NEW YORK
The Jewish Week
03/10/15
Hella Winston
Special Correspondent
Four years after his life was turned upside down by charges he committed extortion and bribery, chasidic sex abuse whistleblower Sam Kellner is fighting back against those he thinks wronged him in the press. Late last year he sued The Jewish Daily Forward for defamation. And last week he filed papers initiating a defamation action against Alan and Nathan Dershowitz, the high-profile lawyers who represented, Baruch Lebovits, who Kellner alleges sexually abused his son.
Kellner, who brought allegations of his son’s abuse by Lebovits to the police in 2008, worked closely with law enforcement to bring forward additional Lebovits victims. Lebovits was convicted in 2010 and sentenced to 10 ½ to 32 years in prison. A year later, in 2011, Kellner was arrested.
In 2012, Lebovits’ conviction was vacated on appeal because of a prosecution error, and a new trial was ordered. Lebovits ultimately pleaded guilty in May of 2014, avoiding a second trial. (He was sentenced to two years but because of time served and what’s called “good time” credits, he ended up serving only a few months.) For his appeal and subsequently, Alan and Nathan Dershowitz were part of Lebovits’ defense team.
The case against Kellner — which included allegations that he paid one man to falsely testify in a grand jury that he was abused by Lebovits and also sent emissaries to attempt to extort the Lebovits family for hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for a promise he could persuade the witnesses against him to drop their charges — was based virtually exclusively on evidence brought directly to the former Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes’ Rackets Division by members of the Lebovits family, their supporters and paid agents. Kellner’s attorneys and others have argued that the charges against Kellner were fabricated in order to get Lebovits out of jail and undermine the district attorney’s ability to retry him.
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