NEW YORK
Courthouse News Service
By ADAM KLASFELD
MANHATTAN (CN) – Once the Yiddish paper known as the “conscience of the ghetto,” the now-bilingual Jewish Daily Forward sparked righteous fury from a Brooklyn father who claims the paper smeared him with illegal wiretaps because he blew the whistle on rape in a devout and insular community.
The defamation complaint that Samuel Kellner, of Borough Park, filed Friday stems from allegations that cantor Baruch Lebovits sexually abused Kellner’s 12-year-old son and other children.
Indicted in 2008, Lebovits was convicted in Brooklyn two years later, but he was freed on appeal because of evidence withheld from his lawyers. The disgraced cantor then went after Kellner with allegedly doctored recordings depicting him as an extortionist.
For a time, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office sought to retry Lebovits while simultaneously prosecuting his accuser. The charges against Kellner were ultimately dropped as shaky, while Lebovits copped to lesser counts that shuttled him in and out of prison within 86 days this year.
Before Lebovits pleaded guilty, his family allegedly tried to revive the case against Kellner by leaking illicitly recorded tapes – including lawyer-client communications – to The Forward’s Paul Berger, who ran excerpts in a November 2013 article.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.