Article about one of the accusers recanting

Re-Capturing The Friedman Story

Mother of alleged victim speaks out, in light of new evidence suggesting the Great Neck father and son were wrongly convicted.

A self-described introvert, Arline Epstein has never thought of herself as an activist, but more like someone who tries to do the right thing. And that’s just what she thought she was doing 24 years ago when she put her 10-year-old son Mike in therapy after police and other parents convinced her — over Mike’s initial insistence to the contrary — that he had been molested by a popular retired schoolteacher named Arnold Friedman and his son Jesse during after-school computer classes in their Great Neck home.

The local therapists working closely with parents and law enforcement at the time argued, Arline recalls, that denials of abuse like Mike’s — particularly in the face of a detailed confession by Arnold and, later, Jesse and another defendant, Ross Goldstein — were caused by shame and/or an inability to remember the traumatic events. Healing, they believed, could come only through the children “opening up” about what had happened to them.

The only problem was that Mike was, in fact, never abused, though he did at some point decide to tell his therapist, Dr. David Pelcovitz, that he had been, hoping that such a disclosure would put an end to the unpleasant therapy sessions and get him back to his normal childhood life. It worked.

Though a number of other children agreed to press charges against the Friedmans, Mike never did, and the whole episode became a part of his past — until recently, when he decided to tell first the Nassau County district attorney and then his parents about his childhood lie.

Read the rest at www.thejewishweek.com/news/new-york-news/re-capturing-friedman-story