The Fixer (Andrew Jarecki & Capturing the Friedmans)
Editing Reality & Manufacturing Ambiguity, Part Two
“Police said that 140 children—ranging in age from 7 to 12—would finally admit what they had been too shamed and afraid to tell their parents. Some of them still wet their beds, take baseball bats to bed with them or are unable to sleep.” —Alvin E. Bessent, “The Secret Life Of Arnold Friedman”
The above article describes how Arnold Friedman, with the help of his students (as well as his sons?), “had converted classroom 235 into WBAY-TV, a simulated television station where they produced videotapes.”
The children were extensively videotaped and photographed. No pictures of the children have been recovered. But police said Arnold Friedman told the children he would send pornographic pictures of them to magazines and tell the publishers to print their names if they told what was going on. He threatened to burn their houses down. He reportedly said he would kill their parents. “It was brainwashing,” the mother of one victim said.
Over time, “the Friedmans increased the abuse, touching and fondling and performing sex acts. Boys were eventually told to drop their pants. The Friedmans would sometimes expose themselves, walk around the room and order their young charges to touch them.”
In March of 1986, police alleged that “friends of Jesse joined in.” The classes
escalated into orgies of sexual abuse. Arnold and Jesse Friedman and three teens would sometimes attend classes with five to 10 students. Victims recounted being held down by one attacker and raped by another. As the abuse escalated so did the threats. . . . Some of the children who testified before the grand juries [later] received threatening telephone calls warning them not to cooperate with police. Now they worry that videotapes will come back to haunt them. They want to forget the lessons in the house on Picadilly Road. “I’ve been trying to put it behind me and go on,” one 12-year-old victim said of the experience that scarred his childhood. He tries not to think about the respected teacher who lived a secret life.
Jarecki & Debbie Nathan, Allies in “Ambiguity”
In 2003, Jarecki’s post-Friedmans consultant, Debbie Nathan, wrote an article for the Village Voice called “Complex Persecution: A Long Island Family’s Nightmare Struggle With Porn, Pedophilia, and Public Hysteria.” One passage in the piece reads suspiciously like an appeal for pedophile-rights:
If victims fail to report the crimes, it’s often because they’re ashamed that they enjoyed the abuser’s attentions, or worried he’ll go to jail. While molestation can of course leave kids with grievous psychic wounds, research by Philip Ney of the University of British Columbia and his colleagues (published in 1994 in the journal Child Abuse and Neglect) suggests that physical and verbal abuse and neglect tend to be far more emotionally damaging to children than molestation. Research by Bruce Rind and colleagues, published by the American Psychological Association in 1998, indicates that many children seem wholly unaffected by sexual contact with adults. This should not surprise. The Arnold Friedmans of the world are kinder to kids than many normal adults.
(The Leadership Council has refuted the results of the Rind study in scientific journals.)
Arnold Friedman is kinder than many normal adults? Clearly we are through the postmodernist looking glass now.
Nathan has been a regular spinner of the “satanic panic,” “mass-hysteria,” and “witch-hunt” narratives around cases of organized (high-level) child sexual abuse in the US ever since the 1980s. But, as Ross Cheit reports in The Witch-Hunt Narrative, her role in Capturing the Friedmans has never been fully explained.
After the film was released, Richard Hankins, an editor and producer of the film, described Nathan as “a friend of the [Friedman] family” and as an intermediary” in the project, raising questions as to how the project evolved. Nathan appears in the film as an expert on witch-hunts. She is not identified as a friend of the family (p. 130).
In an end-note, Cheit emphasizes that Jarecki has always claimed that he only stumbled upon the Friedman case while making a documentary short about birthday clowns involving Jesse’s brother David. This leaves unanswered (because unasked) how Nathan became “an intermediary,” as well as “why was it even necessary, what she did in that role, and why it was never fully disclosed” (p 442n).
Whatever the actual circumstances of Jarecki’s involvement, or recruitment, in 2014 he finally cast off his Rashomon-esque cloak of ambivalence and took a public stand on Jesse’s innocence, by funding Jesse’s appeal and renewing his defense. At that time, Jarecki said this:
Capturing the Friedmans was celebrated for its ambiguity, but if you look at the prosecution of this case, it was an unambiguous disaster. . . . If the police and the DA hadn’t bullied everyone, it never would have gotten to this place. I care a lot about this issue of child abuse, I take it very seriously. That’s why I feel so strongly that when there are false claims about these kinds of crimes, they really undermine the entire system.
Redacted Perps
Included in its paltry “Criticism” paragraph on Capturing the Friedmans, Wikipedia (May 2024) does mention “some critical controversy around footage Jarecki left out on purpose.” Specifically, it cites the omission of a third defendant in the case, Ross Goldstein, who turned state’s evidence and corroborated some of the children’s accusations. Additionally, it cites a confession of guilt Jesse Friedman made from prison on Geraldo Rivera’s talk show in 1989. Here’s a clip of it:
The page also mentions how some of the Friedmans’ “alleged victims and family members” wrote to the Awards Committee, protesting the Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature. Yet, since Friedman confessed to the crimes and was convicted, legally there is no need for the use of the word “alleged.” That it often appears in descriptions of the case is an indication of how effective Jarecki’s campaign (which started out by stealth with the film, but eventually became an open attack) has been.
Ross Goldstein, the third defendant that Jarecki’s film inexplicably leaves out, was a friend of Jesse Friedman who also confessed to sexually abusing some of the boys attending Arnold’s computer classes. From The People of the State of New York, Respondent, v. Ross G., Appellant 163, June 28, 1990:
The defendant, who was 15 and 16 years old when he committed the crimes, became repulsed by them, and six months before the Friedmans were arrested, the defendant disassociated himself from Jesse Friedman and his activities. Following the defendant’s indictment for a number of sex crimes, including class B violent felonies, the prosecution, with the approval of the victims’ families, approached the defendant’s counsel and sought the defendant’s assistance in strengthening the case against Jesse Friedman, and in providing information concerning two other individuals suspected of being involved in the crimes.
Goldstein agreed to cooperate, and the prosecution agreed that, in return, it would recommend a sentence of no more than six months in jail. The prosecution acknowledged that the defendant “cooperate[d] fully with the Nassau County Police Department and District Attorney’s office,” and testified before the Grand Jury, which led to Jesse Friedman’s guilty plea. “The two other individuals suspected of being involved in the crimes were brought to the attention of the police.”
From “The Secret Life Of Arnold Friedman”:
Two additional suspects—teens referred to by the children and named by Goldstein—remain at large. The children were unable to identify the two positively in police line-ups. Police said they believe the two suspects were photographed and videotaped with the children. They said the children claim to have been extensively photographed. Nassau detectives have viewed pictures seized in other jurisdictions but have not yet turned up anything. Bitterness resulted among parents of some of the victims who felt that prosecutors had failed to force Jesse Friedman to lead police to the photos before allowing him to plead guilty. The parents fear the pictures will be circulated among pedophiles and will one day surface and embarrass the children.
That Jarecki chose to leave out all mention of Goldstein or the two other suspects is indisputable proof that, whatever else he was doing with Capturing the Friedmans, he was not simply making a documentary on the Friedman case.
Furthermore, as Ross Cheit observes in The Witch Hunt Narrative, Jarecki didn’t bother to interview the majority of the abuse victims for Capturing the Friedmans, and couldn’t even say for sure how many he had spoken to (between three and five, he said, out of fifteen complainants). That Jarecki “found no evidence” of Jesse Friedman’s guilt, then, becomes utterly meaningless when we learn that “he never talked to most of the people who could provide such evidence” (p. 131).
So how exactly are we supposed to believe that Jarecki “care[s] a lot about this issue of child abuse,” when his interests—and his allegiances—are so clearly with the perpetrators?
(Beyond the Paywall: The body of evidence that Jarecki left out to strengthen his case, and the evidence that he did it deliberately; the false claim of testimonies got via hypnosis; how various interview subjects were duped; Charlie Rose & the Epstein connection)