Just as fascinating as the subject of this documentary is the manner in which the director/producer more or less just stumbled into it accidentally:
Director/producer Andrew Jarecki was in the process of making a documentary about people who work as children’s birthday party clowns in New York which led to the discovery of David Friedman’s story. David Friedman was considered the most successful of the city’s party clowns. IMDb
This is a film in which you are genuinely stumped regarding your own reaction to the Friedmans guilt or innocence. Or, rather, I was. I found myself going back to the national hysteria that revolved around folks who were accused of sexually abusing children in day care centers back in the 1980s. The infamous McMartin preschool trial for example.
I also recall my reaction to the Michael Peterson case. It was showcased in a documentary on the Sundance Channel. The Staircase. I remember being shocked that he was found guilty at the end of the trial. The documentary seemed clearly weighted towards his innocence. And yet in following the case from subsequent articles/television documentaries I became increasingly more convince that he was in fact guilty.
So you always have to take these things with a grain of salt. Ultimately, whatever you are viewing/reading becomes embodied in a particular point of view.
Bottom line [mine]: There seems little doubt that Arnold Friedman received [and collected] hard core child pornography. But the part about him and [especially] his son Jesse abusing children in the computer classes seems to be pure bullshit. A case of public hysteria that originated in large part from the criminal justice system itself. And then from the media. In order to sell more advertising.
What is remarkable here is that the son [David] actually recorded the family crumbling apart after Arnold got out of jail on bail.
Here’s one reaction to the film:
slate.com/articles/arts/movi … s_son.html
And here is a video arguing that the Friedmans probably were guilty: youtu.be/qjYWOZgMbHQ
Of course the problem here is that you don’t learn who made this video. Why did they make it? Did they have a political ax to grind?
Look for the consequences of sexual repression. Wilhelm Reich would have had a field day interviewing Arnold and Elaine.
IMDb
[b]Jesse Friedman suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder following the release of this film and underwent extensive treatment at a VA Hospital in Boston, MA.
The movie caused some theatre patrons to remain in their seats to argue the innocence of Arnold and Jesse Friedman. This caused theatre owners to complain to the films distributor, Magnolia Pictures.
Following the release of the film, director Andrew Jarecki came under fire for comments he made whilst publicizing the film proclaiming his own ambiguous opinion as to the guilt of the Friedmans. During production, Jarecki had stated outright that he believed the Friedmans were falsely accused and had also provided funds to appeal Jesse Friedman’s conviction.
The film sparked enough renewed interest in the case that Jesse Friedman mounted an appeal to his earlier conviction. While the appeal was denied, the Nassau County District Attorney did agree to re-examine the case and appoint a special review committee to evaluate any impropriety in the original case, including coercion of Friedman’s original confession of guilt. [/b]
Here’s the latest I could find on it: newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/06/24/ … oneration/
at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capturing_the_Friedmans
trailer: youtu.be/OVY4ehqJjAA
CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS [2003]
Directed by Andrew Jarecki
[b]David [to the camera]: My dad was a cool guy, you know? He was a schoolteacher. And I think that the other kids liked him, and he liked kids. But he didn’t like spending a lot of time with his wife, so he would teach high school during the day and then after school, he would come home and teach piano lessons and later computer lessons in the house. And that was, of course, more time he didn’t have to spend with his wife.
…
David [from his video diary]: Well, this is private, so if you don’t, if you’re not me, then you really shouldn’t be watching this, because this is supposed to be a private situation between me and me. This is between me now and me in the future. So turn it off. Don’t watch this. This is private.
[then his whole demeanor changes]
David: If you’re the fucking, oh, god, the cops. And if you’re the fucking cops, go fuck yourselves. Go fuck yourselves because you’re full of shit.
…
John McDermott [Postal Inspector]: Back in 1984 US Customs had seized some child pornography, addressed from the Netherlands, in the mail to Arnold Friedman. Now, he never got that piece of mail, but his name was forwarded on to us. So what we would do then would be to initiate a correspondence with Arnold in the hopes that we can determine if he is in fact willing to violate the statute again about mailing or receiving child pornography.
…
McDermott: Since he had sent the magazine, he was always asking for it back. So I asked the prosecutors, “let’s grant him his wish. He wants his magazine back.” I dressed up as a mail carrier, knocked on his door, asked him if he was Arnold Friedman. He replied he was. And I said, “I have a package for you. Sign right here.” He did. About an hour later, we went back.[/b]
With a search warrant.
McDermott: In the top dresser door was the open magazine. Well, he thought we would take the magazine and leave, and i said, “no, we have a search warrant. We’re gonna search the whole house for child pornography.”
And nothing then was ever the same.
[b]Elaine [Arnold’s wife]: And this was Arnold’s secret. He liked to look at pictures of boys. And it’s not that he acted on these things. He just wanted to look at these pictures and meditate or…
…
McDermott: And these are listings of the magazines that were found behind the piano. “Young boys & sodomy.” “Incest case histories.” Something called “chicken pickin’s magazine.” And in addition to that, we found evidence of a computer class being taught there by mr. Friedman. And we did seize a list of names that we thought could be students. I remember walking in there saying, “Goddamn. We could have a problem here.” [/b]
So did he “act on” his “secret”? This is where things start to become considerably more ambiguous. Particularly with respect to the Friedman son, Jesse. Here it gets more and more like the McMartin preschool “investigation”.
[b]Det. Frances Galasso [after sending detectives out to interview Friedman’s computer class students]: The parents were becoming impatient. They wanted something done immediately. But you always want to be very careful about how you proceed, because the one thing that you worry about – I know I worried about it all the time – is just charging somebody with this kind of a crime is enough to ruin their lives. So you want to make sure that you have enough evidence and that you’re convinced that you’re making a good charge.
…
Detective: As we conducted more interviews of the children, Jesse’s name started to pop up. And Jesse was there. What did Jesse do? And then eventually we were able to ascertain that Jesse’s role was not one of, you know, helping his dad conduct the computer class, but basically abusing the children himself.
…
Galasso: We didn’t have children telling us that Arnold had slapped them around. But quite a number of the kids reported incidents of being slapped and having their hair pulled or their arms twisted by Jesse. He was, by far, the more violent one.
…
Elaine: Somewhere along the way, I think it was the Nassau County cops, they showed me this magazine, and they said, “you see? Look at this magazine.” And they showed me the magazine. They were embarrassed to show it to me because of what the pictures were. And you know, I didn’t see it. My eyes were in the right direction, but my brain saw nothing. Because when it was all over, the lawyer showed me the magazine, and then I saw it. For the first time, I really saw it. I couldn’t believe what I saw. I mean, I had no concept that this thing even exists in the world, that this magazine would even be in the world. I mean, we had a middle-class home, educated. I had a good family, right? Where did this come from?
…
Howard [Arnold’s brother]: I was the first to visit my brother in prison. And that was a moment in my life I’ll never forget. He came into the room. I was sitting at this table, a lot of tables, and they were crowded. Just awful surroundings. And he didn’t have his glasses on. Without his glasses, he was blind as a bat. They’d taken them off and broken them, stepped on them. He had a smell of urine. They were throwing urine at him. They were threatening to throw him down the stairs. They knew what he was in there for. It was all over the media. And he was half-blind and hadn’t shaved in two days and shivering and cold and scared out of his wits. The first words out of his mouth were, “Howie, they’re gonna kill me, there gonna kill me. Get me out of here.”
…
Howard: My brother and Jesse kept saying they’re innocent. “This is trumped up charges.” And they did a McMartin’s, you know? They somehow got one kid to tell, they got the police to be able to convince the kids, “well, all of your friends said something happened. Didn’t something happen? Something must have happened,” et cetera, et cetera. And they were convinced. They kept saying they were innocent. And I just kept thinking, “I have to believe them.” [/b]
The two renditions:
[b]Former computer class student: I remember one time I slipped one of the sex games out, and I brought it home and everything, and I copied it, and Arnold found out. Because of that, I was raped by him and Jesse at the same time, as punishment to that. I never did it again.
…
Former computer class student: My general recollection of the classes is basically a positive one, is a pleasant one. The types of behaviors which were described, which were, well, just downright satanic in nature. I mean, they make him sound like some kind of brutal sadist, whereas, you know, I had just always thought of him as being kind of a nebbish. The very nature of these charges is so absurd. It seems almost like some kind of grotesque fantasy.
…
Former computer class student: I think, as someone who took the classes, it was just hard to picture even that going on, because I did have a good experience. And I didn’t, you know, see anything, you know, remotely like, you know, like child molestation or child abuse or any child anything going on. What took place in arnold’s classes was pretty much just straight computer lessons. I mean, as ordinary and as boring as you could possibly imagine it.
…
Larry King: We now welcome, also in los angeles, Debbie Nathan. Debbie is an investigative freelance journalist, who has been covering the McMartin and other abuse trials around the country. All these parents are bizarro, huh? They’re all whacked?
Nathan: Well, it’s not really fair, I don’t think to deal simply with these parents or with this particular case. You have to understand that all over the country there is a hysteria. And I don’t think that it’s a question with most of these kids of lying. I think that they have been brainwashed, if you will.
…
Nathan [now to the documentary interviewer]: In the Friedman case, the basic charges were completely implausible. First of all, you’d have to believe that blood is coming out of these children’s orifices, that they’re screaming, that they’re crying, that their clothes are soiled from semen and from blood. And yet their parents show up. Sometimes they show up unannounced. Everything looks fine. Was there any physical evidence in the case that was relevant? Or it was the case really strictly based on the statements of the kids? It was more testimony. There was a dearth of physical evidence.
…
[b]Nathan: I don’t think that they’re sitting around with any kind of diabolical or conspiratorial agenda to go out and falsely accuse Arnold Friedman or railroad Jesse Friedman. But nobody’s critiquing them. Nobody’s telling them that there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this. Nobody’s saying that we’ve got a problem in this culture with hysteria around this issue. And so they’re really free to let their fantasies fly.
…
Glasso: I think the most overwhelming thing was the enormous amount of child pornography. You would just have to walk into the living room, and it’d be piled around the piano. There were literally foot-high stacks of pornography, in plain view, all around the house. [/b]
Complete bullshit. The photos from the search of the house show none of this.
[b]Nathan: There’s a whole community atmosphere that gets created in a mass-abuse case like this, where the families are talking to each other, they’re going to community meetings, or they’re calling on the phone all the time. They’re seeing each other in group therapy. And there is definitely an element when a community defines itself as a victimized community, that if you’re not victimized you don’t fit into that community.
…
Father of one of the students [his identity concealed]: I appreciated theirs call in the beginning telling me what happened. And then when I told them that we looked into it and my wife and I both felt that nothing happened to our son, it got to be a little pushy situation where they told us that we were in denial, and it absolutely happened to our son.
…
Recording of someone calling the Friedman house: You fucking bitch! I’m gonna kill you! When Jesse gets out of jail, he’s a dead motherfucker. When Arnold gets out of jail, he’s a dead motherfucker. FUCK YOU!! I’LL FUCK YOUR WHOLE FAMILY!!!
…
Nathan: David had just gotten a video camera when this case broke, and so he just started recording the family falling apart. [/b]
And boy do they ever. Though it was mostly Mom against the rest of them.
[b]Elaine: The family was screaming at each other. And everyone wanted me to say, “he didn’t do it.” Well, I wouldn’t do that. I said, “I don’t know.”
…
Jesse: My mother abandoned him, pretty much, wouldn’t talk to him, fought with him constantly, made him sleep on the sofa. And after 33 years of marriage, when your wife, when you’ve been accused of a crime you didn’t commit, you spend 6 weeks in jail for it, you’re trying to build a defense, and your wife leaves you, essentially, my father fell apart.
…
David: My mother is sexually ignorant. As far as I’m concerned, she had sex, I mean everyone thinks their parents only had sex 3 times, you know for each of their siblings. But with my mother, I think it was true.
…
Elaine: And it was like, you know, you read in a book how do you have sex, and you start here, and then you do step step step. And that’s somewhat like what sex was like with Arnold, because I used to say to him, “it’s called foreplay. It’s supposed to be play. It’s supposed to be fun.” And he treated it like work. Like this is what you’re supposed to do when you do it, like washing the dishes.
…
Elaine: Arnold’s mother dated a lot of men and would bring the men into the apartment, and they would have sex in the bed while arnold was there listening. And Arnold said that, because he saw his mother in bed with a man, that when he was adolescent, he was experimenting, as all children do, and he had sex with his brother in bed or something like that. And to me, that’s not what all children do.
…
Nathan [discussing a letter Arnold had sent her]: Then Arnold goes on and says, “my next partners were boys my own age, all of which sexual relations, probably being within norms for my age. However, the emotional impact of these relations was very pronounced and lasted through my adult life. A more normal situation, as probably happened with my partners, would have been to outgrow and forget these episodes. However, I literally fell in love with these boys, and the relations were far more significant to me than they were to my partners.” And then he told me that when he got to be an older teenager, like maybe in his late teens, he started worrying that he was still attracted to kids that were the same age as his brother had been when Arnold was and that really started bothering him. And then after he had his own children, he was worried. He started worrying that maybe he would molest his own children. And at that point, he went to therapy, and the therapist told him, “no, don’t worry. You’ve got everything under control.”
…
David: If my father had the ability to confess to me, yeah, he had done something one time, and that’s how this whole crazy mess got started, it would make a lot more sense. Not that I wanted that to be the case, but you have to find a way to explain the unexplainable.[/b]
Next up: plea bargaining: disconnecting Jesse from Arnold.
[b]Scott Banks [Judge’s legal secretary]: I arranged for Mr. Friedman and his family to get a jury room where they could sit and they could discuss these plea options. And while I didn’t go inside the room except to knock on the door and say where we’re at in terms of what Mr. Friedman wanted to do there was a lot of yelling and crying and screaming going on, coming out of that room.
…
Elaine: When i screamed at arnold, I screamed “you must do it because it’ll help Jesse. Do it for Jesse.”
Jesse: And my brothers were just furious at this notion that my father would go to court and plead guilty. And at one point in all of the chaos my father just started screaming. And there’s uncontrollable tears and he picked up a chair. I remember he threw a chair. He was just screaming about how he wasn’t gonna plead guilty. He didn’t do anything, he’s not gonna plead guilty. And he was furious at my mother and he was just freaking out.
…
Jesse: I’m talking to my father privately and he asked me what he should do. And I could have said to my father “I want you just to walk out of here and go to trial and not plead guilty.” Instead, I remember very clearly saying to him I wanted him to make the decision. And I remember feeling like a really young kid. Kind of looking up to my dad and saying “dad, I,” you know “I want you to be my daddy.” And I would have been really, really proud of him if he had just stood up and said “Elaine, I’m not pleading guilty. We’re going to trial.” But that’s not what happened.
…
Newscaster: The sentence 10 to 30 years. The crime: Sodomizing young boys. Defendant Arnold Friedman had pleaded guilty to sexually abusing more than a dozen youngsters, but this does not end the friedman case. There are still numerous sodomy and sex abuse charges pending against arnold’s son, Jesse Friedman.
…
Peter Panaro [Jesse’s lawyer]: I always believed Jesse. How could this possibly go on for 4 years…children repeatedly sodomized and sexually abused with brutality if you believe the police. And then their parents come to pick them up right after computer class and not one kid is crying…not one kid tells his mother or father what happened in class…not one kid says anything? I find that so incredible that Jesse’s story that nothing happened to me was more believable than the police version of these horrific acts.
…
Panaro: Jesse and I flew all the way to Madison, Wisconsin where we rented a car and drove miles to some town that I couldn’t possibly give you the name of to a federal prison. Who knew more about this case then Arnold Friedman? He knew more about it than Jesse. Jesse was out in the waiting room at this point and this man had this little boy in there who was his son or his stepson, I don’t know but the child was about or years old and they were in the table right next to us. And I was interviewing Arnie and all of a sudden he leaned over and asked me if I could ask the corrections officer or whoever was in charge in the room if we could get another table. And I asked him why, and he said “that little boy over there bouncing on his father’s lap is getting me very excited.” It took me about 15 minutes to regain my composure. I remember that like it was yesterday. I was shocked 'cause even though I was involved in the case now for two months and even though I had studied pedophilia and I knew what these men did to little boys I had never heard somebody actually say it. And I was absolutely disgusted.
…
Jesse: Yeah, my father had the magazines and yes, my father admitted that he was a pedophile and had these fantasies and yes, my father admitted that he was no saint and that there were times that he slipped but I was arrested too and I’m not a child molester. And I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to have to answer for the sins of my father.
…
Jesse: While I was out on bail I put all the charges into a database so that they could be sorted by complainant by time period, by nature of charge. For example, there was one complainant a 10-year-old boy…he says he came to class in the spring of 1986 and during this 10 week session where he was only over my house for an hour and a half once a week he says that there were 31 instances of sexual contact. That’s 3 times a week every single week for 10 straight weeks and then the course ends. In the fall, he re-enrolled for the advanced course and says that he was subjected to 41 more instances of anal and oral sodomy in the next 10 week session and nobody said anything. Week after week, month after month year after year until after the police came knocking on doors and asking questions.
…
Lloyd Doppman [detective, sex crimes unit]: Children want to please very often. They want to give you the answers that you want. Adults do that as well. So you have to be very mindful of the fact that when you’re interviewing a child if the child starts to answer questions your responses should be somewhat in the framework of “and then what happened?” Or, “what happened next?” Or, “what do you remember then?” As opposed to “he did this to you, didn’t he?” Or “she did this to you, didn’t she?” That’s a very, very dangerous type of interview process to use. [/b]
Guess which method the police used here?
[b]Father of one of the students [his identity concealed]: And I listened to the police talking to my son and it got to a point where it wasn’t asking him what happened. It was more of them telling him what happened and that when they didn’t like what he said they kept repeating to him that they know what happened and that he should tell.
…
One of rhe allegedly abused children: What I do remember is the detectives putting me under a lot of pressure to speak up. And at some point, I kind of broke down. I started crying. And when I started to tell them things I was telling myself that it’s not true. I was telling myself, “just say this to them in order to get them off your back.”
…
Nathan: I came across a document regarding a group of children from the Friedman case who were in therapy and it stated that many of them had absolutely no recollection of the abuse and there was some discussion about whether hypnosis would be a good idea now, exactly what you’re not supposed to do. It was the kind of therapy that had a really good chance of messing up kids’ memories and implanting false memories.
…
Elaine: I was told that if he went to trial the judge would give consecutive sentences. Instead of concurrent the sentencing would be consecutive. I said, “oh, my god.”
…
Jesse: She just kept telling me over and over “the only thing to do is to plead guilty and to get the best deal you can. You can’t go to trial. It doesn’t matter if you’re guilty or innocent. You can’t go to trial, because if you go to trial you’re gonna go to prison for the rest of your life.” I said, “but ma, I didn’t do it.” She said, “that doesn’t matter. You have to plead guilty.”
…
Jesse: In 1988 there was no way that a jury in Nassau County who had been reading the newspaper headlines in “newsday” for over a year those people were never going to listen to anything the defense had to say and i was absolutely terrified of going to prison for 100 years.
…
Panaro [after Jesse tells him he wants to plead guilty]: Jesse had always maintained his innocence. I don’t work out deals for people who are innocent. And my first reaction was, “I’m not gonna do it. You’re not guilty, you’re not pleading guilty.” And at that point, he told me that “I have something to tell you.” And with tears rolling down his eyes, literally, he told me that he was abused by his father growing up and that while he never enjoyed the sexual part of that he did enjoy the attention his father gave him and being with his father…and that not everything he had said about nothing happened was true. [/b]
But Jesse denies that this is true. In fact, Jesse claims it was Panaro’s idea:
[b]Jesse: It was Peter Panaro’s fictionalized story that he fed to me and said, “if you say this, it’s gonna look good for you.”
…
Jesse: The private investigator wasn’t coming up with anything helpful. There was not gonna be any defense witnesses. There wasn’t any money to hire experts. Mom was insistent upon there not being a trial. Peter Panaro wasn’t believing me no matter how many times I told him nothing happened. I just ran out of options. [/b]
He cops a plea: 6 to 18 years. He serves 13 of them. Again: Who to believe here? And about what?
But that’s why we invent God, right? He knows.