We Believe the Children

by Richard Beck

  Detective Galasso’s substantial experience with child abuse investigations notwithstanding, the officers who made up her team were not experts of any kind. One, perhaps taking inspiration from film noir or police procedurals, referred to a reluctant child interviewee as a “wise guy,” and the questionnaire used by another contained the query, “Have you ever been touched by anyone?”13 One child went through fourteen police interviews without describing any wrongdoing in the basement. When police arrived for the fifteenth and final visit, they assured the child’s mother that they were going to stay for “as long as it takes.” Anthony Squeglia, one of the detectives who worked on the case as part of Fran Galasso’s team, all but confirmed this child’s account in his interview with Jarecki: “If you talk to a lot of children you don’t give them an option really. You just be pretty honest with them. You have to tell them pretty honestly that we know you went to Mr. Friedman’s class. We know how many times you been to the class. We—you know, we go through the whole routine. We know that there was a good chance that he touched you.”

  As in other cases, children eventually figured out what it would take to end the interviews. “I remember telling myself, ‘It’s not true—just say this to them in order to get them off your back,’” one student said. His testimony led to sixteen counts of sodomy.14

  Over the course of these interviews children said that Arnold had patted them on the back and left his arm lingering around their shoulders. They said that he had shown them pornographic computer games and magazines, and that Arnold, along with Jesse, had also made them take off their clothes. Police believed Jesse had sometimes taken a single student off to another room and that other children then heard sobs and screams coming through the wall. Children said they were made to line up in a row on the floor so that Arnold and Jesse could play “leapfrog,” hopping over and sodomizing each student in turn. In addition to the indictment filed against Arnold, the district attorney’s office charged Jesse with 243 counts of sexual abuse.

  The Friedman family thus took on all of the different roles available to families involved the mass abuse investigations of the 1980s. They were perpetrators, or at least Arnold was—nobody denied he had actively sought out the stack of magazines in his basement. They were also outraged defendants, wrongfully charged with bizarre crimes they never committed. Finally, they were victims, not only of a prosecutor’s efforts to send two of them away to prison for decades but also of Arnold’s pedophilia, which destroyed their long-held belief that they were a normal, contented family. The boys’ response to this experience is both easy and absolutely impossible to understand: in the weeks between the arrests and the trial, as Arnold and Jesse tried to figure out what to do, oldest son and brother David kept his home-video camera rolling.

  David made twenty-five hours’ worth of footage, which sat untouched in his closet until Andrew Jarecki got hold of the story.15 He filmed trial strategy sessions, angry outbursts, private monologues—every aspect of the family’s disintegration and collapse. The camera follows Elaine as she retreats down hallways, with David and his brothers screaming from behind. It sits on the mantle over the course of a long dinner celebrating Arnold’s birthday and watches everyone fight. “Do you honor and respect your husband?” David asks his mother. “That’s why I don’t talk to you.”

  “Things are getting a little out of hand,” Arnold says, trying to defuse the situation, but most of his time is spent sitting in silence at the head of the table, all but invisible. These scenes alternate with moments of sad levity: a birthday cake, Arnold playing standards on his piano. In the midst of the investigation, as Arnold tried to figure out whether a guilty plea would improve or harm Jesse’s chances of acquittal, David videotaped as his brothers cheered up their dad by outfitting him in a balloon animal costume. They’ve made him look like a pterodactyl, and then Arnold says, “It’s a Jewish pterodactyl,” and then he ingeniously elaborates the joke by squawking out, “Schmuck! Schmuck! Schmuck!” while flapping his wings. His sons dissolve into laughter.16 These home movies are almost impossible to watch. They should have been destroyed once the investigation ended. They should never have been made at all.

  Elaine Friedman could not completely understand her sons or her husband, and in turn she was not understood by them. Along with his recordings of family quarrels, David kept a private video diary, and in one entry he makes the family alliances, and the speed with which they are falling apart, clear. “I don’t care about my parents,” he says. He is sitting alone on a bed, and he is wearing a white T-shirt. “I wish it was just my brothers. Oh fuck, I don’t care about my mother, that’s for sure. My brothers were OK and my mother can go to fucking hell. . . . When the guilty verdict comes in on Jesse, my father is gonna kill himself, Jesse’s gonna go away to jail for the rest of his life, Seth is gonna move West.”

  Although David and his brothers had all the normal filial reasons to resent and criticize their mother, their specific grievance during this period had to do with Elaine’s persistent belief that Arnold should plead guilty. She thought it would help Jesse, who could then stand trial without his pedophile father standing there next to him, making the jury wonder about the “cycle of abuse.” But the home movies suggest that she also wanted Arnold to plead guilty because she was justifiably furious at him, and her sons hated what they perceived as the influence Elaine’s anger exercised over their father. “He’s my husband! He doesn’t belong to you,” Elaine yells at Jesse in a home audio recording, and Jesse yells back, “He’s my father, he doesn’t belong to you!” Then Elaine pauses and says, her voice falling and softening, “Well, he doesn’t belong to anybody now.” This, very simply, is the truth—he belongs to the state. But by this point the sons’ idolization of their father has linked up with their belief in his legal innocence, and Elaine cannot reach them at all. “You’re so fucking stupid,” Seth says.17

  Arnold Friedman did plead guilty. He thought it was Jesse’s only hope, and there is also evidence that something really was amiss in his computer classes, though nothing like the crimes with which he was charged. In the run-up to his guilty plea, Arnold’s defense attorney called other former students not listed on the official complaint and asked whether they would testify that Arnold had done nothing inappropriate. They wouldn’t. The atmosphere in Great Neck may have had something to do with this reluctance, but one former student also said that although he was never abused in computer class, he did remember Arnold patting boys on the legs through their jeans or putting his arm around their shoulders and letting the embrace linger. A mother also removed her child from class after he revealed that Arnold sometimes asked students to sit on his lap.18 Years before his arrest, Arnold said, he told a therapist about his pedophilia, and the therapist suggested he go to Times Square and buy porn to sublimate with.19 Even David Friedman, in an interview with the Village Voice, said that he and his brothers found their father’s magazines when they were young and rummaging around in the basement one day.20 In other cases, the fact that the defendants maintained a stance of outraged innocence helped them during the trial and the appeals process. But “not guilty” won’t generate as much outrage as “innocent,” and the Friedmans directed a substantial amount of the outrage they did have at one another.

  The last night Arnold spent at home, he and his sons did what they loved to do best: they improvised and recorded a little performance. The clip appears in Capturing the Friedmans, and it is extraordinarily tender and brief. The scene is made up of about two dozen shots, each less than half a second long. It begins with Arnold and Jesse in profile, standing still and facing each other from across the living room. In the next shot each one, still stationary, has moved in by about six inches. This repeats until they are just slightly apart, nose to nose, and then they circle one another, smiling gently and locking eyes. Once they have rotated 180 degrees, changing positions as though in a stop-motion animation, they begin to back away from the center of the room
until they back out of the frame entirely. The symmetry is a little awful to look at. The scene that Arnold and his sons have dreamed up expresses their situation so elegantly. They had been working together for years on these videos, and they were very good at them.

  Soon after he went to prison Arnold received a telegram from David: “HI DAD, HANG IN THERE, EVERYTHING WILL BE BETTER SOON, REMEMBER HOW GOOD IT CAN BE, DON’T WORRY ABOUT MOMMY, NO MATTER WHAT MOMMY SAYS, JESSE WILL NOT TAKE THE PLEA, I PROMISE. I LOVE YOU VERY MUCH. LOVE DAVID.”21

  The older sons were anxious to curtail their mother’s influence over Jesse’s decision, but David could not make good on his promise: Jesse eventually replicated his father’s mistake and pled guilty too. Given the judicial atmosphere that prevailed in Nassau County at the time, it is hard to blame him. Even before hearing any evidence, a judge told defense attorney Peter Panaro that she would sentence Jesse consecutively on every count against him should he decide to go to trial, and she also later admitted that “there was never a doubt in [her] mind” as to Jesse’s guilt.22 Once Arnold went away to a federal prison in Wisconsin, the brothers seem to have drawn one another close in a rather manic way—they had the camera rolling even as they drove over to the courthouse so Jesse could enter his plea. “Are you a child molester, Jesse?,” David says from the passenger seat, in a melodramatic voice. “Did you do what they said you did?”

  “I never touched a kid,” Jesse replies. “I never saw my father touch a kid.”

  One brother says, “Good,” in an affectionate tone of voice, and then there is a little pause. “Yeah, but still, you must have done it,” David says, and then all three of them burst out laughing.

  The brothers would give their last public performance on the steps of the courthouse later that day, after Jesse entered his guilty plea and after he tried to win the judge’s sympathy by making the argument that he too was a victim of Arnold Friedman’s abuse. “My father raised me confused about what was right and what was wrong,” Jesse told the court, “and I realize now how terribly wrong it all was. I wish I could have done something to stop it sooner.” He sobbed as Panaro reiterated the point, identifying Arnold Friedman as a “monster” and begging the court to take Jesse’s history of abuse into consideration. “This can’t be overlooked,” Panaro said. “I can’t believe we live in such a cold society that no one could look at this man and understand that.” After the hearing, Jesse went outside with his brothers and put on a bizarre and reckless performance, which many people around the courthouse witnessed and remembered years later. They did a Monty Python bit, an unhinged sketch in which a man complains to a doctor, played by John Cleese, that his brain hurts. The joke is that everybody yells everything in stupid voices. “My brain hurts!” Jesse yells in the brothers’ video. “Nurse! Nurse!” There is only one line in his performance that isn’t also in the original sketch, and it happens right after one of the brothers says to Jesse that his brain will “have to come out.” Jesse says, “But I’m using it!”23

  Jesse wasn’t using his brain very well during this period, though. Before he decided to enter his guilty plea he regularly speculated at home about trying the case “in the media.” Once he determined that he could not possibly come out of a trial with an acquittal, he decided to play the media in a different way, and in the months after his guilty plea he sank deeper into his adopted role of traumatized abuse victim turned abuser. His worst decision during this period was to appear on a Geraldo Rivera special, Busting the Kiddy Porn Underground, which aired in February 1989. In between speculative reporting about the child pornography industry, Geraldo asked Jesse to describe his crimes. In the interview Jesse’s voice is small and soft, and he glances around in a dazed way that appears nowhere in any of David’s home movies:

  I fondled them. I was . . . forced to . . . pose in hundreds of photos for my father in all sorts of sexual positions with the kids. And the kids likewise with myself. Oral sex going both ways. I was forced to pose with my penis against their anus. . . . I . . . I know my . . . my father had made vicious threats to the kids about . . . about burning down their homes and things like that and . . . I . . . reestablished that with the kids that I . . . I thought it was completely possible that my father would actually burn down their homes.24

  The claims Jesse made in this interview are ridiculous—no homemade pornography produced by Arnold or Jesse Friedman was ever found anywhere. His decision to incorporate his family pastime of character acting into his public defense was very ill-advised. The jokes were not as funny on the courthouse steps as they had been in the living room, and the personas did not have a sympathetic audience. Jesse’s attempts to apply the dynamics of his family life to the news media placed him in an apparently intractable situation.

  Pedophilia and hysteria about pedophilia are not mutually exclusive. The reality of pedophilia in the Friedman family is that Arnold experienced sexual attraction to children from a young age and tried to keep those feelings at bay with child porn, especially during stressful periods of his life, when the feelings intensified. While struggling with these feelings he also became a beloved and award-winning teacher whose conduct outside the computer class—at school and in the privacy of his own living room, where he gave piano lessons—was never criticized. If Arnold did show magazines to his students, if he provided or tolerated the pornographic computer games, if he was figuring out just how long he could leave his hand on a child’s shoulder or back before anybody noticed, then clearly something needed to be done. But in Great Neck the final truth of Arnold’s actions was swallowed up by a hysterical narrative of pedophilia that combined the police department’s sprawling, violent fantasy and the community’s eagerness to believe it. When Jesse appeared on Geraldo and talked about the shadowy “friends” to whom Arnold would send his nonexistent homemade porn, he was trying to give an account of himself that squared with this hysterical narrative. His mistake was based on a real insight, which is that the real story was not one people were interested in or willing to hear.

  Elaine filed for divorce after Arnold went to prison. Even if he were to come home one day, she said, “I would have to stare at Arnie across the dinner table with just the two of us. There was really nothing between us except these children that we yelled at.” She found a measure of peace in the wake of her son’s conviction. “I know my friends said to me, ‘Don’t you feel, like, terrible being alone in such a big house?’” she says in Capturing the Friedmans. “I said, ‘No, I feel calm.’ That’s when I really started becoming a person.”25

  What did Elaine feel like just before she started becoming a person? The footage in Capturing the Friedmans suggests that she, along with Arnold, David, Seth, and Jesse, felt like a family. Jarecki’s film documents the process by which the investigation and trial steadily and unbearably intensified the dynamics that had always characterized the Friedmans’ lives with one another. So over the course of the documentary’s 107 minutes, the boys’ shared affection for their father becomes a more desperate and lacerating kind of love, and Elaine’s bemused distance from her husband and sons’ antics turns into real bitterness. The case bound the Friedmans closer and closer together right up until the guilty pleas sent them irrevocably on their separate ways.

  This destructive intensification of the dynamics of family life wasn’t only present in the private experiences of those involved with the day care and sex abuse investigations; it also appeared, on a larger scale, in the social and cultural shifts that made those investigations possible and changed how people talked and thought about families and the dangers they faced. This shift and its link to a resurgent cultural conservatism was perhaps most powerfully articulated just as it began to gather steam in 1972, when Richard Nixon gave an interview to the Washington Star-News. It was just two days since Nixon had won a second term as president, defeating liberal icon George McGovern in forty-nine out of fifty states. In the interview Nixon spoke expansively about the national c
haracter. With the country’s long countercultural moment beginning to wane, Nixon stood at the beginning of a conservative revival that would continue for the next three decades, and he talked like someone who knew it. The sixties were fading into history, and it was time to restore a little discipline to American life:

  The average American is just like the child in the family. You give him some responsibility and he is going to amount to something. He is going to do something. If, on the other hand, you make him completely dependent and pamper him and cater to him too much, you are going to make him soft, spoiled and eventually a very weak individual.26

  Nixon’s remarks were aimed at hippies, activists, and others who had spent some portion of the previous decade experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs or making liberationist political demands, and the reelected president appealed to the family as a model for civic life not because of the care families provide but because of the authority fathers wield. The federal government, law enforcement, Christianity, and the military collectively represented for Nixon a kind of national father figure. The country’s future depended on people’s willingness to relearn their respect for traditional authority and to understand that being a citizen was much like being a child.