Your Friendly Jewish Community Kangaroo Court

The reports are that the long awaited hearing for Mrs. Malka Leifer took place today as scheduled. According to Dassi Erlich, Mrs. Leifer herself did not show up in court. The entire session was a cross-examination of the state psychiatrist by the defense. Future dates have been designated for further cross-examinations.

In short, this debacle has developed into a "war of attrition". It's going nowhere slowly. But, it's not a total loss. The Sapper sisters got to meet lots of nice MKs and got great coverage from ABC News. And their trip was paid for by a generous sponsor.

In the meanwhile, someone sent me a link to a very recent (Nov. 21, 2018) interview of Jewish Community Watch (JCW) COO Shana Aaronson by Rabbi Scott Kahn. All in all, the interview is very impressive and informative. Shana Aaronson is a top notch spokesperson and as child abuse advocates go, she is a superstar. I think it is well worth listening to the interview and you can access it HERE.

So much for the compliments.

Unfortunately, my humble unpopular opinion is that for all the good that JCW does under the illustrious guidance of the lamed vavnik Avraham Meyer HaKohen Seewald and HRHG Rabbi Yosef Blau, Shlita, they do quite a bit of damage. I have written about it in the past and intend to write about it some more in the future. My overall assessment is one of יצא שכרו בהפסדו - the damage far outweighs the benefits.

In terms of Mrs. Aaronson's interview, I thought it was somewhat deceptive due to a number of half-truths and I felt duty-bound to point out these deceptive half-truths. So I set out to write a comment on the page. 

Of, course, as usual, the text grew and grew and I exceeded the 5000 character limit. So I will post the intended comment right here and I will put a summary and link onto the page. Here is the intended comment:

Mrs. Aaronson is a very eloquent speaker and has a lot of professional knowledge, expertise and true-to-life experience. As such, she comes across as very professional, sincere and genuine. Still, she is concealing from her listeners the dark side of JCW and uses at least two deceptive half-truths.

A “half-truth” is being defined as: a statement that is totally true in and of itself but it only reveals half the story so as to be passively deceptive.

Half-truth number one: “We have never been sued”.

I presume this is a true statement, but she says so in a context as to ensure us that the rigorous professional standards of JCW’s shaming process is impeccable and we should not be concerned about wrongful listings. The proof to the pudding and their badge of pride is that, to date, they have not been sued.

If one understands the logistics of lawsuits, it becomes clear that this is a vacuous statement for the following reasons:

·        For secular court in the US, one must have conclusive proof of monetary damages in order to claim monetary compensation for defamation.  For lack of such proof, the most one can win is a court order for the listing to be rescinded. No money. For this reason it is almost impossible to sue on a contingency. This means a tremendous outlay of legal expenses with little to no hope of any financial redress whatsoever. For this reason, even if one is confident that he has a valid case, it is all too often financially prohibitive.

·        In the US (and in Israel), freedom of speech statutes and “good faith” criticism clauses make defamation cases hard to win. Not because it isn’t genuine malicious defamation (and certainly Halachic motzi-shem-ra), but because it is hard to establish that this defamation is illegal. Thus, even if one retains a very skilled lawyer – who will not work on contingency and does not come cheap – it is hard to prove a violation of law even if the person is clearly maliciously defamed.

·        Perhaps the biggest legal obstacle in the US is that there is a very short statute of limitations (SOL) on defamation claims. In New York state, it is only one year. And it counts from the time the defamation is posted and expires after a year. One cannot claim that since the offending material is “still up there”, the defamation is perpetual and perpetuates the SOL. There is yet good news for those affected by JCW. JCW is incorporated in Florida which has a two year SOL on defamation, so you can get a second year - but you will have to sue them in Florida. Regardless, JCW very slyly does not put a date on their WOS listings so they can always claim – true or not – that it was posted more than one or two years ago and the claimant will need to prove otherwise.

·        Beth Din does not count for this because BD is merely arbitration, and a plaintiff cannot force a defendant to show up. In fact, one “offender” did summon JCW to a Din Torah very recently and JCW refused to acknowledge that Beth Din nor to do a Zabla. Perhaps their reason for refusal is justified but the fact that they always have the option to refuse – with or without an excuse - indicates that they cannot be forcibly sued in a Beth Din.

·        In Israel, it is easier to prove defamation but here we have another problem that Mrs. Aaronson has not revealed to us. JCW is not a legal organization in Israel as they have not registered in their business or non-profit registry (Rishut HaTaagidim). Officially, in Israel JCW only exists on the cloud. They do not post any land address and only in a recent brochure have they put up a Jerusalem area phone number for contact. This number does not appear on their US URL. They have a single page Israeli URL which has been “Under Construction” since 2016. The only hot link on the page (besides Contact Us) takes you to their US URL. Sof davar, here in Israel, unless you know where to find Shana Aaronson, there isn’t anybody to sue.

[Update - Sometime in December, 2018, the Israeli JCW website was updated and greatly expanded. It still does not identify any local staff members and it does not display any address. There does seem to be a Jerusalem area phone number.]

What emerges from all this is that, for logistical reasons, JCW all but has artificial immunity from being sued. This gives them protection to be the bullies that they are. This is not something to be proud of.

After all this, I do indeed agree with Mrs. Aaronson's prediction that JCW is going to be sued sooner than or later.

Half-truth number two: “The statistics for false accusations are only 1-4%”.

Again, by itself, this may be totally true. However, this statistic only relates to those who are totally innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever and are totally railroaded. And even in this case, we have as much as 4% false allegations. If we settle for 3.3%, this means that one out of every thirty people accused are totally innocent. This works to ten out of 300, etc. and this is not something to dismiss.

But what comes at a much higher rate are cases where there may have been some type of incident which, by itself can be verified, but it is exaggerated, overblown or misinterpreted to become something way beyond what it really is (or was). When we add these to the pile, we are somewhere in the 20% range (rough estimate).

I explained this in detail in my 2016 blog post VictimTurned Predator (this post, incidentally, made Mrs. Aaronson very angry – sorry about that).

Summary of Half-Truths

Once we know these half-truths, we see the dark side of JCW. Their activities to help victims and referral services are very admirable and commendable and it would be great if they stopped there. But their methods of dealing with [suspected] offenders are horrendous and dispicable. Their Wall-of-Shame program comes across as a virtuous enterprise but it is very dishonest, irresponsible and lacking in integrity.

JCW wantonly and impudently passes judgment on people without any benefit of what can be called “due process”. JCW assumes no accountability or oversight whatsoever. Zero! They pass judgement on others with no confrontation or warning, no self-exposure, no redress, no cross-examination or scrutiny of evidence by an objective or defensive party whatsoever. They pass judgement with no method of appeal. There is no transparency of process and the accused or his agent cannot request a transparent review. In short, they are running a Kangaroo Court!

Their panel may be composed of esteemed “Rabbanim”, “professionals”, mental health experts, lawyers, I don’t care who. They are passing judgment on people’s lives in absentia. Not the accused, nor any agent of the accused, is invited to participate. These anonymous cowards hide in the cocoon of logistical immunity from being sued to sentence people to all the indignities and direct and collateral repercussions of being shamed with no consideration for time or weight. All prison sentences have time limits for understandable reasons. Long sentences for more severe crimes and short ones for lesser crimes. There is no parole from the WOS and no distinctions between heavier or lighter cases.

All of this from their unchallengeable and indefensible self-appointed Kangaroo court justice. Of course, according to Mrs. Aaronson, the process is meticulous and the decision (i.e. judgment) must be unanimous. But all of these people pay homage to Meyer HaKohen Seewald and Rabbi Blau and their policies and mindset. They are the proverbial all-white jury in the deep South. (I also suspect that Meyer Seewald and/or Rabbi Blau are members of this panel.)

Of course, it is all seems justified when they provide true case examples and describe how horrible these offenders are and they make it seem as if every “offender” on their radar screen is just as unequivocally monstrous as the undisputable ones they singled out. But the truth is that there are very, very many questionable cases and they use the indisputably clear-cut cases to mask all of the questionable ones. And this becomes another half-truth.

JCW is in dire need of oversight and accountability. Any system without checks and balances is dangerous and immoral. If we allow judges of Jews and their families to appoint themselves, the Jewish Community had better Watch out!

ושפטו העדה והצילו העדה