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Complex
Persecution
A Long Island Family's
Nightmare Struggle With Porn, Pedophilia, and Public
Hysteria

by Debbie
Nathan
May 21 - 27, 2003

Nuclear meltdown:
the Friedmans in happier days. From upper left: Arnold, David,
Seth, Elaine, and Jesse.
photo: courtesy of Magnolia
Pictures

David Friedman, a/k/a Silly
Billy, is the city's—and possibly the country's—most famous
children's birthday party clown. Silly Billy has often been featured
in fluffy articles, but there are things about his family's past
that are not fluffy at all. In the mid 1980s, the Friedmans of Great
Neck, Long Island, were caught up in a sex scandal of epic
proportions. The case was widely publicized at the time, but a new
documentary, Capturing
the Friedmans (opening May 30), offers a more intimate
portrait of this tragic clan—a Franny and Zooey-esque
collection of neurotic but gentle eccentrics, at once brilliant and
doomed.

Silly Billy belongs to the category of not very nice clowns who
scold and screech at children at their birthday parties. Still, he
stops short of being mean or scary. In fact, Silly Billy is such a
schlemiel that he makes tiny children feel superior—and perhaps even
a little sadistic. He does the same magic trick over and over, wrong
every time, until the four-year-olds are shrieking with contempt;
then he does it right, all the while cracking jokes that only the
parents get. Everybody loves him; moms recommend him to their
friends. David's younger brother Seth was a well-known advocate of
underground publishing during the 1990s, putting out the exhaustive
media-watchdog zine review Fact Sheet Five.

And there was the late paterfamilias, Arnold Friedman. A Coney
Island-raised Caspar Milquetoast with shapeless clothes and major
myopia, he was nonetheless a vortex for the energies of other
people, most of them young. During the '40s and '50s, he was a
talented Latin-music pianist and mambo bandleader who played venues
like Roseland. After he married and had three boys, he became a
teacher in Queens. At Bayside High School, he was known for his
radio-TV-film course. Former students would speechify at class
reunions about how Mr. Friedman turned their lives around—weaned
them from teenage anomie, pointed them to careers in media.

(Photo: Magnolia
Pictures)

Arnold instilled in his
sons a propensity to document their lives. The boys always had Super
8s in hand, recording birthdays, seders, and vacations. Arnold
helped them do funny little dramas like Dr. Zero and the
Destruction Ray, made by 10-year-old David, in which an evil
scientist makes people disappear by beaming a flashlight at them. A
pioneer of computer lesson materials, some of which he co-published
with comedian-intellectual Steve Allen, Arnold also taught immensely
popular after-school classes at the family home in Great Neck. He
won countless teaching awards. His sons adored him.

But Arnold had a secret life that the police eventually pounced
on and used to destroy the family. That is the subject of Andrew
Jarecki's award-winning Capturing the Friedmans. For New
York's most famous clown, the release of the documentary is both
cathartic and terrifying.

Arnold Friedman was a pedophile. According to forensic
psychiatric reports developed as his case unfolded, he harbored
sexual urges for boys ages eight and upward. He managed to keep
these proclivities secret until late 1987, when police raided the
Friedman home based on evidence obtained in a three-year-long postal
sting operation. In 1984, Arnold had ordered a kiddie porn magazine
from the Netherlands that the feds intercepted at JFK. A postal
inspector then pretended to be a fellow pedophile, writing letter
after letter cajoling Arnold to put something in the mail.

After he finally did and the house was searched, the feds told
Nassau County police that Arnold was giving computer lessons at
home. Worried that he was photographing and molesting his grade
school students, detectives seized class rosters and started
interviewing. Within weeks, according to police reports, several
little boys were accusing Arnold of priming them for sex by showing
them dirty computer games, then raping and terrorizing them for
months, even years. Jesse Friedman, the youngest of Arnold's three
sons and his classroom assistant, was also implicated. Both were
arrested on charges of child molestation. Capturing the
Friedmans shows the family members convulsed by their discovery
of Arnold's pedophilia and their powerlessness before the rage of
the cops and community—even as they at first staunchly proclaim
Arnold's and Jesse's innocence.

Because I knew the family and have written extensively about
cultural hysteria over child sex abuse in schools, I appear in the
film as a talking head and was hired to consult on it. I also told
director Jarecki about the family's home movies, some of which he
ended up using in his documentary. Amazingly, the Friedmans' shock,
shame, internecine warfare, and indignation—like their childhood
skits and cheerful family holidays—are captured on videotape, which
David recorded for many months, up to and including his father's and
brother's convictions.

I first heard from Jesse and Arnold in 1989, shortly after they
were sent to prison. Back then, I got a lot of mail from inmates
claiming they'd been falsely convicted. The Friedmans wanted me to
look into their case, but I demurred. I was put off by Arnold, who
told me in a quavering, stop-start voice over a prison pay phone:
"Since childhood I've been tortured by this problem. You have to
remember, those magazines used to be perfectly legal. I was trying
so hard to control my urges. To not touch a child. My therapist told
me to go to Times Square and buy porn. To sublimate with. He called
it a prescription." And there was also the matter of Arnold's and
Jesse's confessions—Jesse had even repeated his on Geraldo.

Daddy dearest: amid a swirl
of dubious accusations, authorities arrest Jesse and Arnold
Friedman.
(Photo: Magnolia
Pictures)

Then, in 1990, I came across a paper that had been recently
presented at the San Diego Children's Hospital's annual national
conference on child abuse. The author was David Pelcovitz, chief of
child and adolescent psychology at Long Island's North Shore
University Hospital, and the paper ("Group Therapy and Hypnosis for
Victims of Child Pornography and Extrafamilial Sexual Abuse")
concerned his therapy with kids in the Friedman case. Many of them,
Pelcovitz noted, had no recollection of abuse, so he plied them with
details about the Friedmans' purported crimes. The paper implies
that he used hypnosis to jog their "memories." By then, studies by
researchers like Nicholas Spanos and Elizabeth Loftus were emerging
that cast doubt on the reality of repressed memory, as well as
suggesting that hypnosis can create false recollections, even for
abuse. Among criminologists, concern about false confessions was
growing. I contacted David and told him that I took his family's
claims of innocence seriously. We stayed in touch.

Meanwhile, David's career as Silly Billy was taking off. He
appeared on Letterman, and Susan Orlean wrote a piece on him
in The New Yorker without knowing about the Great Neck
scandal. I never wrote about him until now because he begged me not
to. He lived in constant fear that his celebrity clients—like Susan
Sarandon and Eddie Murphy—would never again let him near their kids
if they discovered the connection.

David and I used to have lunch when I visited Manhattan. David
would do sleight-of-hand tricks as he reminisced about his days as
an 11-year-old visiting 42nd Street and enraging the three-card
monte players by beating them at their own game. Once, about seven
years ago, he mentioned that he'd made videos of the family for
months after Arnold's and Jesse's cases broke. Back at his
apartment, he dug the tapes out of a closet and played them. There
was his mother, Elaine, raging at Arnold; David, Seth, and Jesse
raging at Elaine; Elaine alternately cursing her husband and
tenderly embracing him; Arnold suffering anxiety attacks that
include high-pitched animal sounds; the whole bunch desperately
weighing the advantages of trading false confessions for shorter
prison time. It was 25 unnerving hours of a family cracking under a
crushing load of state pressure and their own disgrace about the
magazines. I asked David why he made the videos. "Maybe because we
knew we'd never be a family again," he said. I think they're about
the real Dr. Zero—Arnold Friedman—being annihilated, with his entire
family, by the Destruction Ray. I think David wanted to make a
tribute to his dad.

Medical libraries and the internet are filled with research on
pedophiles, but most people get their information from USA
Today or CNN, with their breathless Megan's Law scenarios: kids
raped, beheaded, dumped in the woods. The investigations in the
Friedman case started with magazines, and from there, authorities
accused Arnold and Jesse Friedman of raping boys, battering them,
and threatening them with further assault, even death, if they told.

The Long Island authorities might have been more sober in their
investigation if they'd better understood the psychology of
pedophilia. According to Kay Jackson and Rashmi Skadegaard, New York
City psychotherapists with 20 years' experience treating convicted
child molesters, extreme violence among pedophiles is exceedingly
rare. An undetermined proportion never touch children at all. (It's
impossible to know how many, since the subject is so hush-hush.) But
in several studies—including two published by University of Southern
California child abuse researcher John Briere and colleagues in 1989
and 1996, and one in 1995 led by psychologist Gordon Hall, currently
at the University of Oregon—male college students were asked if they
ever felt sexually attracted to small children. At least a fifth of
the men answered yes. In addition, Hall hooked his subjects to a
plethysmograph (to detect organ engorgement)—when exposed to images
and audiotapes of prepubescents in sexual situations many of them
had erections. While most of these "normal" men never act out their
fantasies, they might look at pictures. Paul Federoff, a Canadian
researcher and clinician at Canada's Royal Ottawa Hospital, noted
recently that the fastest growing group in his therapy sessions are
men who, as far as Federoff knows, have never abused a child, but
were arrested for looking at child pornography on the Web.

According to government-published monographs written in the 1980s
by FBI sex crimes expert Kenneth Lanning, pedophiles seldom use
overt threats and violence. It's far more common, say Jackson and
Skadegaard, for pedophiles to seduce through their gentleness and
sensitivity, and for their abuse to take the form of undressing,
fondling, and oral sex.

If victims fail to report the crimes, it's often because they're
ashamed that they enjoyed the abuser's attentions, or worried he'll
go to jail. While molestation can of course leave kids with grievous
psychic wounds, research by Philip Ney of the University of British
Columbia and his colleagues (published in 1994 in the journal
Child Abuse and Neglect) suggests that physical and verbal
abuse and neglect tend to be far more emotionally damaging to
children than molestation. Research by Bruce Rind and colleagues,
published by the American Psychological Association in 1998,
indicates that many children seem wholly unaffected by sexual
contact with adults. This should not surprise. The Arnold Friedmans
of the world are kinder to kids than many normal adults.

What, exactly, did Mr. Friedman do? In an interview for
Capturing the Friedmans that did not make it into the film, a
former computer student who insists the accusations were bogus
nonetheless recalled that Arnold used to give boys furtive pats on
their clothed legs and butts. It felt kind of weird, he said, but
the kids shrugged it off as mere nuisance behavior by the nebbish
who was still a great teacher. But—as the movie makes clear—Arnold
sometimes did more than patting. During the investigation, he told a
therapist and his family that almost two decades before, he'd
committed sex acts with two neighbor boys. He never gave details
except to say they "stopped short of sodomy"—and the victims have
not come forward.

With this confession of ancient misbehavior, if the case against
Arnold had stopped at the magazine possession charge, he probably
would have gotten a year's probation and therapy with people like
Kay Jackson and Rashmi Skadegaard. Based on their experience, they
tell me, some 80 percent of sex offenders in treatment can remain
out of prison and pose no danger to the community. Jackson notes
that, contrary to common wisdom, sex offenders repeat their crimes
at lower rates than other offenders. But Arnold confessed to the
mass molestation charges apparently because he was so filled with
shame and despair. Jesse followed suit—after acquiescing to what he
now insists was his lawyer's pity-garnering strategy, claiming
Arnold abused him as well—because he thought no jury would believe
the son of a confessed pedophile was innocent.

That's the only conclusion I could come to as I delved into the
case. There was the total lack of physical evidence that one would
expect after violent rape: semen, blood, anal scarring. The
pornographic computer games found on some class computers, which
police said were loaded by Arnold, were in fact being traded by kids
all over Long Island in the late 1980s. Further, Arnold for years
gave private piano lessons to grade school boys. Yet even when the
community was rocked with news of the Friedmans' sexual perfidy, not
one piano student came forward. Police got hold of Arnold's computer
class rosters, but the piano students' names were never written
down—which might explain why none of them "remembered" abuse.

Besides official accounts of hypnosis-related therapy sessions
with alleged victims, there is a transcript of an interview with one
boy, which surfaced while Capturing the Friedmans was being
researched (but also wasn't included in the film). The boy insists
that nothing happened in the computer classes, but detectives warn
that if he doesn't disclose, he'll grow up "gay." Several of the
interviewees also accused three teenage boys whom the Friedmans
barely knew. The case had clearly been developed as a gay "sex
ring"—a police fantasy rampant during the homophobic Reagan years,
when Anita Bryant was denouncing gay men as child molesters, and
psychiatric nurse Ann Burgess, author of 1988's Children
Traumatized in Sex Rings, was publishing her first writings on
the topic. Child protection authorities speculated about gay men
organizing to move boys around the country in order to molest them
and make pornography. The sex ring theory was the precursor of the
"satanic" day care cases, such as the McMartin preschool in
California, and Kelly Michaels in New Jersey.

Only a bit of this detail made it into Capturing the
Friedmans. In Jarecki's defense, he was trying to fit a very
complex case, along with all that powerful family video, into under
two hours. But Jarecki, the multimillionaire founder of Moviefone,
also has shrewd business sense. While the film was in production,
Jarecki told the Friedman family he thought the two were innocent of
the charges. 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.
Teaser ads pitch the film as a Long Island Rashomon: "Who do
you believe?" For Jarecki and his PR people, the question is
rhetorical.

The Friedmans have had little active part in this strategy, or
for that matter in making the film. When David mentioned to me three
years ago that some guy was doing a whimsical documentary about his
clowning, provisionally titled Funny and Silly, I was amazed
that he would take such a chance on his family tragedy being
revealed. But David was aglow about the movie advancing his career.
Some months later, Jarecki put two and two together and changed the
focus of his film. David was distraught, but he and the family had
already signed releases for Funny and Silly. After he called
me for help, I spoke with Jarecki, who struck me as sincerely
interested in doing an in-depth examination of the case. I'm happy
now that the film is out. Market-tested Rashomon or not, I
think it gives the Friedmans—and the culture—a little bit of space
to think about who pedophiles really are, what they really do, and
how we should deal with them as human beings instead of monsters.

Two Decembers ago, while the movie was in production, Jesse was
released on parole. He had gone to prison at age 19, long-legged and
shiny-haired. He came out 13 years later thick from bad food,
balding from incipient middle age, gap-toothed from jailhouse
attacks at Attica and other state facilities. He was dizzied by
grocery stores and shocked by cell phones. He still lionized his
father.

For years, he and David had been telling me what a great person
Arnold was. Well yes, there were the magazines. David once told me,
when they were young, each of the brothers had run into them while
poking in Arnold's things. David said it was no big deal, because
Arnold was, in all other respects, such a good man. As the case
snowballed and the brothers struggled to save the family, they
increasingly saw their father as a martyr—a view that fossilized
when Arnold died in his jail cell in 1995, an apparent suicide.

Martyrology has remained especially important for David as he
struggles to protect his career. During filming, it was intensified
by Jarecki's focus on the possibility that the Friedman sons—Jesse
in particular—were molested by Arnold and might not remember. Jesse
says he has no memory of being abused, and neither do the other
brothers. This could well mean that they weren't victimized. On the
other hand, lack of recall is common in adults who were molested
when young. According to the new book Remembering Trauma, by
Harvard psychologist Richard McNally, which debunks the "traumatic
amnesia" theories that have been bruited by some child protection
workers, children may forget molestation simply because they were
too young when it happened or because the abuse didn't feel weird or
troublesome enough to remember for very long.

Jarecki's repeated questions about whether Arnold molested his
sons unnerved David and Jesse, and heightened their fears about the
movie. Jesse's first on-camera interview was so guarded that it had
to be shot again. The first year of production was replete with
screaming matches and phalanxes of lawyers. Things calmed down
considerably when Jarecki started finding former computer students
who now say police coerced them into accusing Arnold and Jesse.

Still, David now worries that his clients will think he was an
abused child, and that they will fold that belief into the folklore
that countless therapists spread—that molested kids become molester
adults. Writing in Pedophilia: Biosocial Dimensions, Arizona
prison psychotherapist Randall Garland reports finding no convincing
evidence that victims become sex offenders. But who has read
Pedophilia: Biosocial Dimensions? David reasons that in order
to continue his clown career, he must convince the world that he is
uninfected by the urge to molest—which, to him, means denying his
father ever molested.

The family hopes that Capturing the Friedmans will
vindicate Arnold and Jesse. Whether or not it will, the film makes
it timely to ask: What is the human reality (rather than the
sensationalized fantasy) of pedophilia? When acted on, what does it
typically do to minors? How should we respond to it? And what do we
do about people like Silly Billy's terrible and wonderful dad?

Related Article:
Michael Atkinson's review
of Capturing the Friedmans

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