedman because of his openness during the making of the documentary: “Many people made an effort to obfuscate in this case, and in the end I found Jesse Friedman was the most open with me,” Jarecki said.
At his many appearances promoting the film, Jarecki has stopped short of saying that Jesse Friedman is innocent, but he has clearly taken his side.
“It is a sensitive time for the case because it is pending in front of the court, so I’m not sure if it’s smart for me to be commenting,” Jarecki wrote in an e-mail response to questions Newsday posed earlier this month. “I have no agenda — the motion is Jesse’s and speaks for itself.” In another e-mail, Jarecki said that “unnamed alleged victims” should not get to make anonymous claims against Jesse Friedman, even though this is common treatment for victims in child sex abuse cases. Jarecki himself gave them and other sources anonymity in his film and in the outtakes included in the DVD. Thirteen boys testified before the grand jury. One of the 13 is featured recanting in the documentary.
Ross Cheit, a political science professor at Brown University who studies the media’s portrayal of sexual abuse cases and has researched court documents in the Friedmans’ case, said “Capturing the Friedmans” follows a pattern of journalism where complicated abuse cases are oversimplified for the sake of telling a good story.
“The actual facts are far more complicated than what Jarecki explains in the film. It is clear that he leaves out a whole lot of important evidence,” Cheit said. “I think it makes a very compelling story. The wrongful conviction story is very compelling and more so than saying a convicted man is guilty as charged. That’s not a good story.”
A family nightmare
Just the mention of his name can bring back nightmares.
“Jesse was the scariest of all of them to my son,” one Long Island mother of a then-7-year-old boy told Newsday. She and her husband both asked that their identity be withheld to protect their son’s privacy. “Jesse is the bogeyman in the covers, the bogeyman under the bed. Even when he is fifty years old, Jesse will be the bogeyman under the bed.”
She said the popularity of the documentary and Friedman’s return to court asking that his conviction be overturned was “disgusting” and “nauseating.”
Innocence was what her son lost, she said.
“I see this media circus that Jarecki has generated to promote this film as an unjustified and cynical attack on the defenders of these children and therefore supportive of those who would victimize them,” she said.
‘I only understood fear’
She and her husband enrolled their son in the computer class for several months in early 1987 after her husband attended the adult program and met Arnold Friedman. Looking back, she said she remembers thinking it was odd that parents were never allowed inside the classroom.
Soon after enrolling in the class, she said, her son’s behavior changed. He began drawing sharks and believed they were swimming in his bedroom floor’s blue rug. Once, when she asked her son what he was learning in the class, he and a classmate looked at each other with “sheepish grins on their faces” and giggled.
At the end, she said, it was Jesse Friedman’s suspicious behavior, and her son’s unwillingness to return for another season, that led her and her husband to pull him out of the school before the scandal broke.
All these years later, she still has vivid images of Friedman. “You know, Jesse had this hair,” she said. “It was all greasy hair, black hair. He had it always over his eyes. He would never look at you. I just have this picture flashing in my head of Jesse opening the door. … He would look to one side, he would open the door and he’d look over here and he’d say, ‘Oh, we’ll be done soon.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, can I wait inside?’ and he’d say, ‘No, no, no, no, no. … ‘ Never would let me in.”
When the case broke, her son told detectives that he witnessed when another child, who was overweight and reportedly the frequent target of humiliation, was sodomized in front of the class — an event supported by that other child’s detailed statement to police. Her son told of being taken to the bathroom, where Arnold Friedman attempted undressing him but had trouble taking off the belt he was wearing.
Eventually, he told detectives and his parents that he was photographed urinating and was subjected to sexual abuse. The way her son described it at the time was that “they did things to him that made him feel like he was going to go to the bathroom,” his mother said.
Their son freely volunteered information without any pressure from detectives, with both parents nearby, she said.
The years have not diminished the horror, the father said in an interview with Newsday. Because of the case, he said he still has trouble communicating with his son and sometimes blames himself for enrolling him in the classes.
“I saw a huge, huge amount of anger that was harbored inside his heart towards Arnold Friedman and his son Jesse, and to Ross Goldstein,” said the father. Finally, when his son told him what had happened, he came to understand his son’s anger. Now a law student, the son declined to be interviewed for this story. But he provided a written statement saying that the documentary, and the resulting flurry of interest in the case, is cruel and unfair to him and the others who said they suffered abuse.
“Arnold and Jesse Friedman violated my trust for them as educators by sexually abusing my classmates and I at their home,” he wrote. “…I was seven years old when I was in the [classroom] custody of Arnold and Jesse Friedman. At that time I did not understand the dynamics of human sexuality. I only understood fear.”
To ensure secrecy, Arnold and Jesse Friedman told some of the boys who testified they suffered abuse that they would burn down their houses, kill them, and hurt their parents if they revealed the abuse, according them, investigators and some parents.
If Friedman’s effort to have his conviction thrown out proceeds, the man said he does not want to have to testify, and once again relive the horror of the abuse. He has rebuilt his life, he said, adding that the “victims are entitled to closure.”
To the father, the uncovering of what had happened to his son has shattered any illusions of the innocence of youth.
It “taught me that life was … not pristine, people were not pristine, and there are people out there who would willingly violate the privacy of a child and the innocence of a child. That was a very, very difficult pill to swallow as a parent, that our children could be so vulnerable.”
A possible return to court
Others who testified in the first case aren’t looking forward to the possibility of having to relive the abuse in court. It is unclear whether Friedman’s motion to overturn will come to that.
Sal Marinello, the Mineola lawyer who says he represents “four victims,” said his clients do not want to step backward to a time they have tried to forget. He said it was the responsibility of Friedman’s attorneys to demonstrate that they have compelling new evidence to justify calling witnesses.
“Why should members of the public, their colleagues, family members, friends, hear about this now?” Marinello said. According to the recent motion, one of the 13 victims who testified of abuse before the grand jury has recanted. Friedman’s lawyers have used transcripts from the documentary as evidence in the motion. Identified in court records as Dennis Doe, the witness appears in the movie saying police pressured him to speak up.
“I kind of broke down. I started crying,” a voice attributed to Dennis Doe says in the film. “And when I started to tell them things, I was telling myself it was not true. I was telling myself, ‘Just say this to them to get them off your back.'”
Friedman’s motion includes eight people somehow connected to the computer classes who say they never witnessed any abuse at the Friedman house.
The joint letter of the two young men to the Academy Awards panel said, in part, “We did not lie. We did not exaggerate. We were never hypnotized to tell our stories. The director twisted the facts in the film to make it appear that way.”
Gregory Doe said he does not need hypnosis to remind him of what the Friedmans did to him. His family sent him to a private therapist after he provided his statement to police but prior to his appearance before the grand jury. The therapist used hypnosis, he said, to try and get him to the point where he could talk about what had been done to him without throwing up.
He said Jesse Friedman abused him first, followed by Arnold and Goldstein, and that he was made to undress, assume sexual positions and perform and receive oral sex.
The most horrid abuse took place during one-on-one makeup sessions when he was left alone with Arnold Friedman. He said both father and son committed forcible sodomy on him multiple times. He said Arnold and Jesse made him and others play leapfrog naked.
Galasso, the retired chief detective on the case, said Gregory’s interview with Newsday was consistent with his original statement to police.
For Gregory, the hullabaloo over Jarecki’s film — and whether the director will pick up an Oscar tonight — is a sideshow to the legacy of the abuse. Even now, Gregory said he sometimes wakes up at night shaking, especially after hearing of other child abuse cases on the news or elsewhere. What would be passing news to others, hits home for him.
Diagnosed in his preteen years, Gregory said he has persistent rectal bleeding from the abuse. Memories aside, the physical scar will never let him forget. “This is the constant reminder I live with every day,” Gregory said, “that I was abused.”