The book was supposed to be closed on The People v. Arnold Friedman and Jesse Friedman, two sexual-molestation cases in the late 1980s that destroyed a family and devastated a community.
But "Capturing the Friedmans," a new documentary and Sundance film festival winner that raises disturbing questions about the police and legal procedure that led to both men's convictions and imprisonment, has revived those painful events.
The documentary by director Andrew Jarecki, left, suggests officials were overzealous in their investigation and prosecution.
(Dayna Smith -- The Washington Post)
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Heated discussions and finger-pointing among the principal players have characterized question-and-answer meetings after screenings of the film, which opened here this past weekend. Many articles and reviews, mostly supporting the movie's point of view, have been written. And there is even discussion, according to one Nassau County, N.Y., official, of getting clearance to retrieve all documents and testimony in the case because of the renewed public interest in the story of the Friedmans.
On one side of the controversy is "Capturing the Friedmans" director Andrew Jarecki, whose film strongly suggests that law enforcement officials of Nassau County, Long Island, were overzealous in their investigation, indictment and imprisonment of computer teacher Arnold and his then 18-year-old son, Jesse.
The film is strongly endorsed by Jesse Friedman, who served 13 years in jail and still holds out hope of legal vindication, his brother David and other friends, family and supporters. On the other side are the Nassau County officials, who are featured in the film but strongly denounce it as "fiction." They say it is misleading and manipulative. These critics include now-retired Nassau County Court Judge Abbey Boklan; Assistant District Attorney Joseph Onorato; detective Frances Galasso, also retired, who headed the investigation; and several other police officers.
Caught in the anonymous netherworld in between are perhaps dozens of men in their twenties and thirties whose complaints as children condemned the Friedmans to prison. Jesse was freed in 2001 but lives a heavily restricted life as a convicted sex offender, with an electronic monitor attached to his foot. Arnold Friedman, an admitted pedophile, who strongly denied molesting the children in his classes, died in jail in 1995.
The 40-year-old Jarecki, who was in town recently to promote the film, stressed that "Capturing the Friedmans" is supposed to be about the Friedmans, a family whose lives were forever damaged when a battering ram broke down their door on Thanksgiving eve, 1987. As the movie outlines, police arrested Arnold Friedman, a popular and award-winning computer and piano teacher from Great Neck, N.Y., and his son Jesse on multiple counts of child sodomy and sex abuse.
Arnold had already been arrested in a sting operation for receiving and distributing child pornography through the mail in the mid-'80s. When postal inspector John McDermott told police that Arnold also taught preteen boys, the Nassau County sex crimes unit (headed by Galasso) got lists of his students and interviewed them. Their testimony included alleged acts of abuse, sodomy and bizarre sexual games.
Throughout the proceedings, Arnold and Jesse maintained their innocence but eventually agreed to guilty pleas in return for reduced sentences.
The film, which includes interviews with the Friedmans, various Nassau County law enforcement and justice officials, as well as former computer students, strongly suggests the children's testimony was obtained with the sort of unfairly leading interview techniques and false-memory hysteria that characterized such 1980s trials as the McMartin preschool case in California. At those trials, alleged child victims were repeatedly interviewed until they gave increasingly lurid accounts of sodomy, other abuse and even satanic rituals.
The movie also contains astoundingly personal footage shot by the Friedmans themselves. Arnold and sons David, Seth and Jesse were home movie enthusiasts who loved to make hammy films about themselves. Elaine, Arnold's wife, never enjoyed these games. When the arrests occurred, the cameras kept rolling. Excerpts from those films and videotapes include some of the family's most private, agonizing moments, as they react to the investigations and legal cases. (Seth declined to participate in Jarecki's project.)
Also evident is Elaine's horror about her husband, as well as her conviction that he should plead guilty. (She and Arnold eventually divorced.) There are screaming battles around the table during a Passover Seder and in the living room. And throughout this emotional distress, Arnold remains a passive participant, seemingly resigned to his fate.
The almost surreal family scenes, further disturbing revelations by Arnold about his previous pedophilia and the underlying premise that both Friedmans were unfairly convicted have galvanized audiences, said Jarecki, who has attended several public screenings around the country. But most people, he continued, focus squarely on the case.
"When I ask [at screenings] how many people feel that Jesse Friedman went to prison unfairly, I would say more people than not raise their hands . . . and the other people look over and think, 'Oh, I didn't think I had permission to think that.' . . . To me the most interesting thing is when they stop looking at me and start looking at each other and talking directly to each other."
Things got very heated, according to Jarecki and several other witnesses, at the Tribeca Film Festival last May and at screenings in Great Neck earlier this month, both of which were attended by several principals from the film. At Tribeca, Jesse and David Friedman, Galasso and Onorato, as well as investigative reporter Debbie Nathan, investigator Lloyd Doppman and Jesse's defense lawyer Peter Panaro, squared off. ("That turned out to be a life experience," recalled Jarecki.) And at the Great Neck screening, there were heated exchanges as well.
The movie, said Boklan in a later telephone interview, "is a brilliant piece of fiction and theater but unfair and inaccurate." She cited a Geraldo Rivera show in 1989 in which Jesse -- already in prison at that point -- admitted he had abused those children. But the scene, she says, is left out of the movie.
"I can't even remember what I said [on Geraldo]," said Jesse, who consented to a conference call interview for this story with his brother David on the line. At the time of the TV interview, he said, his strategy was to claim he had been abused by his father and forced to participate in the sexual abuse. This was a failed attempt, he said, to curry favor with the parole board and his fellow inmates so they wouldn't see him as a voluntary child molester. He claimed this was a strategy once suggested by his lawyer, Panaro.
Panaro did not return a reporter's call. In the movie, Panaro denies making any such suggestion.
The film, Jarecki said, is "about the elusive nature of truth. About how influenced the truth is by all of our own prejudices and agendas and needs on every level. . . . We put our memory in these memory banks and it sits there. But really it's just this electro-chemical impulse that kind of bubbles away and as soon as you lock it away in your memory bank it changes the next second."
Jarecki pointed specifically to a comment by detective Galasso in the movie, recalling "foot-high stacks" of pornographic material found in the Friedmans' living room.
In the movie Jarecki cuts to still photos of the living room showing no such thing. But in a telephone interview, Galasso responded: "I don't know where he [Jarecki] got those photos. I don't recall anyone in my squad taking photographs. I think he may be confused in this matter."
Galasso also strongly rejected the idea that interviews with the children were designed to coax preconceived answers. The first detective sent out to interview one 10-year-old boy was surprised when the boy -- upon meeting the detective -- immediately handed him a flier that advertised Elaine Friedman's in-home day-care center.
According to Galasso, the boy told the detective he wanted him to have the poster because "'I don't want any more children to get touched.'"
"What that young man eventually revealed," Galasso continued, "was a pretty complete account of how he was seduced and then raped by Arnold Friedman and then Jesse Friedman." The 10-year-old's older brother, who also attended classes with Arnold Friedman, "told the same story, by the way," Galasso said.
Two-person teams began interviewing "a great number of children within a very short period of time," she said. Lurid accounts surfaced of games of "leap frog" in the nude and "find the M&M's," which involved children using their mouths to find candy hidden inside other children's underwear.
The police, she said, did their best to ensure that the interviewers did not manipulate answers. But, Galasso allowed, "at some point some detective might have said, 'We know something happened because we've talked to other children in the class.' "
Prosecutor Onorato, who met with "every one of these children, a number of times," started each of his interviews in the same way, he said. "I say to them: 'I don't care what you've told the police or anybody, it's now time for you and I to talk about the truth.' You could say [the children] felt as though they were entrenched by the things they had already said to their parents and the police by this time and weren't going to back off now. I can understand that. I felt that these boys were not making things up."
"I know that none of the sex abuse charges against my father or myself are true, because I was there in the classes," said Jesse Friedman, in the conference-call interview. "Not one single person has come forward and said they were victims, only the people interrogated repeatedly by the Nassau County police. Not one piano student [of Arnold's] going back 30 years ever came forward, after we were on the front page of all the newspapers, to say there was abuse. If my father was secretly molesting kids, I would think he might have done so in the piano classes where he was alone with the kids."
On his Web site (freejesse.net), Jesse Friedman details his present life. By law, he has to register every 90 days as a "violent sexual predator" under Megan's Law and must do so for the remainder of his life. He cannot visit toy stores or playgrounds or revisit the scene of the purported crimes. He must attend sex-offender therapy twice a week. And he has worn his electronic ankle bracelet, thus far, for a year and a half.
"There is no indication," he writes, "that the Division of Parole plans to remove it from my leg before my time on parole is over in December 2006."
Added David Friedman: "There were 17 children who accused my father and brother of weekly sodomy over four years, which means more than 50 visits to the pediatrician at this time. No pediatrician noticed any scarring, tearing, bleeding to suggest any abuse. No one ever dropped out of [Arnold Friedman's computer] classes despite claiming to be sodomized after sessions. They re-enrolled in what was an elective program. It doesn't make any sense. Why would they re-enroll for a program, if these things were going on?"
No physical evidence was sought, Galasso said, because the procedures would have been too invasive and "none of the parents wanted that." Besides, Onorato says, physical evidence was not needed under New York state law. And the testimony was compelling enough.
If the police were gentle with the young boys, says Great Neck resident Stuart Maltin, they weren't quite so tender with his son Judd, who was Jesse's best friend. When Nassau County police were seeking people to testify against Jesse (who at that point was considering going to trial), detectives visitedJudd's house to ask him to come to the station, ostensibly to pick up his computer, which had been found at Arnold's home and contained pornographic disks. The Maltins refused. The police came again.
"They really started to badger me," said Maltin. "They really wanted to pick him up and go to the station. They wanted for Judd to say he saw something. I said, 'I would like you to go.' "
In the end, they did. Judd was not charged by the police.
Jesse, said Maltin, "was a kid in my house all the time. I guess you could be a nice, sweet kid and be a child abuser, but it really made no sense. He was a teenager. They just treated him so unfairly."
The issue, said Galasso, is not Jesse's plight, but that of the victims.
"I have heard from the parents since the film came out and they're in contact, of course, with their children. They're all grown up and many of them are out of state now. They're saying they feel re-victimized. . . . They still wish to remain anonymous."
Jesse Friedman said he expects "only good things to come from this film. The end goal is to have my conviction overturned and vacated. . . . As it stands I have no [legal] avenues for appeal. But I fully expect my accusers will come forward as adults and talk about how I never sexually molested them. I can challenge the conviction in newly discovered evidence if someone comes forward and changes their testimony. They'd have to come to court and testify to police misconduct and testify they were never abused in computer classes."
Jarecki said he's considering the release of a 51/2-hour, extended version, possibly on DVD release.
"I remain obsessed with this," he said.
