Editing Reality, Manufacturing Ambiguity (Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans)
Part One: Celebration of a Snow-Job
(Audio version at the end of this article)
“The idea that Jarecki did not set out to tell the Friedman story is a central premise for establishing his bona fides. Indeed, this backstory made its way into most reviews. Jarecki repeated it often, including in an affidavit once the movie prompted an appeal. But [it] is a claim that does not stand up to scrutiny. The film was presented with the tagline ‘Who Do You Believe?’ This was part of a deliberate marketing strategy that one writer called ‘studied ambiguity’ (Silverglate & Takei, 2004). While the film gives voice to several former officials who stand by the conviction, there is no question that the film leaves the impression that the case was a miscarriage of justice.” —Ross. E Cheit “Hyping Hypnosis: The Myth That Made Capturing the Friedmans Persuasive” (PDF), Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 2022, vol. 23, no. 2, 152–164
Snow-Job A: The Jinx
Andrew Jarecki graduated from Princeton University in 1985 and co-founded and served as CEO of Moviefone, which provided film schedules over the Internet and telephone and was sold to AOL in 1999. He formed the Hit the Ground Running production company with filmmaking partner Marc Smerling in 2003, for Capturing the Friedmans (Smerling also co-wrote and co-produced Jarecki’s fictional film about Robert Durst, All Good Things). Their film Catfish coined the term catfishing: a type of deceptive activity involving a person creating a fake social networking presence for nefarious purposes. It was criticized as being a hoax-documentary.
Robert Durst biographer Matt Birkbeck (“What The Jinx Got Wrong”) has made it very clear that he thinks Jarecki soft-balled the interviews with Durst and allowed several misrepresentations to stand. “Bobby liked the portrayal of himself [in All Good Things], the one of the tormented son of the big real-estate developer, Seymour Durst.” It was due to Jarecki’s more sympathetic viewpoint, Birkbeck believes, “as opposed to other descriptions of him that he had read over the years, of being a psychopath and whatnot,” that Durst agreed to do The Jinx.
In The Jinx season 1, there is a recreation of the scene in which Robert and his father stand by and watch his mother’s suicide. According to Birkbeck’s research, police and firefighters were at the scene, trying to save her. Birkbeck’s book A Deadly Secret: The Bizarre and Chilling Story of Robert Durst contains “the records from that day, from news reports, from police reports.” Instead, Jarecki went with Durst’s version of events; not only that, he filmed a whole scene around it. “They knew the real story,” Birkbeck says. “They went with his version.”
There was a lot in The Jinx that was factually incorrect that [Jarecki] was aware of. For instance, Jeanine Pirro had a huge role in this, and she really played up the story about how she had gotten this tip and got the original investigation going, and how her office was going to interview Susan Berman before she died, and that’s the reason Bobby killed her. None of that ever happened, and [Jarecki] knew that. The New York State Police didn’t reach out to Susan Berman until after she was murdered. . . . He’s a filmmaker [sighs], perhaps he’s beholden to a different set of standards. Joe Becerra, the detective who actually started this whole thing, I think he was in The Jinx for maybe 10, 15 seconds.
Snow-Job B: Capturing the Friedmans
Capturing the Friedmans focuses on the 1989 investigation of Arnold and Jesse Friedman for child molestation. Jarecki’s version is that he was making a short film, Just a Clown (which he later completed), about children’s birthday party entertainers in New York City, including the popular clown David Friedman (“Silly Billy,” the number one birthday clown in New York, with Susan Sarandon and Eddie Murphy for clients). Jarecki claims this is how he learned that David Friedman’s brother, Jesse, and his father, Arnold, had pleaded guilty to multiple charges of sodomy and child sexual abuse, and that the family had an archive of home movies.
Arnold Friedman died in prison in 1995 after taking an overdose of antidepressants, leaving a $250,000 life insurance benefit to Jesse. Jesse Friedman was released from New York’s Clinton Correctional Facility in 2001, after serving 13 years of his sentence.
Jarecki interviewed the surviving Friedmans (with the exception of a third brother, Seth), a few (but far from all) of the child abuse victims, as well as a number of other adults, for his film. Capturing the Friedmans won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and was a huge critical and commercial hit for Jarecki. It was nominated for an academy award, and voted fifth in the 2005 Channel 4 program “The 50 Greatest Documentaries.”
Elvis Mitchell of New York Times wrote, “Mr. Jarecki so recognizes the archetypal figures in the Friedman home that he knows to push things any further through heavy-handed assessment would be redundant. . . . first impressions can’t be trusted and that truth rests with each person telling the story.” The Washington Post wrote, “It’s testament to Jarecki’s superbly wrought film that everyone seems to be, simultaneously, morally suspect and strikingly innocent as they relate their stories and assertions. . . . This is a film about the quagmire of mystery in every human soul.” Roger Ebert: “The film is an instructive lesson about the elusiveness of facts, especially in a legal context. Sometimes guilt and innocence are discovered in court, but sometimes, we gather, only truths about the law are demonstrated.” Ebert cited Jarecki’s claim at the Sundance Film Festival not to know whether Arnold and Jesse Friedman were guilty, and praised Jarecki for communicating this ambiguity. Critic Charles Taylor, in a long essay for Salon, concluded that Jesse Friedman was “almost certainly innocent”: “the only former student in the film who still says he was molested later reveals that his memories of abuse only came to light after his parents put him in therapy, where he ‘recovered’ those memories under hypnosis.”
Despite my familiarity with snow jobs around organized child abuse, I was somehow persuaded by Jarecki’s film myself, which I reviewed for the Oaxaca Times in 2005:
When the police subsequently discovered that Friedman was also a private tutor of prepubescent boys (he taught piano and later computer skills), their suspicions went into overdrive and they conducted a thorough investigation (the film suggests maybe too thorough). They found (or created) the evidence they were seeking, and Friedman and his son Jessie (who also sat in on the classes) were charged with literally hundreds of unspeakable acts. Mysteriously, the alleged victims showed no signs of the abuse, nor did they once betray any signs of disturbance immediately after the alleged acts (they were picked up by their parents after the classes). They made no mention of being repeatedly raped, in fact, until they were interrogated by police much later. (Some of the abused children even signed up for an advanced course with Friedman, the following year. [NB: I don’t know where I heard this; I haven’t come across it while researching this current series.] The film presents a mystery, perhaps insoluble, in which an apparently heinous transgression is distorted and obscured by the hysteria and outrage that surrounds it. Jarecki is sympathetic to the Friedmans without being biased towards them. Considering the incendiary nature of the material (its power to shock and disturb with the alleged crimes, and yet to invoke our sympathy for the accused), it’s a remarkably balanced and cool treatment of the subject. The film’s overall effect is not one of disgust or anger, but one of confusion and melancholy (emphasis added).
Rewatching the film recently was something of a surprise. I had seen it at least twice since it came out in 2003, and my memory was, as above, of a powerful film that honestly represented a dark situation (though on later viewings I was more skeptical). Yet the film I saw in 2024 seemed to be a quite brazen attempt to reframe the charges, using the “satanic panic” playbook perfected for the McMartin preschool case of the early 1980s, albeit on a much smaller scale (and without the Satanism).
This is strange to consider. In 2003, I was fully aware of the strategies of organized ritual abuse, so the fact I didn’t make the connection with Capturing the Friedmans is testimony to Jarecki’s success in manufacturing ambiguity. Jarecki only has one victim testimony included; he is shrouded in darkness and anonymous, and makes contradictory statements, including one he then admits was a lie. The account of the abuse he gives seems absurd and unbelievable (a game of leap-frog that included sodomizing each person as they are being leapt over).1
There are two other witnesses (a boy who was in the computer class and a father of one of the boys) who express scepticism about the charges, and who seem comparably credible. The lawyers interviewed (the DA and two defense lawyers) are mostly skeptical of the charges (even the DA seems doubtful).
Debbie Nathan, author of Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, is one of the “experts” interviewed, and she argues for Jesse’s innocence by stressing the fantastic nature of the victims’ accounts and the lack of physical evidence. The implication is clearly of a miscarriage of justice due to (unexplained) mass hysteria.
Nathan does make this telling remark about Jarecki, however: “Polling viewers at Sundance in January, he was struck by how they were split over Arnold and Jesse’s guilt. Since then, he’s crafted a marketing strategy based on ambiguity, and during Q&As and interviews, he has studiously avoided taking a stand.”
The (recently canceled) film critic Jeffery Wells (in “Return of Jarecki,” Movie Poop Scoop, October 2003) would seem to support this. Wells cites footage Jarecki left out of Capturing the Friedmans, a segment called “Anatomy of a Pedophile” in which Long Island attorney Peter Panaro reads a letter by Arnold Friedman, “rationalizing the difference between a wounding predatory pedophile (which he wasn’t, he claimed) and a caring and considerate pedophile (which he considered himself to be).” Wells asked Jarecki why he didn’t include the footage in the film, considering that “the film plants questions in the viewer’s mind if Friedman . . . was quite the pernicious molester that the authorities made him out to be.”
Jarecki’s answer was that “the film worked better as a Rashomon-like meditation on the case.”
Behind the Paywall: “A Void of Ambiguity” & “Wiped”: the “Conviction Integrity Review” & the evidence that Jarecki left out.
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