Capturing the Friedmans is a 2003 HBO documentary film directed by Andrew Jarecki. It focuses on the 1980s investigation of Arnold and Jesse Friedman for child
molestation. It was nominated for the Academy
Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2003.
Some of the Friedmans' alleged victims and family members
wrote to the Awards Committee
protesting the nomination, their identities confirmed but protected by the
judge who presided over the court case.
Production
Jarecki initially was making a short film, Just a Clown, which he completed, about
children's birthday party entertainers in New
York, including the popular clown David
Friedman ("Silly Billy").
During his research, Jarecki learned that David
Friedman's brother, Jesse, and his father, Arnold, had pleaded guilty to
child sexual abuse and the family had an archive of home movies. Jarecki interviewed
some of the children involved and ended up making a film focusing on the
Friedmans.
Synopsis
The investigation into Arnold
Friedman's life started in 1987 after the U.S. Postal Service intercepted a magazine of child pornography
received from the Netherlands. In
searching his Great Neck, New York,
home, investigators found a collection of child pornography. After learning
that Friedman taught children computer classes from his home, local police
began to suspect him of abusing his students.
The Friedmans were allowed to stay at home in order to
prepare for court and took numerous home videos while Arnold Friedman (and, later, his son Jesse) awaited trial. The
videos were not made with publishing in mind, but rather as a way to record
what was happening in their lives. The movie shows much of this footage: family
dinners, conversations, and arguments. Arnold's wife, Elaine, was unsure of her
husband's guilt and advised him to confess in order to protect their son; she
soon divorced him.
Arnold Friedman
pleaded guilty to multiple charges of sodomy and sexual abuse. According to the
Friedman family, he confessed in the hopes that his son would be spared prison
time. Jesse Friedman later confessed
as well but later claimed he did so to avoid being sent to prison for life. He
said in mitigation that his father had molested him. According to Jesse's
lawyer Peter Panaro, who visited
Arnold in a Wisconsin federal
prison, Arnold admitted to molesting two boys, but not those who attended his
computer classes. He is also quoted as claiming that, when he was 13, he
sexually abused his younger brother, Howard, who was eight years old at the
time; Howard Friedman, interviewed
in the movie, says he does not recall this. Jesse Friedman, in a subsequent statement, said that his father
told him and his brothers that he sexually abused Howard.
Arnold Friedman
died by suicide in prison in 1995, 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. Currently, he is running an online
book-selling business.
Reception
The film received predominantly positive reviews. Review
aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes
reported an approval rating of 97% based on 151 reviews, with an average rating
of 8.5/10. The film was ranked as the
7th best-reviewed movie of 2003 on the website's best of the year list. The low-budget documentary was a success with
audiences as well, grossing over $3 million in theaters and making it a
surprise hit. Elvis Mitchell of The 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."
He praised Jarecki for operating under the premise "that first impressions can't be trusted and that truth rests with
each person telling the story."
Washington Post
columnist Desson Howe offered
similar praise, writing, "It's
a 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." Similarly, Roger Ebert wrote, "The
film is as 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."
The film won the Grand
Jury Prize at the Sundance Film
Festival for 2003. Capturing the Friedmans was voted the
fifth film in the 2005 Channel 4 program The
50 Greatest Documentaries.
In one of the few negative reviews, Los Angeles Times writer Kenneth
Turan wrote a critique of both the film and Jarecki, stating, "Jarecki's pose of impartiality gets
especially troublesome for audiences when it enables him to evade
responsibility for dealing with the complexities of his material."
Criticism intensified as Jarecki's choice not to pursue his
firm belief in the Friedmans' innocence became publicly known. In his review,
Ebert had recounted Jarecki's statement at the Sundance Film Festival that he did not know whether Arnold and Jesse Friedman were guilty
of child molestation. Ebert roundly praised Jarecki for communicating this
ambiguity. It has since emerged that
Jarecki funded Jesse Friedman's
appeal. Writing for The Village Voice, Debbie
Nathan – who was hired by Jarecki as a consultant after having been
interviewed for the film – wrote of Jarecki, "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."
There was a critical backlash due to footage the director left out on
purpose. Jarecki's film omitted a third
co-defendant, Ross Goldstein, a
teenage neighbor who also pleaded guilty to charges of child molestation and
who corroborated some of the children's accusations at the time and went to
prison. Jarecki also omitted a tearful confession of
guilt by Jesse Friedman in prison on
Geraldo Rivera’s talk show in 1989. Jesse Friedman detailed how his father
had molested him as a child.
Additional materials
The 2003 DVD release included a second DVD: "Capturing the Friedmans - Outside the
Frame". It included:
·
Unseen home movies ("Passover Seder", "Grandma Speaks", "Jesse's
Last Night")
·
Great Neck Outraged.
·
New Witnesses and Evidence.
·
Uncut footage of the prosecution's star witness.
·
Friedman family scrapbook and hidden audio
tapes.
·
Just a
Clown (the 20-minute short featuring David
Friedman that led to Capturing the
Friedmans).
·
Jesse's Life Today.
·
An
altercation at the film's New York premiere.
·
The Judge (Abbey
Boklan) speaks out at the Great Neck premiere.
·
A ROM section with key documents from the family
and the case.
The materials show an altercation from a discussion period
following the film's premiere in which the retired head of the Nassau County Police's Sex Crimes Unit
Frances Galasso argues with Debbie
Nathan, as well as a speech by trial judge Abbey Boklan from the showing in Great Neck. Both made the claim that the film had ignored relevant
evidence of Jesse's guilt. This evidence included his appearance on the Geraldo
Rivera show, when Jesse
confessed to sexually abusing children, and the fact that there was another
defendant (Ross Goldstein), who
turned state's evidence and pleaded guilty, and two other unindicted
co-conspirators. (Goldstein is not named in the film but it is said in one of
the other DVD extras that he declined to be interviewed. One of the unindicted
co-conspirators claims in the same section that both were accused falsely by
Goldstein.) In the video of the discussion period, Jesse's lawyer at the time, Peter Panaro, said that he had advised
Jesse not to appear on Rivera's talk show (Panaro was also present on the
show), and in fact, had Jesse sign an affidavit saying that he was doing so
against legal advice.
Subsequent legal
developments
In August 2010, a federal appeals court upheld the
conviction of Jesse Friedman on
technical legal grounds, but took the unusual step of urging prosecutors to
reopen Friedman's case, saying that there was a "reasonable likelihood that Jesse Friedman was wrongfully
convicted". The decision cited "overzealousness" by law
enforcement officials swept up in the hysteria over child molestation in the
1980s.
Following the appeals court ruling, the Nassau District Attorney's office began a three-year investigation
led by District Attorney Kathleen M.
Rice. On June 24, 2013, the report was released. In a 155-page report, the
district attorney's office concluded that none of four issues raised in a
strongly-worded 2010 ruling by the United
States Court of Appeals for the Second
Circuit was substantiated by the evidence. Instead, it concluded, "By any impartial analysis, the
reinvestigation process prompted by Jesse
Friedman, his advocates and the Second
Circuit has only increased confidence in the integrity of Jesse Friedman's guilty plea and
adjudication as a sex offender." Jesse
Friedman was regarded as a "narcissist"
and a "psychopathic deviant"
by a psychiatrist, his attorney hired to conduct an evaluation. Boklan
had been subject to "selectively
edited and misleading film portrayals in Capturing the Friedmans". A
four-member independent advisory panel guided and oversaw the work. It included
Barry Scheck, a founder of the Innocence Project, one of the country's
leading advocates for overturning wrongful convictions, and a member of O.J. Simpson's defense team. However, Scheck has subsequently complained
that key documents were not available to the panel, and urged the matter be
reopened.
Prior to the report's release, details emerged, including
letters from some of the alleged victims in which they recant their accusations
and implicate the police in coercing their statements. Prior to the report's release, The Village Voice conducted an interview
with Jesse Friedman, who described
himself as "freakishly
optimistic", and also reported that Ross Goldstein, a childhood friend of Jesse Friedman's, had broken his 25-year silence to explain he had
been coerced into cooperating with the district attorney's office: "He told the review panel of how he'd
been coerced into lying, how prosecutors coached him through details of the
Friedmans' computer lab, which he'd never even seen, and how he was imprisoned
for something he'd never done."
On February 10, 2015, Jesse
Friedman was back in state appellate court seeking to have Nassau County prosecutors turn over to
him the remainder of their evidence against him. A state Appeals
Court found, in December 2015, that the prosecutors did not have to release
the records. According to a spokesperson for the Nassau County District Attorney, because Friedman pleaded guilty
and there was no trial, the records of witnesses who did not testify are
confidential, and the law does not mandate their disclosure.
No comments:
Post a Comment