Brooklyn DA Thompson Appoints New Prosecutor...
Jewish Voice
Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson appointed a new prosecutor to examine the extortion case against Samuel Kellner, the New York Daily News announced on Sunday, January 19. Thompson named Kevin O’Donnell, formerly of the sex crimes division under former Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes, as the face who will take the helm of the ongoing Kellner case as it moves forward. Over the course of the past three years, Kellner has transitioned from the role of whistleblower on sexual abuse from within Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community to a defendant, according to Vosizneias, which reported that Kellner is currently facing extortion and bribery charges. The Daily News explained that Thompson had “rallied behind” Kellner, 52, during his own election campaign last year. Kellner had spoken out against sex abuse within the Orthodox community, the Daily News reported, but “then found himself charged with extorting an alleged abuser and bribing witnesses in the man’s case.” At one point during Thompson’s campaign he went so far as to call the troubled case “botched.” And now he has named O’Donnell as a fresh face who will review the three-year-old case, sources told the Daily News. The decision could affect the case of the man Kellner allegedly attempted to extort — Baruch Lebovits, 62, a rabbi “who’s awaiting a retrial on charges of abusing a boy,” according to the Daily News. A court date for Lebovits is scheduled for Thursday. “He probably wants a fresh pair of eyes to look at this case,” Kellner’s lawyer, Niall MacGiollabhui, told the Daily News of Thompson’s decision. In July of 2013 the Daily News had revealed that a young man had accused Kellner of paying him to accuse a rabbi of sex abuse. During re-interviews with law enforcement officials it was deemed that the young man’s account was “all over the map” according to prosecutors in the July news story. The Daily News account stated the following: ”In conversations with prosecutors, the star witness acknowledged telling others Lebovits molested him, then later said he had never met Lebovits. He claimed not to know an associate of the rabbi, but subsequently said that person pays for his current stay in Israel and takes care of his expenses.” Furthermore, a New York Times account of July’s events explained that the Kellner case was odd from the beginning. According to the NYT piece, Kellner had accused Lebovits of molesting his son. Kellner had apparently then assisted the district attorney’s office in the identification of other victims, which helped lead to Lebovits’s March 2010 conviction. “But four months later, one victim who testified against Mr. Lebovits before a grand jury told prosecutors that he had testified only because Mr. Kellner paid him $10,000,” according to the NYT. Prosecutors then indicted Kellner, using the original accuser, now an adult, as their key witness in the new case. Kellner was also charged with trying to extort $400,000 from the Lebovits family to keep other children from making accusations. It has been suggested by the NYT that the high profile case was touted by then-DA Charles Hynes as an achievement of “the district attorney’s campaign to persuade members of the insular Hasidic community to cooperate with authorities in such cases” before the case collapsed on itself when the witness gave varying accounts which led to Kellner’s indictment.
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