Capturing the Friedmans (2003) By Andrew Jarecki, writer and director of The Jynx, this documentary follows the drama, community hysteria and media onslaught when a father and son from seemingly typical upper middle class Jewish family are charged with sexually abusing dozens of children.

In August 2010, a federal appeals court upheld the conviction of Jesse Friedman on technical legal grounds,[15] but took the unusual step of urging prosecutors to reopen Friedman’s case, saying that there was a “reasonable likelihood that Jesse Friedman was wrongfully convicted”.[16] The decision cited "overzealousness" by law enforcement officials swept up in the hysteria over child molestation in the 1980s.

Following the appeals court ruling, the Nassau District Attorney's office began a three-year investigation led by District Attorney Kathleen M. Rice. On June 24, 2013, the report was released. In a 155-page report written with very little ambiguity, the report concluded that none of four issues raised in a strongly-worded 2010 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit was substantiated by the evidence. Instead, it concluded, "By any impartial analysis, the reinvestigation process prompted by Jesse Friedman, his advocates and the Second Circuit, has only increased confidence in the integrity of Jesse Friedman’s guilty plea and adjudication as a sex offender." Jesse Friedman was regarded as a "narcissist" and a "psychopath" by a psychiatrist his attorney hired to conduct an evaluation.[17] Judge Boklan had been subject to "selectively edited and misleading film portrayals in Capturing the Friedmans". A four-member independent advisory panel guided and oversaw the work. It included Barry Scheck, a founder of the Innocence Project and one of the country’s leading advocates for overturning wrongful convictions and a member of OJ Simpson's defense team.[18] However, Scheck has subsequently complained that key documents were not available to the panel, and urged the matter be reopened.[19]

Prior to the report's release, details emerged, including letters from some of the alleged victims in which they recant their accusations and implicate the police in coercing their statements.[20] Prior to the report's release, The Village Voice conducted an interview with Jesse Friedman,[21] who described himself as "freakishly optimistic", and also reported that Ross Goldstein, a childhood friend of Jesse Friedman's, had broken his 25-year silence to explain he had been coerced into false cooperation with the district attorney's office: "He told the review panel of how he'd been coerced into lying, how prosecutors coached him through details of the Friedmans' computer lab, which he'd never even seen, and how he was imprisoned for something he'd never done."[22]

On February 10, 2015, Jesse Friedman was back in state appellate court seeking to have Nassau County prosecutors turn over to him the remainder of their evidence against him, which they have not done despite a 2013 court order telling them to do so.[23]

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