I think this thread resoundingly proves my point about the elusiveness of “truth”.
FWIW, I think the cops & prosecutor went overboard in their zealous pursuit of a conviction, entwined with the mob mentality/hysteria of the time. However, despite all the dodgy evidence, there are still enough troubling questions (primarily around the father) so that I’m still not convinced nothing happened. The fact that things were overblown doesn’t mean there wasn’t a legitimate thread that was initially latched onto.
Interestingly, Metacom, I found the mom probably the most functional of the family, in that she was having a relatable reaction to the proceedings. I don’t understand the enormous hostility the boys have towards her, and the way they try to repress or redirect all the bizarre feelings coming up around the trial is much more disturbing than her completely understandable emotionalism (especially given the predisposition of her own husband!) This isn’t to say that that “proves” anything, but if you want to talk dysfunction, I think the Friedman men have it in spades.
I found Jesse’s lawyer to be one of the more convincing testimonials, since (post-trial), he seemed to have little motivation for lying. But maybe that’s just an indication that if you’re confident and articulate, you come across as more “real” than if you’re raw & emotionally naked. I haven’t seen the film it since it opened in the theaters, but it still fills me with a deep sadness, especially since ID’ing who’s the victim and who’s the perpetrator is maddeningly difficult.
I went into viewing this expecting it to be an exposee of a family that got railroaded by hysterical families and and railroading police.
It wasn’t that way at all. That is one whacked family, and they were that way before the accusations. Clown-boy running around with underwear on his head talking to the TV people is not normal behavior.
We didn’t get to see much in the way of evidence or testimony against them, other than the stoner on the couch, but if were forced to guess at what happened, here’s the way I’d guess it went down:
The dad probably did assault some of the kids. Probably not rape, and certainly not in front of the class, but I’ll bet he jot his jollies from touching some of them. A small ember of truth, in an isolated and outraged community, turns into a brushfire of wild accusations. The son (Jessie?) I can’t figure out. He may be totally innocent, but his behavior is so bizarre that I couldn’t rule it out. He didn’t act like an innocent person would be expected to act. Did you notice that instead of flatly declaring “Nothing happened!”, they instead said repeatedly “nothing happened, did it?”.
I acknowldge that this is pure speculation and is only my opinion. I am not on a jury holding the guys fate in my hands.
[QUOTE=Metacom]
Ah, but can the lawyer admit that he thinks his client is innocent, but let him plead guilty anyways?
Exactly what the filmmaker wanted you to think, but I wasn’t buying it. She seemed to me an innocent woman bearing the terrible burden of knowing (or at least strongly suspecting) her husband and son were guilty and wondering if she could have prevented the crime.
She was surprised. My point is that she didn’t know what was happening, but after it came out, she believed it was true. And did she offer any discussion of the computer sessions? Why wasn’t she present (at least intermittently) for those? Was she barred from the room? The filmmaker didn’t explore that issue.
Which brings me to another point: the filmmaker has a lot of time, energy and money invested in this project. Wouldn’t be much a film if it were an open-and-shut case now, would it? So it is in the filmmaker’s artistic and more to the point financial interest to create ambiguity and doubt wherever he can. Which is why I am *always * suspicious of such documentaries.
I would love to see a counter-documentary presenting the prosecution’s case unfiltered by a filmmaker sympathetic to the Friedman boys.
He was either lying at the hearing or lying at the other times. Either way, we know that Jesse can be a convincing liar when it benefits him, don’t we?
If the filmmaker created ambiguity in the case, it was in favor of the prosecution, not the defense. According to this Slate article quite a bit of exculpatory information was left out of the film.
Furthermore, I’m wondering if maybe you slept through the 1980’s. Remember the McMartin case et al? “They’re Satanizing/sodomizing our children!” was the witch hunt du jour in those days, and quite a few good people went to prison on little to no evidence.
And again, there’s no evidence in the Friedman case, other than the children’s highly dubious testimonies. I’d love to see your imagined scenario for Arnold and Jesse’s guilt, which explains why there was no physical evidence (a fact which is freely admitted by the prosecution). Sexual abuse is going to create physical evidence, or do you deny that?
The “witch hunts” to which you refer involved pre-school children, who are prone to fantasy and highly suggestible as has been shown in study after study. It is intellectually dishonest for Slate magazine to conflate those cases with that of the Friedmans which involved much older (pre-teen?) children.
And again, we have no way of knowing how dubious that testimony is because we’ve seen only a few cherry-picked examples selected because they added to the ambiguity. I remind you that FRIEDMAN PLED GUILTY. If he were innocent, he should hae gone to trial. Would anyone plead guilty to a crime this heinous if they were not? Hell no.
Physical evidence of abuse is ephemeral. Clothes get washed, floors get mopped, wounds heal. Unless the evidence is gathered promptly after the abuse occurs, it can easily be lost.
The elder Friedman was a pedophile, yes? You will concede that much? Did you really buy his statement that he only acted on it twice? I didn’t.
If I thought there was a low probability of a fair trial, and a plea agreement was the difference between 10 years in prison and life in prison, I’d plea. I’d like to think that I’d stoically stand up for truth, but I’d probably choose having a shot at a normal life (as much as a convicted sex offender can ever have one) over spending the next 40 years in prison.
I don’t think anyone is arguing that the Arnold Friedman wasn’t a pedophile. I would, however, argue that there are pedophiles who don’t molest children, and I don’t hold anything against them.
I don’t know if his statement about only acting on it twice is true or not. I am reasonably sure that any offenses he did commit are on a much lower level then what he plead to.
You’re kidding here, right? Innocent people plead guilty all the time, to these and worse crimes. It’s often presented to defendants as the lesser of two evils.
Sure.
Beats me. Maybe he acted on it every other weekend. But he never acted on it in that basement, during those computer classes. I have no doubt about that.
Unfortunately, I missed the first half-hour. But it was a fascinating documentary if for nothing more than showing how bizarre the Friedmans were/are.
I got the same feeling, too, though different people react differently. But the car scene was very interesting. Jesse is laughing it off (sort of) but then I thought I heard him say “and I had to do it fast because there were people around” and he didn’t appear to be joking. I can’t remember the exact quote, and it might not have been so ambiguous, but I literally sat up when I heard it. Does anybody remember exactly what he said?
I thought the documentaty was interesting because I think it really created ambiguity. Not necessarily in a legal context, but in a “what happened” context. So many people seemed to be so deeply in denial it doesn’t seem possible to find out anything true about the Friedmans.
That should say: “I can’t remember the exact quote, and it might not have been so unambiguous, but I literally sat up when I heard it. Does anybody remember exactly what he said?”
It’s your lack of doubt that I find remarkable. I could understand it better if you said you had some doubt that it happened. But to say that you have no doubt that it DIDN’T happen, when you haven’t even heard the prosecution’s case or its witnesses…
That may be the common wisdom, but I’ll need more than common wisdom for that bold assertion, so…cite?
He said something about whatever happened, if anything happened, being minor and of no consequence. That wigged me out too (the credits are rolling on it even as I type).
HBO was touting the half-hour documentary about David the clown as “the film that started it all.” Yet IMDB has it coming out in 2004 and this film in 2003. Anyone got a quick-n-dirty sequence of events on how these two films came about? I can’t imagine the director approached the clown to make a little film and David said “oh by the way, my father and brother are convicted child rapists and I have all these home movies about it.” Actually, on second thought, I can see exactly that happening.
I think they’re both guilty of some sexual misconduct but not the hundreds of charges that were levied.
Thanks. I just remember how casually he said it and how it really came out of nowhere because his brothers were in a more joking mood.
This article says that, in interviews with David Friedman about the clown business, the director learned about the family history. It’s not quite clear how he learned – from David or from friends or from research? But the article also discusses the controversy about the legal cases and the documentary.
If it’s your contention that only pre-school children are prone to fantasy and highly suggestible, I invite you to make a closer study of daytime television.
But the movie does present the point of view of some of the alleged victims (the young man with the shadowed face, for example) and several members of the prosecution, such as the detectives and the judge in the case.
Given that:
There was no physical evidence.
Not one of the alleged “victims” reported these “crimes” before the detectives “interrogated” them, using protocols that have since been completely discredited.
The judge in the case admits on film that she made up her mind about Jesse’s guilt before she’d heard all arguments. I’m pretty sure one of those bad-jurist-words like “malfeasance” applies here.
Related to #2 above, the allegations against the Friedmans took place in the witch-hunt climate of the 1980s…
No, I don’t think my “lack of doubt” about Arnold and Jesse’s innocence is at all remarkable.
Ithappensallthetime. Evidence is unavoidably going to be anecdotal for this, but a simple logical analysis is going to demonstrate that it happens, and it’s not a “bold assertion” to say it does. Like that mountain climber who cut off his arm with his own arm, sometimes the bad trumps the worst.
This was a sad story. I would recommend those curious to check out the DVD extras – the aforementioned back story as to how this film got made, an interview with the director, and some extra footage. Some of the footage was taken at the premiers, where the judge, lawyer, and investigators were attending and presented their reactions.
I think the filmmaker did an admirable job at presenting all the evidence he could fit in. He didn’t hesitate to show us absolutely everything bad thrown at the Friedman’s and it is nondisputed that Arnold Friedman deserved to go to the pokey, if only for distributing child pornography and two admitted molestations (his brother and the other child).
I came out of this movie with a different perspective though – this is mob thinking and vigilante justice in 20th century America. We don’t round up a posse to hang people anymore. We use the tools at our disposal – community activism, sympathetic lawyers, and posturing politicians.
Jesse may be guilty, he may be innocent. I am 99% sure that he is innocent (it is beyond me how anyone who can justify using a testimony which was coaxed out of a 10 year old by telling him that if he didn’t tell them about molestation he would become gay or a pervert) but that is not really the point. The point is to show how Jesse didn’t get a fair trial and couldn’t have gotten a fair trial in his situation. He was confronted with a tidal wave and in no way was prepared to face it. He got bad legal advice at the same time his family was crumbling. A word on that – it is hard to remember that this is an actual family that we are watching through all of this videotape. We are used to seeing scripted actors in this situation, not a real family under enormous duress. As such, they are not acting in ways we can easily comprehend. We have all seen families like this – a seemingly happy family who really only exists on a thin veneer of stability. That is cracked and everything falls apart. The mother was betrayed by Arnold and her actions towards Jesse were probably only a defense mechanism to prevent her being betrayed twice – even though Jesse probably didn’t do it, she couldn’t chance it because Arnold had already lied to her.
The tragedy here is that if there was any abuse, it was buried amidst all of this “recovered” psychological evidence. We don’t know if there was molestation or any lesser crimes because bad police work and community mob mentality. This is as much of a tragedy as Jesse spending all of this time in prison because of a railroaded trial. Any true abuse was buried amidst tales of “leapfrog” and threats with knives and guns and true victims were neglected. The breakdown of the legal system here (and letting mob justice get out of hand) has cut both ways.
Cute retort, but you have hardly supported your argument. Please cite a study showing that older children are succeptible to implanted memories (what we’re really talking about) in the same way that pre-school children are. What I see on the 'net says of implanted memories that:
Cite. It was therefore intellectually dishonest for the author of the Slate article to conflate the well-documented “pre-school abuse hysteria” cases of the 1980s with the Friedman case.
As for the assertion that it is wrong to ask leading questions of the children who have been victimized in these cases, I again point out that children are often very reluctant to testify against men who have molested them. Reasons for this can include fear, embarrassment, and even an emotional attachment to the molester.
Indeed, children can be remarkably protective of the molester. I recall the Florida case where two brothers killed their own father in an apparent attempt to protect and preserve their relationship with a 40-year-old man who was molesting them. (I’ll see if I can find a link to that story.) Do you think these boys would have readily testified against their abuser?
Your assertion was that people falsely plead guilty to child molestation “and worse” all the time. That, my friend, is a bold assertion. And one which you have not yet supported.
So why didn’t the filmmaker give us that information?
I’ll answer my own question: it would have reduced the ambiguity and made the film a less valuable commodity. The film only gives the appearance of presenting a balanced story.
Also from the linked article:
Look, when a man who is an admitted pedophile goes out of his way to set up a situation (computer classes) which puts him in regular contact with pre-teen boys, apparently outside the presence of his wife and other adults, that doesn’t raise any red flags to you? You still have “no doubt” that he is innocent? The mind boggles.
No malfeasance at all. Judges make up their minds early all the time. It’s a moot point in a jury trial, since the jury and not the judge is the arbiter of guilt. At any rate, the case was resolved by a guilty plea before it ever went to trial.
If the prosecution’s case was as weak as the Friedmans claim, they should have maintained their “not guilty” plea and called the alleged flaws in the prosecution’s case to the attention of the jury. But we really don’t know how strong the prosecution’s case was because we haven’t seen it. Presumably, it must have been pretty strong or the Friedmans wouldn’t have caved.
One point not yet raised regarding Jesse’s guilt:
The investigators were not initially focused on Jesse when they were interviewing the kids. The investigators were focused on Arnold. It was the kids themselves who kept bringing up allegations of abuse against Jesse. They were not led to this by investigators. Ponder that for a moment.
It wasn’t that the case was necessarily strong (it’s just as faulty for you to claim strength as it is for others to claim weakness since as you note you haven’t seen the case), it’s that it was overwhelming. Hundreds of counts, each of which would be adjudicated in front of a hostile judge and a jury pool that was quite likely tainted beyond recovery by pre-trial publicity. We can only go by what was shown but I didn’t get the impression that the guilty pleas were the result of any fear of the strength of the case but because of the perceived impossibility of getting a fair trial.