Redacting the Friedmans: A Decades Long Operation in Child Abuse & Pornography?
Editing Reality & Manufacturing Ambiguity, Part Three
Pedophile Exoneration Project (National Center for Reason and Justice)
Founded in April 2002, the NCRJ describes itself as non-profit organization that
supports people who are falsely accused or convicted of crimes against children. In the nation that leads the world in incarcerating its citizens—one in 100 adults is behind bars—we ally ourselves with others seeking to reform the criminal justice system to defend and promote the civil and human rights of all offenders.
Jesse Friedman is listed on the NCRJ website as a case for “sponsorship” i.e., as a possible miscarriage of justice. The President is listed as Michael Snedeker, Esq., “an attorney who has successfully overturned numerous wrongful sex abuse convictions and obtained money damages for several of his clients.” Snedeker is co-author, with “former board member [and Jarecki consultant and friend of the Friedmans] Debbie Nathan, author of Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt.
I found out about the NCRJ via a site called The Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence (LCCAIV), specifically the page titled “Capturing the Friedmans: annotated Bibliography.” While the NCRJ still links to Jesse Friedman’s site, some of the links at LCCAIV are no longer active, such as one that references NCRJ’s first fundraiser event, at the Chelsea Clearview Cinema in New York City, on September 18th, 2003. The fundraiser featured a private screening of Capturing the Friedmans, followed by speakers, discussion and a reception. Jesse Friedman is quoted at the LCCAIV link:
Andrew Jarecki generously granted permission for a private screening of Capturing the Friedmans. [He] brought a film crew to record portions of the event, most likely for inclusion on the DVD for Capturing the Friedmans. . . . It has always been important to me that Capturing the Friedmans would raise awareness about the issue of imaginary crimes and help those less fortunate then myself—namely those still in prison.
On January 8, 2004, Jesse filed a motion to overturn his conviction based on “the 3-year investigation done by the filmmakers in the course of making Capturing the Friedmans.” Jesse is quoted again at the LCCAIV page:
I was subjected to a horrible injustice, regardless of what anyone has to say about my father, Arnold Friedman. I am endeavoring to realize a complete exoneration. While this process will be a difficult one, people seeing this film is a crucial first step towards this goal . . . Capturing the Friedmans leaves room for the viewer to hear all sides; to judge truth from lies.
As we’ve seen, Jarecki’s campaign, with and since the film, has been highly effective, if not in exonerating Jesse (who after all has done his time), then in the far more encompassing agenda of invalidating claims of organized child sexual abuse by reinforcing the idea of mass hysteria-fed miscarriages of justice (a.k.a. “the witch-hunt narrative).
This is from “It’s About Time We Freed the Friedmans!” at Huffington Post (2013):
One of the main reasons that Jarecki made the film was to help Elaine’s son Jesse. There was never a single bit of evidence to suggest that Jesse, who was a teenager at the time, molested anyone. He has maintained his innocence all along, and now Jarecki is leading the fight to have Jesse’s verdict reversed. . . . Jarecki has provided the DA’s office a ton of new evidence supporting Jesse’s innocence. Indeed, he tracked down and interviewed numerous individuals who were supposedly molested by Jesse and his father in the computer class. Now grown men, they deny ever having been touched by either of the Friedmans (emphasis added).
I found nothing to corroborate the last claim, just the contrary (that Jarecki studiously avoided talking to most of the victims of the abuse). The claim of zero evidence—as I have shown—is nothing more than ignorant adherence to Jarecki’s own consistent insistence (and insistent inconsistencies), and to the power of the narrative which his film asserts.
It is also a kind of sophist manipulation of truth, seeing as how the official “lack of evidence” is because the defendants plead guilty and so the case never went to trial. No evidence was presented, because none was needed. This is very different from a lack of existing evidence, and any defense lawyer who recommended his clients plead guilty, if there was no evidence against them, would surely be an extremely poor lawyer. Again “mass-hysteria” conveniently papers over this crack in many people’s minds.
A link to the NCRJ site at the LCCAIV page is described as “Other convicted pedophiles that the NCRJ is raising money in order to help free.” So Jarecki’s award-winning documentary film would appear to be square at the center of a considerably larger program, wholly distinct from (if dependent on) yellow documentary filmmaking or dodgy investigation methods (and much less the desire for justice).
It is the very shadiest aspects of organized crime and intelligence psyop that Jarecki is evidently in cahoots with.
Jesse’s Formative Years
“I had an awfully peculiar family.” —Jesse Friedman
The afore-cited article, “The Secret Life Of Arnold Friedman,” describes how, at the age of 8 or 9, Jesse Friedman stumbled upon his father’s cache of kiddie porn. Sometime after that, his father began to visit his bedroom at night and molest him. This eventually “escalated into sodomy.”
“In my family, everything got washed under the rug,” Jesse said. “I never told about the abuse. I didn’t think anyone would understand. Trying to do something about the problems in my family never seemed to get me anywhere.” Jesse said his parents fought a great deal. “I used to go to sleep listening to them fighting, screaming at one another . . . I never saw them loving each other. I would cry when they would fight. I would bang on the walls. I’ve got all these holes in the walls from my banging.” Jesse said his parents argued about him and about such mundane issues as the color of a carpet. When he was 10, Jesse began psychiatric therapy [but] never told his therapist about the incest. . . . At 15, Jesse said, he was diagnosed as manic depressive. . . . At 16 he began smoking marijuana and using LSD, and before long he was stoned on a daily basis. . . . They were secrets of incest that Arnold Friedman’s now 19-year-old son Jesse kept hidden through years of therapy and drug abuse. “I guess it mostly started out with my father trying to love me,” Jesse says.
That Jesse was a psychologically damaged child and dysfunctional young man is echoed by the “Conviction Integrity Review: People V. Jesse Friedman” (PDF), which cites a report of Dr. Pogge, describing Jesse as a “pansexual” and a “psychopathic deviant . . . self-centered, manipulative, egocentric, and capable of breaking the law,” as well as “narcissistic, antisocial, passive aggressive, badly behaved, not a good citizen, and drug-dependent.” Pogge opined that Jesse’s
personality was consistent with someone who was capable of committing the crimes with which he was charged. As Panaro’s contemporaneous notes of his conversation with Dr. Pogge summarized, “Jesse believes it didn’t occur or, that if it did occur, it’s not really important,” because “there is no victim.” Jesse lies all the time, and derives gratification from fooling others. It was almost definite, Panaro said Pogge had told him, that Jesse had been involved in deviant sexual behavior with his father, and that Jesse’s real problem was his inability to admit that his father was guilty. Another doctor, listed only as “Dr. Feldman” in Panaro’s notes, stated that in his opinion Jesse was “abused by his father,” exhibited tendencies towards “sadism,” and “has been an exhibitionist.” Like Dr. Pogge, Dr. Feldman reported that “Jesse feels he is being persecuted and that if there are sexual acts, there are NO VICTIMS b[ecause] they participated ‘voluntarily.’” (p. 38)
As I will get to, the Friedmans were almost certainly involved in producing (and not merely consuming) child porn, an element of the case that has been down-played into non-existence, despite the fact Jesse Friedman confessed to it on national television:
When interviewed on the Geraldo Rivera Show, Jesse sobbed while describing sexual abuse by his father and confessed to abusing three children. He said, “I fondled [the children]. I was forced to, to pose in hundreds of photos for my father in all sorts of sexual positions with the kids.” He now claims that his story and his tears were “fictionalized to win leniency.” However, he had already been sentenced. (“Capturing The Friedmans: Documentary or Whitewash?”)
Nor did confession, sentencing, incarceration, or later professions of innocence do anything to dull the edge of his predilections. From the “Conviction Integrity Review”:
Jesse served thirteen years in prison and was released in 2001. Between 2000 and 2001, he was disciplined for possessing in his cell a torn photograph from Harper’s magazine of two pre-pubescent girls, one of whom is naked. He also was punished for writing and distributing “fictional” stories that described violent and disturbing sexual acts, including incest, bestiality, and child rape (iii-iv)
So how is it that countless otherwise “intelligent” people have found it easier to believe that a convicted child abuser would fake a confession to get leniency, rather than do so because he knew he was guilty, and then lie about it later to at least secure some sort of life outside of jail?
Isn’t this an indication of how the first casualty—in cases of organized child abuse—is common sense and the ability to think rationally? Or to honestly face facts?
Arnold’s Mysterious Rise to Prominence
This same cognitive blindness seems to have also prevented many people from noticing the strange discrepancies in the official story of Arnold Friedman; such as, for example, how a poor lad went from lowly rhumba musician to living—and teaching elite children—in one of the most affluent areas of New York State.
As a point of comparison, the famous British DJ and arch-sex-offender (as only came to light after his death), Jimmy Savile, started his career (while supposedly working down the Liverpool coal mines) playing records in dance halls, then went on to run his own clubs in the 1950s, rubbing shoulders with the Kray twins, Ian Brady (moors murderer) and (alleged Yorkshire ripper) Peter Sutcliff.
As I wrote about in Vice of Kings, the dance hall scene intersected not only with organized crime (mainly drugs and prostitution) but also with the interests of government and intelligence agencies. Saville almost certainly began his career trafficking children for sex within the higher echelons of British power, which included running “homes” and hosting parties where the children were farmed out to sexual deviants.
Savile also hosted a massively successful BBC TV show called “Jim’ll Fix It,” which children regularly attended, some of whom were sexually abused by Saville backstage. Yet, besides those victims, almost no one talked about it until after his death. There are parallels with Arnold Friedman’s career arc here that are striking.
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