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…