Capturing the Friedmans

Plot synopsis:
The investigation into Arnold Friedman's life started after the U.S. Postal Service in 1987 intercepted a magazine of child pornography received from the Netherlands. In searching his Great Neck, New York home, investigators found a collection of child pornography. After learning that Friedman taught children computer classes from his home, local police began to suspect him of abusing his students.
During police interviews, some of the children Friedman taught reported experiencing bizarre sex games during their computer classes. Jarecki interviewed some of these children himself; some stated that they had been in the room with other children alleging abuse, and that nothing had happened. The film portrayed police investigative procedures as the genesis of a "witch-hunt" in the Friedmans' community. The charges assumed that the abuse had taken place with multiple children over an extended period of time, yet none of them ever told any of it to anyone, nor were they in distress when parents arrived to pick them up from the computer classes.
The Friedmans were allowed to stay at home in order to prepare for court, and took numerous home videos while Arnold Friedman (and, later, his son Jesse) awaited trial. The videos were not made with publishing in mind, but as a way to record what was happening in their lives. The movie shows much of this footage: family dinners, conversations, and arguments. Arnold's wife, Elaine, quickly decided that her husband was indeed guilty and advised him to confess and protect their son; she soon divorced him.
Arnold Friedman pleaded guilty to multiple charges of sodomy and sexual abuse. According to the Friedman family, he confessed in the hopes that his son would be spared prison time. Jesse Friedman later confessed as well, but later claimed he did so to avoid being sent to prison for life. He said in mitigation that his father had molested him. According to Jesse's lawyer Peter Panaro, who visited Arnold in a Wisconsin federal prison, Arnold admitted to molesting two boys, but not those who attended his computer classes. He is also quoted as claiming that, when he was 13, he sexually abused his younger brother, Howard, who was eight years old at the time; Howard Friedman, interviewed in the movie, says he does not recall this. Jesse Friedman, in a subsequent statement, said that his father told him and his brothers of his abusing his younger brother.
Arnold Friedman committed suicide in prison in 1995, leaving a $250,000 life insurance benefit to Jesse. Jesse Friedman was released from New York's Clinton Correctional Facility in 2001 after serving 13 years of his sentence. Currently, he is running an online book-selling business.

Tags: brainwashing, romantic, home movie

Review:
In 1987, Great Neck, Long Island, a comfortable upper middle class town, was rocked when Arnold Friedman, a respected high school teacher and his 18-year old son, Jessie were arrested on charges of molestation, rape, and sodomy against young boys to whom they taught computer classes in their basement.
The documentary Capturing the Friedmans is a dark and disturbing look at the Friedman family (Arnold, sons David, Jessie, Seth and their mother Elaine) that compels us to sift through the ambiguous evidence and determine for ourselves the question of their guilt or innocence.
"It's a combination of different versions of different stories", says first-time director Andrew Jarecki, who assembled video footage filmed by eldest son David, news accounts, still photos, and his own original material, and turned it into one of the most powerful films of the year.
Even the homemade family film, filled with slapstick and confession, is either so disingenuously crafted by another son to create the uncertainty or so naive as to be believable.With that ambiguity, ironies abound: Award-winning teacher Arnold has a sleazy secret life centering around the very students he is guiding; Arnold's ex-wife is so remote from this male-dominated family that she may not have had a clue, yet her reunion with Jesse after his prison term is amazingly joyful and honest; son Jesse disclaims helping dad with the molestations yet confesses in the end, he says, because the law and the town are stacked against him.Most fascinating to me, an amateur chronicler of my own family, is the Friedman's (and by inference, America's) obsession with documentation.
Long before Arnold Friedman, a deeply respected and retired high school teacher who moved on to teaching computer skills when PCs were rare, and one of his son's, Jesse, became defendants in a widely reported and still remembered pedophile case, filming and taping each other was a family staple.
On that charge at the least he was fully eligible for and deserved a long prison sentence.But the initial investigation yielded verbal complaints by boys that they were sexually abused during the computer training sessions in the Friedman home by both Arnold and his son, Jesse.
Also living in the house were his wife, Elaine, and two other boys, David and Seth.The police investigation led to myriad charges lodged against both Arnold and Jesse and the legal proceedings drew national media attention (which I well remember).No forensic evidence existed to link either Friedman to the crimes let alone establish that they had occurred.
Elaine is alternately revealing and guarded but it's clear that her union with the popular Arnold was disturbed, emotionally, sexually and even in terms of practical matters like childrearing.The family films show the deterioration of the sons' relationship with their mother whom they hotly blame for supposedly not standing behind their father.
That's just not possible.What "Capturing the Friedmans" shows is that when a defendant like Jesse recants after pleading to so many counts it's impossible to ever be sure whether the allocution required at the guilty plea hearing was genuine or, as Jesse later claims, the inevitable needed confession for the best deal he could get to avoid life in prison.My view as an experienced lawyer is that both were guilty of SOME offenses against young boys.
Just one of the many outstanding documentaries of 2003, `Capturing the Friedmans' is a riveting, depressing and ultimately quite frustrating account of a pedophile and the effect he has on his community and family.In 1984, Arnold Friedman, a highly respected husband, parent and teacher living with his wife and three sons in an affluent suburb of northern Long Island, was arrested on more than a hundred charges of child molestation, purportedly committed while he and his youngest son, Jesse, were running a computer class (for boys only apparently) out of the family's home.
By combining present day interviews featuring several of the family members as well as some of the law enforcement officials involved in the case with glimpses of the family's life caught on film and videotape both before and after the arrest, director Andrew Jarecki creates a fascinating view of a family and a community torn asunder by crisis.
Although the moviemakers' sympathies seem to lie more with the family than with the court, we can't help thinking that maybe no one is really telling the whole truth and that perhaps the reality, as is so often the case in life, lies somewhere in between.If nothing else, `Capturing the Friedmans' serves as a reminder of just how messy and complicated an issue child molestation can be.
The documentary centers around the destruction of a family after Arnold Friedman (patriarch) and the youngest son, Jesse, are accused of committing horrible acts against children.
Their Jewish family tears apart with the situation and the sentences of Arnold and Jesse."Capturing the Friedmans" deals with two very unpleasant themes, pedophilia and destruction of a family, and is a great documentary.
This is Shakespeare, and there's a shattering moment when Arnold's wife, Elaine, asks, "Where did this come from?"The film is craftily put-together -- there's a shock left until the end, the kind of thing that calls into question what we've just seen -- and the filmmaker looks at the situation as a family drama, with the backdrop of the trial, where understandably furious parents try and attack Arnold ("You raped my son!").
He does, in fact, eventually admit to abusing one child, a son of a friend, so he is a molester; whether or not he abused the children that he taught and that is the subject of the documentary is another matter; my own feeling is that the evidence is pretty sketchy, and that he was made an example out of for possessing magazines.
This documentary follows the story using interviews and home movie footage from the time.I came to this film as a fan of documentary features, despite not really knowing anything about it; the trailers had been careful to be very coy about the nature of the event that ripped the family apart - a coyness that was not carried into the film.
The home movie footage is well used and puts us in a situation where we don't have to rely on the interviews to tell us how things went.Overall this is a gripping film but one that deals with a morally complex subject that makes it very hard work to watch and is certainly not going to fill a cinema on a Saturday night!
The filmed allegations of "Computer Student One" remain the only direct evidence offered by Friedman or his advocates suggesting that hypnosis was used to induce victims to make accusations in this case."I also find it difficult to understand how these basic facts are totally omitted in the documentary, such as: "While maintaining his innocence prior to his eventual guilty plea, Friedman commissioned and failed at least two lie-detector tests."Overall I found the film, especially the narcissism still preserved in Friedmans' character interesting enough to google the case.
I felt as if Jarecki was blatantly wanting me to question the charges, and then in turn, question my own doubts.Instead of letting the film unfold on its own terms, Capturing the Friedmans forces an issue that leaves the audience pondering the truth, even if it has created the mystery for them.
Arnold Friedman, a nebbish, a good teacher, a husband and father of three sons in up-trodden Great Neck, Long Island, answers an ad planted by the sex police on some web site, about trading erotic photos of young boys or something.
The title of this magnificent documentary is ambiguous enough to suggest the director was getting to know this family, or the actual incarceration of Arnold and Jesse Friedman.
Toward the end of the documentary, his male lover gives his own account and frankly, it surprises the viewer, because we had no indication at all that Howard was gay and living with in a seeming healthy relationship.The young people that were made to accuse the Friedmans fall under two categories, either they were speaking the truth, or they were made to confess things that didn't happen to them.
It is at this point that we get an insight into Arnold's perverse and uncontrollable sick mind and what aroused him.By way of atoning, or perhaps in a last effort to ask forgiveness from Jesse, Arnold takes a life insurance policy that makes his youngest son the beneficiary, but nothing else goes to the family, or at least, it's never explained in the film.This is one of the most disturbing documentaries that have come out in a long time.
Here it is revealed, by those involved in the investigation (judge, detectives, lawyers) that many important details were left out of the movie:  the three other adults accused of sexual misconduct associated with the case, that Arnold confessed and gave police the names of the children he had abused so they could interview them, that Jesse went on Geraldo (against the advise of his lawyer - and a signed affidavit declaring as such) and confessed to the American public that he has been abused by Arnold, that the private investigator never contacted the Great Neck police and never reviewed first hand the evidence of the case - and much more stuff that when left out of the documentary skews the viewers perception of the case and creates a false context.
In the footage of the Judge addressing a crowd during the Q&A at the Great Neck premiere of the video, she makes a pretty convincing case that Jesse's new claim to innocence is retrospective back peddling - and don't even get me started about David.So, this is just a bit of what I think about Capturing the Friedmans.
More than anything else, it is 109 minutes of voyeurism that appeals to a Reality TV culture which is no less perverse than the Friedman family.Unfortunately, the typical American, at least, does not already know the most important and relevant themes in this film, and that is why it is considered so "thought provoking" on matters we should already be thinking about daily: the slippery nature of "truth", the unreliability of witness testimony, the lunacy and injustice of our law enforcement and legal system, the phenomenon of mass hysteria, trial and conviction in the news media, the enormous tragedy of false imprisonment (if Jesse was indeed falsely accused), and the fact that there are a lot of weird--very weird--people living amongst us.There is simply no way to determine the truth of what really happened in the Friedman basement from the evidence presented here, and we are given no compelling reason to believe that court trials would have provided any more certainty.
Quietly devastating documentary from Andrew Jarecki weaves both vintage and recent home movie footage of the family with revealing interviews of the former Friedman matriarch (who had fallen out of love with her accused husband and failed to stand by him) and two of her sons.
But when Arnold Friedman and his 18 year old son Jesse Friedman got arrested by the police for abusing and molesting young children's in the Friedman home.
Documentary filmmaker Andrew Jarecki (All Good Things) interviews David, Jesse, Elaine including the reporters, victims, the prosecutors, sex crime unit, the judge, formers students of Arnold's computer class, Jesse's former friend and Arnold's brother.
We have interviews with the major protagonists and oodles of camcorder footage but no incisive questioning or comment from the filmmakers and as compelling and interesting as this film is, the ultimate feeling is one of frustration.The story of the Friedmans is murky and disturbing and needs poking around with a big stick before the truth can begin to emerge.
The police intercept a package intended for Arnold that contains a magazine of child pornography and dirty secrets and wild accusations are soon sullying the family name.Former pupils come out of the woodwork and accuse Friedman of abusing them in the computer classes he ran out of his own home.
David was sooooo deep and heavy into denial - he completely villainized his mother and held his father accountable for as little as possible.This movie leaves A lot of fertile ground for amateur psychologists...It is probably the most fascinating "case study" of a dysfunctional family that has ever been documented.It kind of makes me wonder how must families would end up looking under such close scrutiny.....
The main thing I was left with was a sense of doubt - I doubt they did all the things they were convicted of and I doubt they were totally innocent.The interviews with the police,prosecutors and victims clearly show major flaws in the way evidence was gathered and presented whilst Arnold's stash of child porn and Jessie's statement when he is on his way to the court house for sentencing that nothing happened "only that one person, and they did not complain anyway" is telling.
This was a plus because one comes away from experiencing the movie with a litany of unanswered questions and the bonus disk really clarified many, but not all concerns.The film tells the tale of the Friedman family and allegations of hundreds of child molestation charges committed by the father and the youngest son.
Gripping documentary about the child pornography case against Arnold and his youngest son Jesse Friedman that took place in Great Neck Long Island.
We see the story unfold from film and video taken by the Friedman family over the years, and through the stressful and turbulent times of Arnold and Jesse's arrest and sentence.
In the late 1980s, the Long Island town of Great Neck was rocked by multiple allegations of child molestation on the part of a well-liked pillar of the community, Arnold Friedman, and his son Jesse.
Their very normal and somewhat happy world was turned upside down when the father and his youngest son were arrested and charged with some very shocking and disturbing crimes.'Capturing The Friedmans' is a film of which 95% was watched with a very bemused expression on my face.
This film shows a complex and full picture, and reveals not one, but many shocking angles to the Friedmans' story - a middle class, respectable family whose father and youngest son were charged with sexual molestation of children.
The film depicts not so much the facts or testimonies in the case of Arnold and Jessie Friedman and the pedophile charges that sent them both to prison (though it does to a great extent), but really more so the rift in an already flawed family.
As a documentary, the viewer is given as many sides as possible, though perhaps more with the family's side (some of those who testified or gave evidence on the prosecution side don't even reveal faces, which adds to the curious nature of what may or may not be true), and a very close, nearly voyeuristic look at the Friedmans through the video footage stored up.What Jarecki then culls together in the end is part Rashomon take on what happened, with a very psychological and skeleton-closet tide to it all through Arnold Friedman's past, with another part a detailing of the specifics of the case (some of them kind of unbelievable in a couple of spots), and another part being like an all-too-true and harsh reality-TV type of area.
Did teacher Arnie Friedman and his teenage son Jessie molest and rape dozens of boys or were they victims of media hysteria?The tale is told from both points of view, with candid home-video footage taken during the trial, and later interview material used to convey the tale of perversion in a well-to-do, but very dysfunctional, Jewish family.There is no doubt that Arnie was guilty of paedophilia  his collection of dodgy magazines condemned him from the start  but whether he or his son were guilty of all charges, we may never know for sure.This well constructed and absorbing film unflinchingly reveals how the shocking revelations had a devastating effect on the Friedman family, resulting in despair, divorce and even suicide..
Due to Arnold Friedman's fascination with film and video, there are an abundance of home movies shot by the family members themselves to assist Jarecki in showing us the `real' family; and what we see is not always pretty  especially once David, in an almost prophetic way, decides to document the family almost continuously after the arrests.
It's the desire to know the truth (which we never can), and to separate out these tortuous issues, which really sucks the viewer in.However what makes Capturing the Friedmans so remarkable and unique is that long before director Andrew Jarecki took an interest in the case, David Friedman (another of Arnold's sons) was already there in the thick of it, filming everything.
I want to say that I am giving both sides the benefit of the doubt, and here's why:I don't believe there was enough evidence (at least of what they presented to us in the movie) to determine one way or another whether Arnold Friedman and/or his son Jesse sexually molested young boys.
During that investigation, and even more heinously, he and his son Jesse were charged with molesting some 30-40 boys who were taught in computer classes at the Friedman's home.While there is no disputing the child pornography charges, the objective of the director in this film was to try and shed some doubt on the molestation charges by claiming that the town and children of Great Neck, NY were whipped into hysteria by the line of questioning of the police during the investigation.
Without spoiling the movie, too much, the documentary tells the story of what seem like a quiet peaceful American family, the Friedmans, only to find out that, under the public façade of respectability masks the ugly truth that David's father/public school teacher, Arnold was buying and distributing child pornography.
A very disturbing documentary, Capturing the Friedmans deals with a middle class Jewish family where the father is accused first of child pornography and then of pedophilia (along with his youngest son).