NEW YORK
New York Magazine
By Joe Coscarelli
Kings County District Attorney Charles Hynes has taken a shellacking in the press lately for his handling of sex abuse in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, with critics arguing that he’s going easy on offenders for political reasons, proliferating a culture of cover-ups, and inflating prosecution figures. Hynes has responded by announcing his support for legislation that would require rabbis to report sexual abuse allegations, but that doesn’t erase past mistakes. Today, the New York Times digs one up with a galling story about Hynes attempting to go easy on a kidnapping rabbi.
And as icing on the bad-press cake, one of Hynes’s employees allegedly punched a cop.
The Times reports that in 1994, ultra-Orthodox rabbi Shlomo Helbrans took a 13-year-old boy from his family and tried to brainwash him, only to have Hynes’s office encourage police to drop the case. Michael Powell reports that the NYPD division commander and the boy’s mother “drove down to the district attorney’s office, seeking a meeting. They sat there for hours but never got past reception.”
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