This is how bad police work helped create a panic – and how the lessons from that panic apply to the child sexual abuse panic in Nachlaot, Jerusalem.
Hella Winston has a long piece in The Jewish Week about the infamous Friedman child sexual abuse case in Long Island.
The case took place in the 1980s, and the problems with the handling of the investigation by police are severe.
There's no question that Arnold Friedman was a pedophile who distributed child porn. But did he and his son Jesse rape kids from a computer class they taught in the Friedman home?
Almost certainly not.
There are very large questions surrounding what seems to be a coerced guilty plea Jesse Friedman.
More than that, the way police conducted the investigation is highly abusive and coercive itself – so much so that it almost certainly sparked a panic (like the witch panics that took place in New England for decades and sparked many witch trials, and other similar panics).
For close to two decades, no major or mid-sized police department in the US has used the highly problematic investigative techniques laid out below. Most never did.
But the techniques – highly suggestive interviews of child 'victims,' rewarding child 'victims' for saying what the adult questioners want to hear, and coercing child 'victims' all allegedly took place in Nachlaot, Jerusalem during the recent child sexual abuse panic there.
In Nachlaot, as I was first to report, a mentally unstable woman was able to use the presence in the neighborhood of a known pedophile to create a pedophilia "ring" with many pedophile "members" who were sexually abusing kids. People came to believe that there was a tunnel from one ring "member's" house to another, and underground secret room used to rape children, and similar fantastical things that are not true. (The woman who owned one of the two houses connected by that "tunnel" was savagely beaten and almost killed by haredi vigilantes a few months ago. Yet even though they had complete run of her home, and even though police had the same after the crime was reported, no evidence of a tunnel was found.)
Israel's police contributed to this panic with their slow reaction to reports of child sexual abuse in the neighborhood and by their own lax investigative work.
But they also used parents' sincere but misguided attempts to get their kids to admit to being abused to say that evidence had been corrupted, and to ramp down the official investigation as a result.
The real reason for this may have little to do with corrupted evidence, however.
One of the pedophiles living in the area is Avrohom Mondrowitz.
Police have spent decades ignoring reports about the politically connected Gerrer hasid's child porn, fake degree mills, other cyber crimes and his indictment in the US for child rapes and are almost certainly doing the same now.
Were any children raped or molested in Nachlaot?
Almost certainly, the answer to that question is yes.
But that child sexual abuse did not come from a ring of pedophiles, take place in part in a secret tunnel or involve any ritual components.
If children were raped in Nachlaot, it was almost certainly done the old fashioned way, without black candles, satan worship, a secret society of pedophiles, a secret tunnel, Christian symbols, etc., etc., etc. It was done by one or two (or even three) neighborhood pedophiles, the garden variety, who lured kids with candy and toys and videos, just like pedophiles do everywhere.
Here is Hella Winston's account of the problems with the Friedman investigation from this week's Jewish Week:
…25 years after the case broke and nine years after the controversial film “Capturing the Friedmans” first raised serious questions about how the investigation was handled, additional information is coming to light that suggests the convictions may have been wrongful. In fact, four of the 14 original complainants now claim they were never abused.…
The [appellate court] judges placed the Friedman case in the context of what they described as a “vast moral panic [that] fueled a series of highly-questionable child sex abuse prosecutions” that took place in the late 1980s and early ’90s and noted numerous problems with the investigation that were first revealed through interviews in the film. Among them were the fact that there were no complaints from any children until after Arnold was caught by U.S. postal inspectors, a complete lack of physical evidence for what were alleged to be instances of violent sodomy, and what the Court called “suggestive” and “aggressive” interviewing techniques which “an extensive body of research suggests can induce false reports.”
[B]ecause there was no trial, the Court also noted that the “petitioner never had an opportunity to explore how the evidence against him was obtained” and that, “on the contrary, the police, prosecutors and the judge did everything they could to coerce a guilty plea and avoid a trial.”…
One complainant — whose grand jury testimony resulted in more than 10 charges, including sodomy, sexual abuse and endangering the welfare of a child — said: “I remember the cops coming to my house and the cops being aggressive and people wanting me to say what they wanted to hear. I’ll tell you, I never said I was sodomized. I was never raped or molested ... if I said it, it was not because it happened, it was because someone else put those words in my mouth.”
One of the non-complainants who attended the same course that produced 96 counts of sodomy and sexual abuse told the filmmakers that he had a “vague recollection of being interviewed at the time by someone who was trying to get me to say something that didn’t happen. … I always assumed that if something was going on in the classes, I would have had some sense of it, and I didn’t,” he said, adding that “[p]eople who were in class with me always felt that they weren’t allowed to say that nothing happened.”…
[A] mother also recounted how she came home one day to find two police officers in her living room. While the officers assured her that they had not yet spoken to her then 11-year-old son, they told her they wanted to question him about the classes. According to the mother, the officers “started to grill him … they hammered him for a while, [asking] him the same question 95 times in different ways. After a while I said, ‘I [almost] wanted to confess to something.’”
“I could see how they could drag stuff out of kids that didn’t happen.”…