NEW YORK
The Jewish Daily Forward
By Hody Nemes
As a teenager, Joey Diangello, a self-described survivor of child sex abuse, left the insular Satmar Hasidic community of Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, where he’d grown up and plunged into the world of heavy metal music.
There, Diangello, who wore mascara and heavy metal T-shirts and sported long, black hair, found some measure of comfort in the music of such bands as Metallica.
But in death, Diangello, a co-founder of the group Survivors for Justice, which seeks to expose child sexual abuse in the Orthodox community — where it is often repressed — returned to the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Monsey, New York. On Ocotber 19, he was buried in a cemetery there under the birth name he abandoned long ago: Yoel Deutsch.
Diangello, who was 34, died of a drug overdose, according to PIX11, a local New York television news outlet. But friends remained uncertain of whether the death was a suicide.
“As of late he had been clean. He was running a marathon, he was really getting his life together, which is why it’s especially frustrating,” said Mark Weiss, a fellow member of Survivors for Justice.
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