He's guilty as sin.
That's the conclusion reached by the Nassau County District Attorney's three-year reinvestigation into the case of Jesse Friedman, the subject of the documentary "Capturing the Friedmans."
Friedman, his supporters and the makers of the Academy Award-nominated documentary have long maintained he was railroaded into pleading guilty to charges he molested 13 kids in the late 1980s, and were expecting the report to exonerate him.
It did the opposite.
Friedman, they found, was labeled a "psychopathic deviant" by his own shrink, and had actually sexually abused a total of 17 children.
"The District Attorney concludes that Jesse Friedman was not wrongfully convicted," the blistering 172-page report says.
"In fact, by any impartial analysis, the investigation process prompted by Jesse Friedman . . . has only increased confidence in the integrity of Jesse Friedman's guilty plea adjudication as a sex offender."
The panel said it interviewed three of Friedman's now-adult victims. "Each confirmed that he was sexually abused by Jesse Friedman. Each told their separate story, marked by pain and recovery," and "recounted years of shame and humiliation," the report said.
One of the victims said Friedman had threatened to "kill his dog" if he ever told anyone about the abuse.
his dog" if he ever told anyone about the abuse.
At a Monday afternoon press conference, Friedman said, "It's painful when people lie about you and it's really painful when the district attorney lies about you.”
“I believe that there were nothing but lies in the report that was released today,” he said, his wife Elisabeth by his side.
“I'm standing strong and I have more fight in me than I've ever had before. So, game on."
The exhaustive report also took aim at the makers of "Capturing the Friedmans," director Andrew Jarecki and producer Marc Smerling. It accused them of using misleading, out-of-context snippets of interviews to further their campaign to exonerate Friedman, 44.
"'Capturing the Friedmans' was a provocative and entertaining movie, but it was not an exhaustive account of the entire case against Jesse Friedman. The Review Team had to go behind the excerpts and sound bites that the producers used in the film and other 'reels' and exhibits the producers have produced over the course of this re-investigation," the report said.
They "were not forthcoming with evidence under their control. Though both told witnesses and the public that they possessed swaths of evidence capable of 'proving' Jesse Friedman's innocence, this material was not shared with the review team or the advisory panel until 2012.
"Even then, the information that they chose to share was partial" and unconvincing, as were the "recantations" of victims they'd offered up, the report said.
One said he was "tricked" into the statement by Jarecki's "manipulative" questioning, the report said.
The director also suppressed a statement from Friedman's uncle - who'd said in the movie that he thought Jesse was innocent - that his nephew was indeed a molester and "cannot tell right from wrong," the report said.
"Instances of wrongful conviction are real and exist in far greater numbers than any of us would like to admit. Wrongful convictions undermine public safety, and they pose the greatest threat there is to the integrity required of our justice system. But the case against Jesse Friedman is not one of them," Nassau County DA Kathleen Rice said.
"I came to this case without an agenda or any personal stake in its outcome, and without any interest outside of searching for the truth. We were fully prepared to exonerate Mr. Friedman if that's where the facts led us. But the facts," Rice said, "led to a substantially different conclusion."
Lawyer Ron Kuby, who's represented Friedman pro bono for almost a decade, maintained the report ignored the facts.
"DA Rice spent three years whitewashing the prosecutorial and police misconduct in this case," and her team's report "contains numerous outright falsehoods belied by the documentary evidence," he said.
Kuby said he plans to be in court Friday to get access to original police reports and information from the 25-year-old grand jury proceedings.
"We will continue the fight to exonerate Jesse," he said.
Jarecki, meanwhile, was unimpressed with the report's film criticism, and said he had reviewed the case far more thoroughly than the DA's office did during their three-year "superficial" "boondoggle."
"We knew it was unlikely this case would be reversed by the same prosecuting office famously made a mess of the investigation in the first place," he said.
Rice ordered the review in 2010, after a federal appeals panel said their review of the case showed there was a "reasonable likelihood" that Friedman had been wrongly convicted.
He was busted back in 1987, after the feds discovered his father, Arnold Friedman, had a stash of kiddie porn in his Great Neck, L.I., home - and that the retired teacher taught computer classes to young kids there.
Police started questioning the students, and within weeks, both Arnold and Jesse, who'd helped his dad with the classes, were arrested on sexual abuse charges.
Arnold Friedman pleaded guilty four months later.
With the charges against him piling up - he was hit with over 100 counts of sodomy - Jesse, then 19, eventually copped a plea as well.
Arnold was sentenced to 10-30 years in prison, and died behind bars of a heart attack in 1995. Jesse was sentenced to 6-18 years behind bars, and was released after serving 13 years.
The circumstances of his conviction were called into question by "Capturing the Friedmans" in 2003, and "Jesse Friedman came to see the film as a vehicle by which he could assert his innocence," the report said.
Within a year, Jesse, a level three violent sex offender, started fighting in court to get his conviction vacated.
He was helped by the moviemakers, who became convinced of his innocence.
The federal appeals court ruling adopted several of the film's arguments - that police asked the kids in his father's class leading questions, and were "aggressive" in their questioning, refusing "to accept denials of abuse."
None of the 8-10 year-olds in the class, it was contended, showed any signs of abuse before Arnold Friedman was arrested for the child porn.
In one instance, "detectives interviewed a child 15 times" before getting the boy to "admit" to the abuse.
Another child only "remembered" being abused after being hypnotized, the court said.
The hysteria was compounded by Arnold Friedman's admission as part of his plea deal that he'd molested all 81 kids who'd taken his class, while prosecutors didn't question "outlandish" tales of "sex games" in his classroom.
Jesse, meanwhile, only pleaded guilty because he'd been forced to by the judge, who'd threatened to lock him up for life he didn't.
The review found none of that was true: police generally didn't ask leading questions, and there's no record of any child being visited 15 times. The victim who said he'd been hypnotized was unreliable and likely wasn't.
The children had shown signs of abuse, but they weren't immediately recognized as such, the report said. Some were scared of attending the class, one developed a stutter and another started losing his hair.
Arnold Friedman admitted molesting "only" 41 children, and specifically denied molesting a dozen others. Three separate students gave similar accounts of sexualized versions of Leap Frog and Simon Says being played in class, the report said.
And the review found that the judge who presided over the case, Abbey Boklan, didn't threaten Jesse, she just properly warned him about of how much time he was facing.
He "pled guilty because his own calculations showed it to be the optimal strategy in light of the choices available to him, not because someone else forced him to do so," the report said.
The report also paints a highly disturbing picture of Friedman, who's now married and living in Bridgeport, CT.
A shrink who was hired by Jesse's lawyer to help with the original criminal case, Dr. David Pogge, found he was "a psychopathic deviant" who was "self-centered, manipulative, egocentric and capable of breaking the law."
"Jesse lies all the time and derives gratification from fooling others," the doctor was quoted as saying.
After his guilty plea, he wrote a letter to one of his two brothers calling the experience "exhilarating." "I want a big article tomorrow!" he wrote, adding that he dreamed of being a "star."
Friedman also went on Geraldo, against his lawyer's advice, and said then that he'd been sexually abused by his father, and forced "to pose in hundreds of photos for my father in all sorts of sexual positions (with) the kids."
He "reveled in public discussions of his guilt," the report says.
He's since denied he was ever abused by his father, or that his father abused any of his students, but the panel found those claims "not credible."
In prison, the report said, Friedman was disciplined twice - once for possessing a torn photograph of two prepubescent girls, one of whom was naked, that he'd ripped out of a magazine, and the second time for "writing and distributing 'fictional' stories that described violent and disturbing sexual acts, including incest, bestiality and child rape."
The panel said it interviewed Jesse's uncle, Howard Friedman, who told them, "Jesse is guilty, and you're going to ask me how I know. Because Arnold told me."
He said his brother had tearfully confessed to him after his arrest that he and Jesse had "misbehaved with children," but swore him to secrecy "until he was dead and Jesse was out of prison."
He told the panel he'd lied about Jesse's innocence when he was interviewed for "Friedmans," and said he felt like "a huge rock had been lifted from my chest" after he made the admission, the report said.
It also said he'd come clean before - he told Jarecki what his brother had told him a couple of years ago, but the director had never mentioned the startling admission to the review team.
The report acknowledges there were some problems with the initial investigation, and the re-investigation: The panel did not have access to the victims' grand jury statements, which Friedman's supporters say show the case was flimsy. Investigators were inconsistent with their note taking and keeping, making it hard to recreate the investigation.
The review panel didn't get to talk to several of the victims, including one who recanted to Jarecki, because they ignored requests to talk.
"In hindsight, the investigation was not ideal, but it was a product of its time," the report said. "Today an investigation against the Friedmans would start and proceed differently. But it has not been shown that the result of the investigation would be any different."
Friedman told the Daily News in an interview last week that he expected the report to clear him, and was hoping for an apology from the DA's office.
"I know if that hasn't happened, we haven't reached the end yet," he said.
* * *
It was a documentary loaded with fiction.
The Nassau County DA’s office blasted the 2003 film “Capturing the Friedmans” as misleading, and accused the moviemakers of interfering with the probe they were responsible for reopening. The report said the filmmakers misrepresented comments from an investigator and the judge presiding over the case, and took at face value comments by one victim that he was “hypnotized,” when there’s no evidence of such.
The report also claimed filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Marc Smerling would not hand over some of the evidence under their control, and refused to hand over the unedited versions of interviews with Jesse Friedman, his family members and another co-defendant in the case.
Jarecki told the Daily News his investigation was far more thorough than the DA’s “superficial” probe. He said they provided investigators with more than 1,700 pages of exonerating evidence, and “they never even asked us a single question about it.”
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