Final Nails in the Spin Doctor's Coffin
Editing Reality & Manufacturing Ambiguity in Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans, Part Four
This is the 4th and final installment. For previous parts see main menu.
Child Porn Studio
In “Little Joy in Victory For Boys’ Families” (Newsday, January 25, 1989), Alvin E. Bessent wrote:
No photographs have been recovered, although the younger Friedman admitted when he pleaded guilty to using a child in a sexual performance that he had taken at least one. “If he was truly repentant and remorseful for what went on, where are those pictures?” demanded one mother.
From “Dragnet Is Out For Porn Photos in Child Sex Case,” from the same author and source (February 8, 1989):
Many victims told police they were photographed performing sexual acts in the home of computer teacher Arnold Friedman, who has pleaded guilty to sex abuse. And many parents, who fear the material is circulating in child pornography circles, say they were angered because plea bargain negotiations by authorities with Friedman’s son Jesse, 18, did not lead police to the material. . . . The missing pornographic materials could provide needed evidence against the two [unidentified, never-charged] suspects, officials said. “Virtually every child who gave a statement said they were extensively photographed and videotaped during these sexual acts,” said Det. Sgt. Frances Galasso, chief of the Nassau police sex crimes unit. “Just about every class was videotaped. It had to be dozens [of tapes],” she said.
Incredibly—considering how thoroughly this fact has been stricken from all records—Jesse’s own defense attorney, Peter Panaro, confirmed that child pornography was indeed part of the Friedman’s “operation.” He described a video camera and a 35mm still camera “regularly positioned on tripods in the ground floor classroom where Arnold Friedman conducted computer classes” (ibid).
Some parents of the victims remarked that Jesse “often had a camera around his neck when he greeted their children outside his home before computer classes.” And after entering a guilty plea, Jesse “admitted taking photos, of at least one boy in a sexual scene.” Panaro insisted that Jesse had no knowledge of “what became of the photos and tapes, or whether they still exist,” and stressed that “Arnold had 100 percent control over pictures” (ibid). Ironically, Panaro here tacitly acknowledged that his client was involved in the manufacturing of child pornography.
How is it possible that none of this made it into Capturing the Friedmans—a film that revolves around the Friedmans’ near-obsession with filming their activities? Or into any subsequent discussions of either the film or the case? How indeed.
None of the pictures or tapes were found during two searches in late 1987 of the Friedman house at 17 Picadilly Road. Nassau police have traveled around the region to view child pornography seized in other jurisdictions, Galasso said. And federal postal inspectors said they, too, are on the lookout for homemade pornography tied to those involved in the case. Authorities said they have no firm leads to the whereabouts of the materials (ibid).
Understandably, parents of some of the victims expressed a fear that the footage might end up in the child pornography netherworld—which was one of the threats Arnold used to keep the children quiet. Apparently, these concerns, combined with the desire that the two additional suspects be charged, made questions about the missing photos and tapes of overwhelming importance to some of the parents. As a result, the negotiations that eventually resulted in Jesse’s guilty plea almost collapsed.
This may go some distance to explaining how it was possible to sweep the whole question of photographic evidence of the crimes (a.k.a. child pornography) under the rug.
In an interview, one victim said he was afraid the pictures and tapes could ruin lives, but took solace in the hope that the pornography will not surface for years. “People change so much as they grow older . . . If these things surface 20 years later, they won’t be recognizable,” he said. The mother of a victim said, “The kids are afraid Jesse has those pictures and when he comes out of jail he’s going to be real angry and use those pictures to hurt them. It’s a very powerful hold to have on someone, to have those pictures.”1
Framing Organized Child Sexual Abuse
As discussed previously, the illegitimate ambiguity which Andrew Jarecki established with Capturing the Friedmans depends on the exclusion of pertinent facts (Goldstein, the porno video games, the child porn manufacture), a misrepresentation of other facts (the judge’s insistence on Jesse’s guilt, the use of hypnosis in interviewing witnesses), and unsubstantiated claims (that police coerced testimonies and did a shoddy investigation job, or that mass hysteria was at work).
This kind of spin around cases or organized child sexual abuse (OCSA) is only possible because so little is generally known or understood about the nature of OCSA. At the same time, the general mis-comprehension of OCSA is itself due to the prevalence of spin-doctoring, designed to illegitimately generate ambiguity, doubt, confusion, and skepticism. (For a summation of facts around OCSA, see here.)
And yet, it is important to stress that there is a great deal of legitimate (by which I mean genuine) ambiguity—even liminality—around OCSA, most especially when it involves ritualistic, occult, or “satanic” elements. Such legitimate forms of ambiguity are generated, not by the spinning of narratives or the fudging of facts, but by a combination of the strategies of organized abuse networks (and individual perpetrators) themselves with the (often intended) reactions of the victims, family members, and investigators and therapists.
Simply put, many of the more extreme forms of OCSA are by their very nature deranging, and are designed to be so. Something we should expect from any sort of sustained contact with organized and intentional malevolence, then, is accounts that are somewhat incoherent.
Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans asserts a conventional (I might even say a “Spielbergian,” especially since Jarecki’s voice and facial expressions notably resemble Spielberg’s) frame for social reality, in which schools are just schools, communities are just communities, and evil is only ever the result of social or familial dysfunction (i.e., an aberration), never of intentional, long-term planning or design (the norm).
Ironically, and maddeningly, that Capturing the Friedmans asserts this frame must itself be considered as a possible example of the same malevolent, long-term planning: i.e., as part of an organized cover-up.
For those who research these matters, none of this will be new, however. It may seem like picking at an old wound. Yet the danger in being somewhat cynically inured to such programs of OCSA and their cover-ups is that we may miss ways in which we, too, have been deceived. And continue to be so.
(Over the Paywall: Final Nails in Jarecki’s Coffin, victim testimony, Howard (and Seth) Friedman affirm Jesse’s guilt; and why I ended up revisiting this whole can of worms.)
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