Paul Berger's Response to Sam Kellner's Attorney

By Niall Macgiollabhui

November 25, 2013

http://forward.com/articles/188246/paul-bergers-response-to-sam-kellners-attorney/



In the letter posted below, Niall MacGiollabhui responds to the Forward’s November 14, 2013 article, “Sam Kellner’s Tangled Hasidic Tale of Child Sex Abuse, Extortion and Faith; Is Alleged Shakedown Artist a Hero or Crook?” The article discussed controversies surrounding two separate, ongoing criminal prosecutions-one of Mr. Kellner and one of Baruch Lebovits. Mr. MacGiollabui represents Mr. Kellner.

I write this letter on behalf of my client, Sam Kellner, in response to the article that was published online on November 14, 2013 by the Forward headlined: “Sam Kellner’s Tangled Hasidic Tale of Child Sex Abuse, Extortion and Faith,” “Is Alleged Shakedown Artist a Hero or Crook?”

According to Mr. Berger, the author of the article, he looked deeply into the unraveling prosecution of Sam by the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office “largely at the urging of [Baruch] Lebovits’s family.” Baruch Lebovits is an alleged pedophile whose conviction in 2010 was overturned in 2012 on a technicality, and is facing retrial. His family claims that Sam tried to extort them after being told by his son that Lebovits molested him and after other victims came forward. The family also maintains that Lebovits is innocent of the many heinous accusations leveled against him by multiple victims. Offering this disclosure, however, does not excuse or mitigate what is disclosed: Mr. Berger put himself and your paper at the service of a notorious, longtime, alleged pedophile who, it seems, is desperately trying to avoid retrial and the justice his alleged evil deeds deserve.

Mr. Berger contacted me in early November, we spoke at length, and he provided me with a list of questions addressed to my client. Based on the form of the questions, which was accusatory, I told him it appeared his proposed article would adopt the prosecution perspective of Sam’s case.

(Nonetheless, I continued, we were willing to answer any questions he wished to ask and provide him with any material he sought.) On the contrary, Mr. Berger assured me, the article would be a balanced one examining the merits or otherwise of the prosecutions against both Sam and Lebovits. He further proclaimed by email on November 8: “I have asked the hard questions of both sides. That’s what I do.” For anyone who reads Mr. Berger’s article, the sound to be heard is the Lebovits family laughing out loud.

I made a simple inquiry of Mr. Berger: have you found a single shred of credible evidence to support the accusation that Sam Kellner attempted to extort the Lebovits family by claiming he controlled two victims, other than his son – identified in the article as Y.R. and M.T., respectively – who reported being abused by Baruch Lebovits. (The other accusation, that Sam bribed M.T. to falsely testify, is generally accepted to have been thoroughly discredited). Ten questions were emailed to me for my client to answer. The first five related to a secret recording made by Meyer Lebovits, a son of Baruch Lebovits, of a conversation with Sam in May 2009, supposed to be the “smoking gun” in the case. I asked Mr. Berger why he used his own, at times inaccurate, characterizations of the tape’s content, rather than the content itself, as the basis of his questions. He sheepishly conceded that he did not really analyze the content of the tape, relied on a transcript given to him by the Lebovits family, and volunteered that I understood it a lot better than he did. To help Mr. Berger, I emailed him the transcript provided by the District Attorney’s office, which he hadn’t seen. By email on November 7, I stated to him: “[I]f what is alleged against Sam was true, you would expect him somewhere in the course of 161 pages [of the transcript] to say he “controls” YR and MT and that’s why a trial [of Baruch Lebovits] won’t happen. As you know, it’s nowhere to be found. Likewise, when he’s asked repeatedly what he wants by Meyer [Lebovits], you would expect him to demand money. Again, nowhere to be found. Either he’s the world’s worst extortionist or he’s innocent.” Mr. Berger, however, quickly lost interest in the tape (as shown by the single thoroughly bland paragraph in his article in which he refers to its content), once he realized it didn’t support his pernicious agenda.