Capturing the Friedmans Page #4

that he had to leave.

He wasn't allowed

while we were searching.

And finally, he came in

for the last time.

He bent down.

I really thought he had

a weapon in that duffle bag.

Everybody kind of, you know,

reached for a gun at one point.

What he came out with

was a pair of Fruit

of the Loom underwear.

And he started prancing around,

flailing his arms in the air,

saying, "Look at me.

I'm an a**hole."

They're harassing my father

for no reason at all.

If I had had some kind of

Arabian sand scarf

I would have wrapped

that around my face

and been Lawrence of Arabia.

Maybe that

would have been better.

But I took out underwear,

and I put it on my head

because I didn't want

to be on camera.

The first arrested

was Arnold Friedman,

a retired schoolteacher who was

charged with sodomizing boys

aged 8 to 11.

The charges are that, while

running a computer school,

Arnold Friedman and his son

engaged in various forms

of sexual abuse

against minor children.

Jesse pulls up coming

home from school.

His friends dump him

out of the car.

David sort of grabbed me,

and we were sitting

a couple of houses down,

sort of on the sidewalk.

And he was saying

something to me.

And then one of the TV

cameras came over,

so we kind of ran

to the backyard.

And we went behind the house.

And we were in the backyard

of our house.

And the cops came back, and they

said, "What's going on here?"

And I said, "Don't worry about

it. It's just me and Jesse."

And they said,

"Well, we want Jesse.

We need Jesse in the house now."

Of course, we thought, you know,

we didn't know why that was.

As we conducted more interviews

of the children,

Jesse's name started to pop up.

And Jesse was there.

What did Jesse do?

And then eventually we were

able to ascertain

that Jesse's role was not one

of, you know, helping his dad

conduct the computer class,

but basically abusing

the children himself.

We didn't have children

telling us

that Arnold had

slapped them around.

But quite a number of the kids

reported incidents

of being slapped and having

their hair pulled

or their arms twisted by Jesse.

He was, by far,

the more violent one.

All these policemen

said that Jesse

was some kind of aggressor.

That even his father

was cowering,

and Jesse was this sexual,

molesting tyrant.

I challenge anyone

to find anyone

who Jesse had even teased

as a child or called a name.

Jesse was not an angry person.

He was not an upset person.

So we ended up spending

a lot of time together.

I was over his house 3 days

a week, 4 days a week.

And as far as I know him,

none of this ever happened,

not on my watch.

Eighteen-year-old Jesse Friedman

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