Thirteen years ago, a Brooklyn man’s child molestation conviction pierced a veil of silence in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, where many people who dared to report sexual abuse were shunned, expelled from schools and had businesses ruined.
Now the man, Nechemya Weberman, an unlicensed therapist who was sentenced to 103 years in prison, could be on a path to freedom.
Mr. Weberman, 67, is scheduled to appear in court next month, with a judge set to decide whether to commute the original sentence and impose a new, shorter one, in a move supported by Eric Gonzalez, the district attorney.
Supporters of survivors of sexual abuse in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community are outraged. They say Mr. Gonzalez has bowed to years of relentless pressure from an influential voting bloc, and that an office that won a seminal conviction was now abdicating its duty in the same case.
“This sends a devastating message,” said Boorey Deutsch, 38, the husband of the woman whom Mr. Weberman was convicted of abusing when she was a girl. “Politics matters more than protecting children.”
Mr. Gonzalez was elected in 2017 in a wave of liberal-minded prosecutors and ran unopposed in winning re-election this year. He has largely avoided the scrutiny of his counterpart Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, despite pursing many of the same policies, including re-evaluating cases that led to long prison sentences and, occasionally, recommending clemency.
That mission has meant revisiting cases like Mr. Weberman’s case.
Before going to trial, Mr. Weberman was offered a plea agreement under which he would have been sentenced to five years in prison. He refused it, was convicted and received the lengthy sentence.
In 2021, Mr. Gonzalez wrote to Andrew M. Cuomo, the governor at the time, and asked that he consider commuting Mr. Weberman’s sentence. Though a “substantial period of incarceration was necessary,” Mr. Gonzalez wrote, Mr. Weberman had been “singled out for an unusually harsh punishment because his was a high-profile case.” (Mr. Cuomo did not act on the request.)
Mr. Gonzalez, in an interview on Friday, said his office stood by the conviction and he called Mr. Weberman’s crimes “horrific.” But he also said the original sentence departed unfairly from the norm and had been engineered to make an example of one man.
He added that victims would be less likely to report such crimes if they thought that members of ultra-Orthodox Jewish community would be treated unfairly at sentencing.
“These excessive sentences have become a serious moral and policy failure in our criminal justice system,” Mr. Gonzalez said.
For supporters of Mr. Weberman’s victim, that he has continued to insist on his innocence and has never apologized disqualifies him for clemency.
“It sends a strong message to victims of, ‘Don’t even try. You don’t stand a chance against our power,’” said Asher Lovy, the director of Za’akah, an organization that promotes awareness of sexual abuse in the Jewish community.
Mr. Weberman’s sentence was once unimaginable in a community where sex crime victims had long been intimidated. But it angered members of the Satmar Hasidic community, where Mr. Weberman was a respected figure.
The New York Times is not naming his victim because of the nature of abuse she faced.
The prosecution of Mr. Weberman unfolded at a politically charged time. The district attorney at the time, Charles J. Hynes, faced loud criticism that he had not prosecuted sexual abuse in the politically connected ultra-Orthodox community aggressively.
Under heavy scrutiny and facing re-election, Mr. Hynes took a hard line against Mr. Weberman after he decided to chance a trial.
In court, the victim testified about modesty committees that policed the behavior of young girls found to have broken the Satmar community’s austere rules. Parents of those who broke the rules had to send them to religious counselors.
It was in that context when the victim first encountered Mr. Weberman. She was 12 and had been referred to him for counseling by her religious school in the Williamsburg section. Her parents were told that unless they paid Mr. Weberman $150 an hour for his services, she would be expelled, according to a close family member who spoke with The Times in 2012.
For the next three years, Mr. Weberman sexually molested her and told her she would be expelled if she told anyone, according to the family member. The victim shared the accounts of abuse with a licensed therapist, who reported the accusations to the authorities.
At the trial, Mr. Weberman’s victim testified that during counseling sessions supposedly aimed at making her more religious, he had forced her to perform oral sex.
“You played around with and destroyed lives as if they were your toys,” she told Mr. Weberman at his sentencing, “without the slightest bit of mercy.”
According to Mr. Weberman and his lawyers, the girl concocted the accusations and reported him as an act of revenge.
Mr. Weberman was convicted in December 2012. After prosecutors called for the maximum possible sentence, Justice John G. Ingram of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn gave Mr. Weberman the longest sentence ever imposed against a member of the ultra-Orthodox community for sexually abusing a child.
To Mr. Weberman’s lawyers, the 103-year cumulative sentence on 59 counts was a wild departure, and Mr. Gonzalez agrees.
Had Mr. Weberman’s sentences run concurrently, his lawyers wrote in a June court filing, his minimum sentence would have been five years, in line with punishments for similar crimes.
Instead, Judge Ingram gave Mr. Weberman consecutive sentences. A state law capping prison terms for such crimes has already cut his sentence to 50 years, meaning he could be released at 97. That is still excessive, his lawyers argued in their filing.
In a statement Friday, Donna Aldea, a lawyer for Mr. Weberman, said his sentence was “unconstitutional” and that he could not be punished simply for exercising his right to go to a trial.
Mr. Weberman has maintained a loyal following in the Satmar community. In Yiddish language publications, he has been compared to Joseph from the Book of Genesis, who was falsely accused of rape. He has been visited in prison by prominent Satmar rabbis.
About a year ago, more than a dozen of New York’s most powerful Jewish leaders wrote to Gov. Kathy Hochul, asking for Mr. Weberman’s immediate release.
While condemning his crimes, the leaders wrote that Mr. Weberman had missed weddings, bar mitzvahs and baby naming ceremonies, and had been harshly punished “to set an example to the Orthodox Jewish community.”
On Wednesday, the dean of Yeshiva University’s rabbinical school, Hershel Schachter, released a video that had been posted on Instagram in which he expressed regret for signing the letter, whose existence was first reported by The Times of Israel. He said he was “misinformed” about it. He called Mr. Weberman a “public menace.”
“I was misled from the beginning,” Mr. Schachter said.
Though Mr. Weberman’s case revolves around one victim, additional accusers said he had sexually abused them, according to legal filings obtained by The Times.
In August 2012, before the trial, a Brooklyn prosecutor wrote in a filing that six other victims had approached the district attorney’s office to report that Mr. Weberman had sexually abused them in counseling sessions dating to the 1990s. Mr. Weberman was not charged in those cases.
Ms. Aldea said Mr. Weberman’s “extreme” sentence was not justified “by uncharged, unproven, and anonymous allegations.”
Before and at trial, the victim faced persistent harassment from members of the community. After Mr. Weberman was arrested in 2011, hundreds of Hasidic men held a fund-raiser for his defense and hung posters accusing the girl of libel. Four Satmar men were charged with trying to buy the silence of the victim and Mr. Deutsch, who was then her boyfriend, for $500,000.
Mr. Deutsch said that he and his wife had moved out of Williamsburg after getting married to “stay away from the community.”
To Mr. Deutsch, the question of whether Mr. Weberman’s sentence was too harsh is irrelevant. He worries that if released, Mr. Weberman will be welcomed as a hero.
“Every child molester should be made an example of,” Mr. Deutsch said.
Santul Nerkar is a Times reporter covering federal courts in Brooklyn.
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