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Toward An Elusive Truth

A documentary filmmaker exploring the abuse cases against a Great Neck father and son lifts the curtain on the family's private dramas

By Karin Lipson | Staff Writer

January 16, 2003

Three years ago, filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, having spent a successful decade in the business world, decided to return to movies with a documentary about children's party clowns. "I thought it would be fun to follow one of these people into their lives," he recalled recently. "I was really trying to make a pretty light film."

What he wound up with couldn't have been more different.

"Capturing the Friedmans," a documentary that premieres tomorrow at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, is a sobering re-examination of events that stunned Long Island in the 1980s, when they seemed to cast doubt on the very notions of normality, community and safety.

It was in 1987 that Great Neck resident Arnold Friedman, an award- winning former high school science teacher who now held computer classes for boys in his home, was charged, along with his 19-year-old son, Jesse, a college student, with multiple counts of child abuse and sodomy.

Police interviewed dozens of children, ranging in age from 8 to 11, who had attended the computer classes over a period of years. What emerged from those interviews were horror stories - stories police said the children had been too frightened to tell before - that turned the innocuous-looking, middle-class Friedman home on Picadilly Road into a virtual lair of sexual depravity against innocent children.

Indicted on 107 counts, Arnold Friedman pleaded guilty in 1988 to 42 sex crimes against children and was sentenced to 10 to 30 years in prison. Jesse, faced with 245 counts, later pleaded guilty to 25 charges and received a sentence of 6 to 18 years. The Great Neck community felt relieved that it had rid itself of two sexual predators.

These events are recalled in "Capturing the Friedmans." But the 107-minute film is not a police procedural: "Frankly, the police story had been told" in news accounts at the time, said Jarecki, during a brief stop in New York (he lives with his family in Rome), before heading on to Sundance.

Nor is the film an anti-police diatribe, though it does question some police methods and conclusions in the case. "It's not a deconstruction and criticism of the police," said Jarecki. "It analyzes everyone's approach. I don't think it tries to draw conclusions."

In fact, "Capturing the Friedmans" isn't principally about a child-abuse case, though that clearly is what set other events in motion. It is about the elusiveness of truth, despite the seemingly best efforts of those involved to grasp it. Perspectives shift as the director interviews different people and reveals new details.

"What fascinated me was how smart everyone was," Jarecki said. "The family was smart, the police were smart, the judge was smart. Everyone was smart, and yet no one can agree on anything."

Arnold, for instance, emerges clearly as a pedophile; in fact, it was his mailing of pornographic material that initially put him in the crosshairs of law enforcement officials. "You could believe Arnold was using the U.S. mail to mail child pornography; that he had a sexual interest in children; you could even believe he molested children" at some point, noted Jarecki. "But you don't necessarily have to buy the analysis" that he repeatedly abused children, undetected, over a period of years in his home, as charged.

If "Capturing the Friedmans" is partly about the shifting sands of truth, it also is about our concepts of family - and how one admittedly unusual family fell apart under almost unimaginable stress.

In the film, a still-bewildered Elaine Friedman - who was Arnold's wife and the mother of his three sons, David, Seth and Jesse - recalls the shock of the unfolding events: "We had a middle-class home, educated. We had a good family, right? Where did this come from?"

It was, in fact, a family member who ultimately led Jarecki to make "Capturing the Friedmans." While interviewing potential subjects in 2000 for his then-planned clown film, Jarecki came across David Friedman, whom he describes as "the No. 1 children's entertainer in New York."

Though clearly a perfect subject for the film, Friedman "had an undercurrent of a certain kind of intensity, I might even say anger," Jarecki recalled. That, plus Friedman's reluctance to talk about his family, led Jarecki and his staff to do some independent research. They found Newsday articles summarizing the case and identifying David Friedman as the eldest son of Arnold Friedman.

But, of course, Jarecki was reading of those events years later, with an inevitably different perspective. The Friedman case, for example, had unfolded during an era of national mass hysteria over purported instances of child sex-abuse in group settings. At least two headline-making cases, respectively involving the McMartin Preschool in California and day-care teacher Kelly Michaels in New Jersey, eventually fell apart when the accuracy of children's testimony was questioned.

And while both Arnold and Jesse Friedman had confessed to their crimes, recent events have shown that confessions may not always be what they seem: "The five 'Central Park jogger' defendants confessed convincingly," noted Jarecki, yet their convictions were overturned a dozen years later.

In the case of the Friedmans, he said: "The police took decisive action. The court took a decisive view. And yet, the world had changed so much since then, I felt I needed to start fresh."

The fact that there had been no trial for either Arnold or Jesse also intrigued Jarecki: "When there's no trial, you often have a very intense series of negotiations and stress, and perhaps that was why the clown was so angry." At this point, he said, "I was still thinking of making this a part of David's story. Then the rest of the story just basically pushed the David story out."

Although his planned six-month clown project would stretch to three years, Jarecki had the financial and artistic resources to proceed. Founder and former chief executive of Moviefone, the nation's largest movie show time and ticketing service, Jarecki, now 39, sold the company to AOL in 1999. The producer of a prize-winning short film, Jarecki counted film director Melvin Van Peebles among his mentors.