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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
But even if you decide that Arnold Friedman's admissions were something more than a way of expressing guilt for his pedophile urges (which had driven him into therapy), there seems little doubt that the case against him and Jesse was bogus. It isn't just that not all pedophiles act on their urges -- it's the crazy nature of the allegations. If these stories of hour-long computer classes turned into ongoing bacchanals of violent sexual abuse were true, then parents picking up kids afterward would surely have found their children in physical and emotional pain. They would have found blood or semen on their clothes. They certainly wouldn't have reenrolled their kids in Arnold's classes, as many parents did.
No Great Neck parent ever raised an alarm about Arnold Friedman. This fits in with the recurring narratives common to all mass abuse cases -- increasingly elaborate, steadily expanding stories that somehow leave behind no trace of physical evidence. And the interviews with the police and prosecutors in "Capturing the Friedmans" give you a clue as to how these stories developed.
It's a given that cops are usually censorious when it comes to what they consider any unconventional sexual behavior. How many times has the presence of pornography, or evidence of an extramarital affair, been a red flag for all sorts of suspicions? Now imagine how those suspicions increase when there are allegations that kids are being sexually abused. The cops and prosecutors in "Capturing the Friedmans" are frightening because their absolute conviction in the rightness of their suspicions and methods is matched only by their apparent stupidity.
Detective Sgt. Frances Galasso, the retired cop who headed the investigation, says, "Everyone could see what was going on." But none of the stories were ever validated; no one saw anything. At one point, Galasso talks about the Friedman home as a nightmarish den of depravity, with stacks of pornography visible everywhere. As she says this, Jarecki shows police photos taken during the raid on the ordinary suburban home, which show nothing amiss (Arnold's cache of porn was, befitting his shame, hidden away behind the family piano). Later, Lloyd Doppelman, a detective who worked the case with Galasso, talks about how he and other cops went about gathering "evidence." Essentially their method was to tell the kids they knew something had happened and that the kids had better tell the truth. "If you talk to ... children," Doppelman says, "you don't give them an option."
"Capturing the Friedmans"
Directed by Andrew Jarecki
Jarecki allows the cops and prosecutors to hang themselves with their own words. But you wish that his impulse to be fair and nonconfrontational didn't impede him from challenging these people with the ridiculousness of their claims. All the mass child sexual abuse cases, taken together, never turned up any consistent, provable evidence of anything -- except a widespread pattern of police and prosecutorial misconduct. Galasso should have been presented with the photos taken during the raid and asked to point to the alleged piles of pornography. Doppelman should have been asked what the point of gathering evidence is when the cops think they already know what happened and browbeat witnesses into submission to confirm their suspicions.
When the judge who presided over the case, Abbey Bolkan, says, "There was never a doubt in mind as to their guilt," you long to see her made to square that statement with a judge's sworn duty to be impartial. When the assistant district attorney, Joseph Onorato, says, "There's a reasonable human expectation of some people that where there's smoke there's fire," you wish Jarecki had asked him if, absent any physical evidence, this was the assumption on which his office proceeded against Arnold and Jesse Friedman. When cops, a prosecutor and a judge so flagrantly violate the ethics of their respective offices, they deserve to be made to squirm at least a little.
Where Jarecki's determination to be fair does work is in the interviews with Arnold's widow and Jesse's mother, Elaine Friedman. I found it impossible to resolve my feelings about her. It's clear she felt trapped in a rotten marriage with a man who couldn't begin to address her sexual needs. And the confusion and betrayal she feels when deeply troubling charges are brought against her husband and son is understandable. In her way, Elaine Friedman shows a sort of integrity. Because she doesn't know what happened, she refuses to say one way or the other. But there's also something needy and whining about her. At times she seems so focused on her pain that she can scarcely acknowledge the pressure on Arnold and Jesse. Jarecki's movie also makes it seem as if, in part, she persuaded her husband and son to plead guilty for her own peace of mind.
You experience it as a slap in the face when Elaine says that, after her husband and son went to jail and she was alone in the house, she felt peace. It's understandable, given the horrible family arguments David captured on video, that she needed a break. Yet you can't help seeing something selfish in her lukewarm support of her husband and son against what she should have seen were ludicrous and unsubstantiated charges, and you can't help disliking the way she takes her resentment of her husband out on her sons. But the image the film leaves you with -- Elaine reuniting with Jesse on his release from prison -- makes clear how badly she was torn up by what happened.
