This is a story about religion, sex abuse, power, extortion,
bungled prosecutions and the pitfalls of pursuing justice in an insular
Orthodox community where disputes are solved internally and mistrust of
outsiders reigns.
It involves a convicted sex offender; a Hasidic
multimillionaire oil and diamond dealer; a drug addict; a New York assemblyman;
a supporting cast of ultra-Orthodox rabbis, private investigators, victims’
advocates, bloggers and lawyers — including Alan Dershowitz — and a cache of
secretly taped conversations.
The story plays out against the backdrop of a bitter 2013
election battle for the post of Brooklyn district attorney in which claims of
corruption, connivance and race-baiting abounded.
But it began for me in 2010, in a courtroom in Brooklyn,
where Baruch Lebovits, a Boro Park cantor recently convicted on eight counts of
child sexual abuse, appeared for sentencing.
On one side of the courtroom sat a phalanx of Lebovits’s
black-clad supporters in neat rows. As one of Lebovits’s daughters entered the
courtroom, she turned to the mass of advocates occupying the benches opposite
and, fixing her red, raw eyes on them, insisted, “My father is innocent.”
The advocates, many themselves victims of other
ultra-Orthodox child molesters, were in court that day to show support for the
victim and to see if justice would finally be served.
Prosecuting child sex crimes is hard enough in a secular
society, but in the ultra-Orthodox world, with its prohibitions against gossip,
lashon hara, and ratting out a Jew to the secular authorities, mesirah, it is
tortuously difficult.
Parents of ultra-Orthodox victims must get permission from a
rabbi before they can report their child’s abuse to the police. Even with
permission, they. and their families are often barred from synagogues and
schools. They are publicly shamed and denounced, their businesses destroyed,
their marriage prospects shattered.
At Lebovits’s sentencing hearing, prosecutor Miss Gregory
told the court that on the morning of that very hearing, the victim’s father
had been accosted in synagogue, called a traitor and “physically menaced” by a
man who threw him out of the synagogue and tried to kick him.
Earlier, the victim told how the horror of being abused,
pushed him into drug addiction and petty crime. “Mr. Lebovits showed me no
mercy,” the victim told the court. “I know that seeing the man who caused me so
much pain being punished will give me hope and strength to rebuild my life.”
Before passing sentence, Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice
Patricia DiMango noted that Lebovits himself had been a victim of abuse.
DiMango said that, according to his probation report, Lebovits was molested by
an uncle in London when he was 11 and was abused again one year later by two
teenage friends.
DiMango said Lebovits and his victim epitomized “the
ultimate harm and havoc” of sexual abuse. Then she sentenced Lebovits to
between 10 and 32 years in prison.
Although that three-hour court appearance has stuck with me,
during the past few years I have begun to have doubts about the Lebovits
conviction.
My doubts are focused not on whether Lebovits sexually
abused boys, but on whether Lebovits was denied a fair trial.
The seeds of doubt have been planted during numerous
off-the-record interviews with people in law enforcement and in the advocacy
community, and with lawyers for and relatives of Lebovits.
They are also based
on secretly recorded conversations — some already in the public record, others
never publicly released — that appear to undermine the case against Lebovits.
The principal reason for such doubts lies with one man: Sam
Kellner.
Kellner was arrested in 2011 on charges of extortion and
bribery.
The Brooklyn DA, Charles Hynes, accused Kellner of paying a
witness in the Lebovits prosecution $10,000 to falsely testify that he had been
abused.
Kellner was also accused of trying to extort the Lebovits
family for $400,000 by threatening to bring forward more witnesses against
Lebovits unless the family paid up.
At first it seemed bizarre that anyone could think that
Lebovits, who earned a living as a travel agent, could afford such sums.
But it turns out that one of his sons, Chaim Lebovits, is an
oil and diamond dealer who has spent much of the past decade in West Africa and
Israel. (His latest venture, BrainStorm Cell Therapeutics, is a biotechnology
company that specializes in finding a cure for diseases such as multiple
sclerosis and Alzheimer’s.)
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