Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 9, 2009
In Andrew Jarecki's devastating documentary "Capturing the Friedmans," a Long Island family is torn to shreds by spectacular child-abuse charges. But who were the real criminals -- Arnold and Jesse Friedman or the cops, prosecutors and shrinks?
May 30, 2003 | The day before Thanksgiving in 1987, Arnold Friedman, a mild, nebbishy science teacher, and his youngest son, Jesse, were arrested by police at their home in the affluent suburban town of Great Neck, N.Y., and charged with numerous counts of child sexual abuse. As the story unfolded, the cops charged that the father and son had committed their crimes during hour-long computer classes held in the basement of their Great Neck home. Both Arnold and Jesse eventually pleaded guilty. Arnold died in prison in 1995, and Jesse was released in 2001 after serving 13 years of a 16-year sentence.
There was only one problem: They were almost certainly innocent.
It's fitting that the devastating "Capturing the Friedmans," which could be said to be documentary as an act of detection, itself came about through a piece of inadvertent detection. The director, Andrew Jarecki, who had made millions as the founder and CEO of Moviefone, was making a documentary about the people who work as children's birthday party clowns in New York. Nearly everyone he interviewed told him he had to talk to David Friedman, the most successful of the city's party clowns.
In his interviews with Friedman, Jarecki was struck by how bitter this man, who made his living as "Silly Billy," seemed. Pursuing the answer, he eventually found out the history of David's family -- and also uncovered an unlikely treasure trove for a documentary filmmaker. During the trial and up until the time each Friedman began his prison sentence, David had made hours of home movies depicting the family turmoil the ordeal had set off.
"Capturing the Friedmans"
Directed by Andrew Jarecki
"Capturing the Friedmans" includes interviews with David and Jesse (the middle son, Seth, declined to take part in the film) and their mother, Elaine, as well as police, prosecutors, the judge in the case and some of the (now grown) kids who took those computer classes. It also makes liberal use of David's home movies. In other words, the film is not just the history of how a family came apart -- it actually allows us to see the Friedmans coming apart before our eyes.
Jarecki, whose method is sympathetic and nonjudgmental, does not offer any psychological explanations for why David Friedman took those movies (no reason you could come up with would be very attractive). What's important to note is that Jarecki's use of David's home movies rigorously avoids any note of exploitation or prurient interest. In interviews, the director has refused to offer his own opinion on Arnold and Jesse Friedman's guilt or innocence, saying he thinks it's important for each viewer to make up his or her own mind. That's a canny P.R. move -- and also a necessary one. Despite the work journalists have done in discrediting many of the mass child sexual abuse cases of the '80s, despite the jury's wholesale rejection of the charges brought in the McMartin case in Southern California -- the longest and most expensive prosecution in the country's history -- and despite the fact that the FBI never found evidence to support the existence of satanic cults that practiced child abuse and murder, the debate over those cases can still inflame passions. You can hardly blame Jarecki for not wanting potential audiences to expect a jeremiad. And to his credit he hasn't delivered one.
But I don't see how any reasonable person could watch "Capturing the Friedmans" and not see it as a tale of mass hysteria and the American judicial system gone amok. No physical evidence was ever found to corroborate the charges against Arnold and Jesse. The only former student interviewed 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. Another former student, Ron Georgalis, ridicules the stories of abuse and says he never saw anything remotely like them occur. One student who did claim to be molested admits in the film that he made up the stories to escape the pressure the police were putting on him to admit that something happened. (His story alone led to 16 charges against Arnold and Jesse.) And a parent of one of Arnold's computer students tells how, when he determined that nothing untoward had happened to his son, he found himself under pressure from the cops to say that abuse had occurred, and was even attacked by neighbors who told him he was "in denial."
That said, there is a complicating factor in the Friedmans' story, and not an insignificant one: Arnold Friedman was a pedophile. The case against him began building when he was arrested in a postal sting operation for ordering child porn from the Netherlands. A further investigation began when John McDermott, a government postal inspector, noticed the Friedmans' basement set up for computer classes and suspected, as he says in the film, "We could have a problem here." Arnold Friedman later admitted to molesting two boys (neither one of them a computer student) near his family's vacation home, and said that when he was 13 he molested his 8-year-old brother, Howard.
But no victim has ever come forward to verify those claims, and Howard, a gentle man overcome with grief at the destruction of his brother (his interviews with Jarecki are the film's most painful), says he has no memory of sexual abuse. To complicate matters further, Jesse Friedman, at his sentencing, claimed that his father Arnold had molested him when he was a child. In the movie, however, Jesse denies that. He says he told the story at his attorney's urging, in hopes of a lenient sentence. (The lawyer, for his part, believes the story about Arnold having abused Jesse is true.) None of those denials, of course, will carry much weight with proponents of repressed-memory syndrome, who treat every assertion of innocence as further proof that something terrible must have happened
