NEW YORK
Gothamist
Even if you’ve been following the deeply disturbing story of Sam Kellner, the ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn man whose life was destroyed after informing police about a serial child molester who abused his son, you’ll want to read The New Yorker’s in-depth report on the scandal. It’s a fascinating look at how the Hasidic community in Brooklyn enables sex offenders through intimidation, bribery, and their history of voting as a bloc, which gives them significant sway over elected officials like former Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes.
New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv lays out all the facts of Kellner’s ordeal, describing how he needed permission from a rabbi before even reporting his allegation to secular authorities, and how he became a pariah in the community for doing so. “Kellner’s behavior was seriously threatening to the community’s power structure,” one observer tells her, and it appears that power structure was only emboldened by Hynes’s handling of the case against Baruch Lebovits, a prominent cantor.
Despite very flimsy evidence, Kellner was charged with trying to extort money from Lebovits, supposedly in exchange for getting his son to recant “false” allegations. In fact, the Lebovits family tried to bribe Kellner repeatedly with large sums of hush money (something that apparently worked with another accuser), but Kellner refused. “What would I say to my son?” Kellner asks The New Yorker. “That I took money so he could be used as a prostitute?”
Perhaps the most incendiary allegation to emerge from The New Yorker’s story is that senior Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney Michael Vecchione went after Kellner as a favor to Arthur Aidala, an attorney who represented Lebovits and happened to be a close friend of both Vecchione and Hynes. Six weeks after Lebovits was convicted of molesting a boy (“Aron,” not Kellner’s son) in 2010, Aidala met with Vecchione.
From The New Yorker:
Initially, Aidala didn’t focus on Kellner. He spoke about a case that was easier to substantiate: he said that, days before, a friend of Kellner’s named Simon Taub had extorted the Lebovits family. Taub had said that his son had been molested and threatened to go to the police unless he was compensated by the family. A few weeks later, in a sting operation, detectives from the rackets bureau wired Chaim Lebovits, a businessman who had made a fortune in oil and diamonds. Chaim went to Taub’s home and caught him on tape accepting money.
After he was arrested, Taub said that prosecutors told him, “If you coöperate with us, you will be home in an hour.” They pushed him to implicate Kellner in an extortion plot. Taub said that he didn’t have the information that the prosecutors wanted. “To coöperate, I had to lie,” he told me. Instead, he pleaded guilty to attempted grand larceny and was sentenced to probation. The alleged abuse of his son was never investigated.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.