Capturing the Friedmans and Questioning Justice

Article posted Tue Jul 29 09:21:01 2003

Capturing the Friedmans is an important new documentary by Movefone co-founder Andrew Jarecki. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and is garnering impressive reviews. Not bad for a film about two convicted child molesters and their family.

The film, oddly enough, began as a documentary about clowns. While doing interviews on clowns, Jarecki spoke to a New York City birthday clown named David Friedman. As it turned out, other parts of Friedman’s life were far more interesting than his comic antics: His father and brother were accused of ritually and sexually abusing young boys in their home town of Great Neck, New York, in the 1980s. Both of them were convicted of the crimes, though the case against the Friedmans was based almost entirely upon circumstantial evidence. The abuse was not reported at the time, but only after police questioning and memory recovery through hypnosis. Contrary to popular opinion, the whole notion of recovered (or “repressed”) memories lies on very thin scientific evidence. The medical literature is clear: When traumatic events happen to people, they usually have difficulty in forgetting the memories, not remembering them. Memories that only appear after the fact (and during hypnosis) can often confuse fact with fiction.

It is important to understand the context of the Friedman accusations. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, a rash of child abuse cases horrified America. Children accused adults of ritual rapes, torture, and abuse, and the news media reported the lurid stories with glee. Often (though not in the Friedman case) the accusations included charges of Satanism. Though some media reports were carefully researched and stuck to the facts, most were heavily sensationalized. The pinnacle was perhaps Geraldo Rivera’s infamous NBC special Devil-Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground, which aired on October 28, 1988.

On the special (as well as in his syndicated talk show), Rivera mixed together a stew of self-proclaimed “Satanism experts,” misleading and inaccurate statistics, crimes with only tenuous links to “Satanism,” and sensationalized media reports. What came out was a rancid yet irresistible two hours that garnered the largest viewership for a documentary in television history— though “documentary” is perhaps giving it too much credit. Rivera did his best to whip up emotions, paranoia, and fear, claiming that an organized, Satanic conspiracy was at work killing babies, murdering innocents, conducting ghastly rituals, and having orgies, all to appease evil incarnate, Satan. The notable lack of evidence for the Satanic crimes was seen not as a reason to question the claims, but simply as proof of how well organized and shrewd the Satanic conspiracy really had become.

Satan’s Underground was also a 1991 book in which author Lauren Stratford related her experiences inside a Satanic cult. Stratford tells a first-person, horrific story of Satanism, pornography, infanticide, torture, and rape. She claims to have been continually physically and sexually abused by her parents and forced into child prostitution and pornography. She was forced, she said, to attend Satanic rituals including sacrificing a baby. At one point she was locked in a metal drum with the dead bodies of four babies who had been sacrificed. The account was terrifying and became a best seller. It has since been used to support claims promoting and validating Satanic ritual abuse and “repressed memories.”

Several journalists with Cornerstone, a Christian magazine, looked into the story behind the book. As Bob and Gretchen Passantino and Jon Trott discovered, “As it turned out, none of it was true. There was no documentation, corroboration, or evidence. Careful research… revealed that author Lauren Stratford was actually Laurel Rose Willson, a troubled woman from Washington State who spent most of her teen and adult life fabricating horrendous stories of victimization by a variety of people in a variety of settings.… In the mid-1980s, when the scare about ritual child abuse in day cares gained momentum, she produced a new story incorporating Satanic Ritual Abuse’s most sensational features. That story metamorphosed over three years to become the story of Satan’s Underground.” According to the authors, Stratford has since changed her name to Laura Grabowski and is currently claiming to be a Jewish Holocaust survivor.

In the wake of the emotional manipulation and media hype, terrible injustices were committed. Hundreds of people were accused of horrible crimes, ostracized by their friends, family, and communities, and even sentenced to prison. Though many of the convictions have been overturned and falsely accused people set free, others remain in prison. A few of the most notorious cases:

• Manhattan Beach, California 1983: In the longest and costliest trial in American history (seven years and $14 million), preschool teacher Ray Buckey, his mother Peggy McMartin Buckey, his sister Peggy Ann, his grandmother Virginia McMartin, and three other teachers at the McMartin Preschool were accused of sexual abuse. Of 400 children questioned by a child welfare agency, 369 were determined to have been molested. The first charges were brought by Judy Johnson, who claimed that Ray Buckey had abused her 2-1/2 year old son, along with her estranged husband. She also complained to prosecutors that someone sodomized her dog, and in 1985 she was found to be an acute paranoid schizophrenic. The childrens’ stories included tales of being abused in a secret tunnel underneath the school; being taken to a church where strangers killed a rabbit and forced them to drink its blood; jumping out of airplanes; children digging up dead bodies at a cemetery, and even more fantastic stories. When asked to identify molesters, children fingered community leaders, store clerks, and even a picture of actor Chuck Norris. Nonetheless, fueled by zeal (and, undoubtedly, pressure from a scared public), prosecutors believed these outlandish tales. Eventually charges were dropped against Peggy Ann, Virginia, and the three other teachers; Ray spent five years in prison during trial, his mother two years.

• Malden, Massachusetts 1984: Gerald Amirault, his mother Violet Amirault, and his sister Cheryl LaFave were accused of torturing children at the Fells Acres Day Care Center. One child said that he had seen a four-year-old sodomized with a foot-long butcher knife that got stuck; another said that they had been tortured by a “bad clown” in a “secret room”; yet another claimed that if the children tried to refuse sex, a robot would bite their arms. Gerald Amirault was sentenced to 30 to 40 years in prison; his mother and sister each served eight years, having been denied parole because they maintained their innocence. As of this writing, Gerald remains in prison, having exhausted his appeals.

• Edenton, North Carolina 1989: Robert Kelly, Jr., was convicted in 1992 on 99 counts of sexually abusing a dozen children at his Little Rascals day care center. One boy claimed that Kelly prayed to the devil; another that Kelly took the children on a boat trip and pushed a boy overboard to circling sharks; one girl said that he raped and drugged her, then photographed her performing sex acts with another child. Little or no evidence was found that supported any of the accusations. Kelly had been sentenced to 12 consecutive life sentences, one for each child. In May 1997, after he had served more than six years in prison, all 99 charges against Kelly were dropped.

• Wenatchee, Washington 1994: When sex crimes investigator Robert Perez’s nine-year-old foster daughter told him of a church-based pedophile group, he drove her around town and asked her to point out who had abused children. She accused dozens of townspeople, and the search began to find more victims. Finally other children joined in; one told of mass child rapes by men in black and women holding colored pencils; another spoke of wild orgies involving dozens of people held at the local Pentecostal church. When the investigations were completed, some 29,000 charges were brought against 28 people. Eventually, 19 people were convicted or pled guilty. Most of the defendants had developmental disabilities, low IQs, or limited English skills. Lawyers from Innocence Project Northwest, a group of volunteers, have helped overturn convictions.

The initial accuser recanted her accusation in 1996, then later withdrew it. One girl claimed that she and her sister had been forced by Perez to make false accusations; a former social worker said that, when interviewing a third-grade girl, Perez placed his gun on the table in front of her and repeatedly told her that she wouldn’t be allowed to go back to school until she told him about abuse. Meanwhile, Perez remains adamant he did nothing wrong: “I’ll never apologize for the work I did.”

Other similar cases have occurred in Maplewood, New Jersey in 1985, Olympia, Washington in 1988; and Martensville, Saskatchewan in 1991. The Friedman case was not as high profile as others, though an injustice was clearly done. In nearly all the cases, social workers, police, and detectives asked leading questions of children in their efforts to uncover the “truth.” At times the interviewers would badger the children until they said what they wanted to hear. And throughout, there was a stunning lack of physical evidence to back up the wild (and, at times, physically impossible) accusations. The emotional will to “believe the children” (a popular slogan adopted by many child advocates) overrode common sense and defendants’ rights. Superior Court Judge Isaac Borenstein’s 1998 comment on the Cheryl LeFave prosecution is typical of the abuse cases: “There are so many examples in the evidence of this case of improper procedures that it would take days to go through them. This case should leave no one confident except for one thing—justice was not done.”

(The roots and history of the Satanism and abuse hysteria in America are far too lengthy and detailed to treat here. For those interested, the following books will prove invaluable: Jeffrey Victor’s Satanic Panic; Kathryn Lyon’s Witch Hunt: A True Story of Social Hysteria and Abused Justice; Lawrence Wright’s Remembering Satan; Terence Campbell’s Smoke and Mirrors; Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters’s Making Monsters; Elizabeth Loftus’s The Myth of Repressed Memory; and Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World.)

But Capturing the Friedmans is not necessarily a cut-and-dried example of a witch hunt. Their case is complicated by the fact that the Friedmans pled guilty to some of the charges against them. Why would a person plead guilty to a crime they did not commit? The film provides some answers to that question, and it is also true that in other similar cases (including those mentioned earlier), innocent people did plead guilty to crimes they did not not in fact commit. In a famous recent case, the men convicted of brutally attacking the Central Park Jogger in 1989 were freed when the actual attacker, Matias Reyes, admitted to the crime and DNA evidence implicated him. Several of the innocent men had pleaded guilty to the crime, the longest serving about ten years. False confessions are not as rare as many people would like to believe.

It is also true that Arnold Friedman admitted that he molested at least one child, years earlier (though he was never accused of the crime). Arnold seems clearly guilty of something, but we do not convict people for specific crimes they are not accused of. There is no evidence that Arnold’s son committed any crime at all.

Director Jarecki has said that he believes the Friedmans were innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted. Some have criticized Jarecki for not taking a stronger stand in proclaiming the Friedmans’ innocence. But if you look at other, similar documentaries—such as Errol Morris’s classic The Thin Blue Line (1988), or Brother's Keeper (1992), or Paradise Lost (1996)—the directors are usually doing bona fide documentary work. That is, documenting an event without explicitly expressing their beliefs about the subject. Some documentaries, such as Bowling for Columbine, are obviously biased, but if Jarecki really doesn't know who to believe (or didn’t, at the time of filmmaking), then I think that's a legitimate standpoint. It was obvious to me from watching the film that he believes that the Friedmans were wrongfully accused. This is especially clear when he cuts from an expert talking about how careless police investigators can lead witnesses directly to an investigator describing how he led witnesses. Aside from that, other than interviewing himself or putting up title cards, I don't know how he could have injected his own opinions into a documentary that is not about him. I think Jarecki would argue that it is more persuasive to lead people to your conclusion instead of beating them over the head with it. Jarecki may also have some reservations about vouching for the innocence of an admitted pedophile.

In the end, Capturing the Friedmans is an important film that sheds some much-needed light on a very dark—and uncomfortably recent–—period in America when hysteria, overzealous and incompetent investigators, and baseless accusations combined to ruin innocent people’s lives.