NEW JERSEY
NJ.com
By MaryAnn Spoto | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
on April 14, 2015
TRENTON — Rabbi Mendel Epstein engaged in puffery and exaggerations when he talked about torturing husbands to extract divorces from them but he was not involved in a federal kidnapping scheme, his attorney told jurors on Tuesday.
As the federal kidnapping and conspiracy trial of the Lakewood religious leader winds down, defense attorneys are summing up two months of testimony that federal prosecutors argued on Monday shows Epstein and three others employed criminal practices to get those divorces.
“A crime may have been committed here, but it wasn’t federal kidnapping,” said Epstein’s attorney, Robert Stahl. “We all know what the goal of what happened here was.”
Stahl said Epstein was “puffing” to put at ease a woman who told him she was desperate for a divorce in order to start a new life. That woman was actually an undercover FBI agent.
Epstein, 69, is on trial before U.S. District Judge Freda Wolfson in Trenton along with his son, David “Ari” Epstein, and two other rabbis, Binyamin Stimler and Jay Goldstein on charges they were part of a kidnapping conspiracy to force Orthodox Jewish husbands to grant their wives religious divorces.
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