There was strong reason to investigate and prosecute both Jesse Friedman and his father when the scandal erupted in 1987, Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice said in a 168-page report Monday. The new inquiry also concluded that father and son had abused young boys taking computer classes in the basement of their Great Neck, Long Island, home.
Both pleaded guilty in 1988 to abusing 13 children.
Friedman's attorney, Ronald Kuby, called the report a "whitewash." He and Kuby said they intend to continue fighting for his exoneration.
"Today is not the worst day of my life," Friedman said at an afternoon press conference, accompanied by his wife Lisabeth. Now an online book dealer who lives in Bridgeport, Conn., he added: "I've had many, many worse days than today and I'm standing strong and I've got as much fight in me - I've got more fight in me - than I've ever, ever had before. So, game on."
Rice's review was undertaken after Friedman appealed his conviction following the release of "Capturing the Friedmans." A federal appeals court in 2010 refused to overturn the conviction, but encouraged Rice - who was not the original prosecutor - to review the case.
"By any impartial analysis, the re-investigation process prompted by Jesse Friedman, his advocates and the 2nd Circuit, has only increased confidence in the integrity of Jesse Friedman's guilty plea and adjudication as a sex offender," the report stated.
Andrew Jarecki, who made the 2003 film, said he wasn't surprised by the report's findings. "Prosecutors do not like to undo the work of other prosecutors, especially in their own office," he said.
About a half-dozen prosecutors, supplemented by an independent review team that included noted defense attorney Barry Scheck, investigated claims raised in the film and in the appellate court filing that police used flawed interview techniques, employed hypnotism to elicit victims' memories and took advantage of a moral panic that was sweeping the country in the late 1980s. It also examined whether Friedman had caved to pressure from a county court judge and prosecutors to plead guilty.
Scheck was not immediately available for comment, but in a letter attached to the report, he and the three other advisers said the review team "had to go behind the excerpts and sound bites that the producers used in the film." They concluded that "the district attorney made the best judgment under the circumstances."
The report released Monday methodically addressed the issues raised by the film and the appeals court.
During the first two weeks of the investigation, at least 35 children were interviewed by a team of 12 detectives working in two-person teams, the report said. No single detective dominated the investigation and different teams obtained incriminating statements from different victims, the report said.
"Given the compressed timeline, it is unlikely that detectives would have been able to repeatedly visit any one household for hours at a time to induce a child to make false accusations," the report said.
The review team said it found no credible evidence that hypnosis was used by investigators on any child.
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