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Capturing the Friedmans
Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans
Capturing the Friedmans opened in the UK in April 2004. In March, the film's director Andrew Jarecki, joined The Script Factory for a preview of the film followed by a conversation about truth.
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CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS
Followed by the Script Factory Masterclass with Andrew Jarecki
in conversation with The Script Factory Co-Director Briony Hanson.
The Screen on the Hill. March 25, 2004.
BRIONY HANSON (chair)
Can you talk a little bit about how this project got started?
ANDREW JARECKI (DIRECTOR)
Well, I wasn’t making Capturing the Friedmans at all, I thought I was making a film about a famous clown in New York [David]. And I remember showing one of the interviews to the screen editor in New York who was helping with the original film, and I said what do you make of this guy? She watched it and said I keep asking myself, what makes this clown so angry? I think that was a guiding principal – trying to understand David’s anger. One of the ways I tried to understand that was to go and try to find out why he was so angry with his mother – I felt that that would be a key to what was going on in his life that he wasn’t telling me. I went to visit Elaine after a lot of back and forth with David. I found out that David had been on Candid Camera – and American television show, I guess you have it here too – I found that so ironic that David was on Candid Camera - incredible. Anyway, he was on this show when he was about four years old, and the Friedmans are a kind of Vaudevillian troupe in their own way. So, it seemed to me that that may be an interesting thing to see, so I got hold of this Candid Camera episode. David had been saying to me all along that you can’t talk to my mother – my mother is crazy, she will tell you crazy stories, so I was intrigued and wanted to meet Elaine more than ever. Then one day, after telling me I couldn’t speak to her, he called me out of the blue and said, you know, I want to get a copy of that Candid Camera episode, and you want to talk to my mother, so if you could use your filmmaker magic to get a copy of the Candid Camera episode that I was on, then I’ll let you talk to my mother. So, it was one of the weird bartering process that we went through and we’d get David to the point where even the story would come out. Then I visited Elaine who was living in Long Island in a little, tiny house – she had moved out of the house after she and Arnold had split up, and Arnold had passed away – she was living with her new husband, Peter, in this tiny house. I went in the house, and started to interview her in the front room, and she stopped, and said, you know, there’s another room, we should go to this other room. So, we brought everything down and we set up again – it took another hour and a half – and it was the dining room. We started there, and she said you know, I’m not comfortable here either, let’s move again. So we moved into this little office at the back of the house, and she sat me down in front of this desk where there was a writing tablet on the desk. She said why don’t you sit here for a little while, and I’ll come back. Everything on the desk was facing her except for this one pad that was facing me so I saw this letter that was written on the pad – so I read it. I thought it was to me. Later she said, no that was to the editor. But the story was a total secret – she wasn’t writing anything to the editor – but that’s Elaine. So, it said – a person of faith, a deeply religious person, I was always brought up in the Jewish faith were truth and justice were the most important things. Truth and justice was never a part of this case. This was the first time I’d heard this word “case”, in relation to David or anything else so on my way back to the city I called the associate producer in New York and said to her go on the computer and put in “Friedmans”, She called me about twenty minutes later and said you’d better pull over, I’ve got something to read you.
So, she read me the story, which is the most salacious possible version of what you just saw, but a very one-sided version of it – a very disturbing story. I went back to David and said, I’ve discovered this other story and I understand it might have been something you didn’t want to tell me and I think it’d be a good idea to make a film about it. After a lot of back and forth, he said I think I should tell you that if you’re even considering re-focusing your film on this other story – the story of my family – then I guess I should tell you that in addition to the twenty five hours of home movies that my father took, the 8mm home movies, many of which are in the film, there’s actually another box of home videos with another twenty five hours that I started shooting after the police showed up at my house. That was a major revelation. But the whole process, to answer your question, was like that. Starting out with one thing, finding it be another thing, working with David and trying to get him to be comfortable with the idea of sharing the story with me, going to Elaine and back and forth with her wanting to tell me, but not being allowed to tell me because David had sworn her off telling me. It was a very organic, bubbling up process of a very ancient story.
BRIONY HANSON (CHAIR)
Did that mean that any of the others got involved – Jesse, why did he talk to you?
AJ
I asked Jesse later, because when I went to visit David after I learnt this, he said before I talk to you about any of this I want you to visit Jesse because it’s really more his story than my story, and you need to understand it from him. So I went to see Jesse at Danna Morro which is that prison facility – a kind of mediaeval facility, it’s very scary there - and he was an incredibly bright, complicated, articulate young guy, in some ways the least likely person you’d have in your mind associated with this kind of a crime. He just wasn’t an obvious ex-convict, or convict at the time. Later I said when I first visited you, you were immediately ready to tell me the story, why did you trust me when you first met me to tell me about this incredibly personal thing. And he said at that point it wasn’t about trusting you at all – it was just that things couldn’t get any worse for me. So everyone had their own reason and their own place in the timeline.
BH
Do you think that when you started to make the clown film with David, did he know that he was going to talk about this stuff, did he think you were going to discover it?
AJ
Some people would say that if you have a secret story and you don’t want someone to make a film about it then when a filmmaker knocks on your door and says I’d like to make a film about your life, that’d be a good time to say “no”. But David would say, well I wanted to make a film about my career about a clown, and I thought that might be and original device and not knowing how persistent you turned out to be – but now we know each other so well, and it’s been so long, the story has been something that David absolutely had to tell at some point in his life. He was living in fear that this story was going to come out as page six gossip item, and that his career was going to be obliterated by some very casual mention of this very sensitive thing. I felt and he concluded that it would be a better thing in a balanced and methodical, and careful way, and take the banding off all at once instead of some agony that he was in already.
BH
I’m sure there are lots of questions about truth and honesty, but let me just ask you one which is about did your own interpretation of the truth change as you picked up bits and pieces of the story – how did that change the way you structured the film? Presumably, with the roller coaster of believing somebody, then you don’t, then you believe them again, is that the experience that you had when you were making the film?
AJ
I think it has a certain theatrical element to it because I was discovering the story in these little bits. I would talk to somebody and he’d be convinced that I’d figured it out and then I’d go and talk to somebody else who seemed equally rational, and now I’d have a totally other story, and then it’d happen a third time. So the film was a progression of unreliable narrators. I felt that to just blurt it out at the end of a bunch of investigative – this are the five or six key facts that I learnt – I was missing a huge element for the audience which is, if you don’t feel like you’re expectations have been subverted then not only you don’t have the experience that I had, but you don’t learn to mistrust yourself while you’re watching the film. I think it’s very important when you’re watching the film, I’m not sure if everybody had this feeling, that there is this feeling that you’re looking at an eye chart and you’re saying A E F J and finally the optician puts in the right lens, and you realise you’re initial perception was completely wrong. You feel a little silly in the doctor’s chair, while imagine that people’s lives are at stake and the issues are incredibly important. It seemed to be important that the audience had some of the same experience that I had of having a pretty good beat on things and then seeing how incredibly wrong our initial perceptions could have potentially have been. So to have structured the film so it gave a certain amount of narration as you went – it’s also a very complex story. It’s even more complex than is in the film because of course there are going to be elements that are going to be even longer than I described. So certain things in the film have to be narrated. For example there are two cases against Arnold – there were Federal pornography charges, and then there were State child sex abuse investigation – and that’s distinction without a difference from the audience point of view unless you’re a lawyer, it’s just too much to try to figure out those two things. So certain of those things had to be streamlined, but in terms of the revelatory nature of the story, I didn’t think we could streamline that. You had to go through those steps yourself or I felt that was important.
AUDIENCE MEMBER
I think that it’s just frightening; I never would have thought that people’s lives could be ruined with no physical evidence at all. So CSI’s reaction to this case: was David’s career as a children’s clown ruined or harmed by this film?
AJ
David’s career has not been ruined by this film. It hasn’t been helped by this film, but he went into this process with his eyes open. We talked about that a great deal. He felt a certain obligation to his brother; his brother wanted the film to be made. I think he felt that even though he know that I wasn’t going to make a propaganda piece for the family, he also knew that I wasn’t going to show him any of the material until the film was finished, he still felt that I was a very reasonable person, and that I would probably make a compassionate effort to show both sides of the story. And the story had been shown in such a singular way before that, that I think anything that gave a nod to the family’s perspective was going to be a big improvement for them. But he grappled with that issue all the time. We had a kind of a love/hate relationship and there were days when he calls me up in a great mood and other days when he says that somebody just cancelled the show because he saw the movie or something. It’s a complicated relationship.
BH
What’s been the effect on the others? How have their lives changed because of the film because it’s caused a huge stir?
AJ
When Jesse Friedman got out of jail, he’s a sex offender, and in the States that’s treated in a special way. Among other things you have to go back in front of the original sentencing judge to get your classification under what we call Megan’s Law, which is a special law for sex offenders, so Judge Berklen made him a Level 3, which is the worst kind of sex offender called a violent sexual predator. So Jesse got out of prison and he had to wear an electronic monitoring device around his ankle, and he’s got very strict curfews and he cant live in a building where there are children, so he’s had a tough time adapting to that life even out of prison. And his parole officer is always threatening that he’s going to send him back to jail, which could happen at any time. On the other hand, he’s walking down the street in Manhattan and he’s recognised instantly. So the film penetrated in an unusual way. For example it’s the first film ever that’s opened in two cities at the same time, and the two cities being New York and Great Neck, Long Island. In Great Neck it played at the Squire which is like the hometown cinema, and it played all summer long and there were 10,000 admissions for the film at the Squire. The total adult population of Great Neck is 20,000. So fifty per cent of the population of his hometown saw the film. Or maybe the judge saw it 10,000 times. So he’s got a whole different identity now. And he doesn’t know what to make of that. When the judge came out recently in the press and said that Jesse Friedman was being paraded like a celebrity, well, that’s false. He’s done almost no press in the States, he stays out of the papers, because it can only bring on the wrath of the parole officers. So whether you found him guilty or innocent, he’s up against a series of restrictions that are quite similar to the ones in prison. So it’s a weird life. But I think he’s happy that he has a story to tell that’s different than I’m another violent sexual predator, I cant come over to your house because you have children: that’s true. But at least he’s different in a way. I think he feels that that’s a benefit to him.
AM
Have any of the victims changed their story since the movie, and is Jesse using any of his money to try to look into that?
AJ
There’s been a mix of response from the alleged victims at various levels in the case. Five of the ex-computer students who are in the film, one of them says that the police put a lot of pressure on me, another one says I told them something that wasn’t true. Those people, sometimes I go along with their stories, but I guess it’s true. So, it’s really strange to me that I don’t remember it. I think it’s quite itself recantation. There’s been a lot of people who have been students in the computer class, who were in class with the people who became complainants in the case, who have clear recollections, in their view, of the computer classes, and say they saw nothing happened in the computer classes. So, that whole issue of what happened in the computer class is very complicated. Also, the judge was very offended by the film; in general people thought the film quite balanced, the judge felt the film was horribly biased because she comes off seeming prejudiced. I didn’t create that situation: she says in the film, there was never a doubt in my mind as to their guilt. I don’t think as a retired judge, she perceived how shocking that was for the audience to see. I think she felt that the film would be a celebration of the police work in the case. But, I didn’t say to her that I was going to make a positive or negative film. I didn’t set out to harm her in any way. But she’s been beating the bush to try to get the complainants to come forward, which is very unusual for a judge to do. I talked to a reporter a few weeks ago, who had just gotten off the phone to the judge, and it was two o’clock in the morning New York time, and she called me (I don’t usually take calls from reporters at two o’clock in the morning) but the judge had called here at two in the morning New York time. So the judge was really on the rampage. What she’s done is got one of the original victims to say the film was unfair to us because it’s too pro-Friedman. Well the film could’ve been a lot more pro-Friedman. They say that we could have done more to say that they were really railroaded here. There’s always going to be that mix of response when there’s going to be an emotional subject, I think.
AM
Last year I was a juror on a child sex case, and it was the most disturbing experience of my life, and I don’t think I’ll ever really recover from it to be quite honest. Do you feel, having met the people, that you know the truth?
AJ
I don’t think it’s possible to know exactly the truth. Certainly, having not been there, I thought it wasn’t responsible to position myself as if I was the primary source. I think the film has to convey all the positions, and the audience have to have their own feelings about it. I don’t think the audience has to reach a conclusion about it either. One thing I would say is that I’ve reached the conclusion that multiple things can be true. It’s possible here that there was a paedophile, Arnold Friedman, who not only has a thought crime, but takes action and is active in his pursuit of kids, and yet he may not have committed these crimes. Then it’s also possible that there’s a witch-hunt, that there’s also hysteria. So that’s what’s disturbing, particularly if you’re a juror, you’re being asked to draw a very hard line. What was disturbing about this case is that the system didn’t create an opportunity for the truth to be illustrated because, among other things, the police work was so lousy, and in addition, you have a judge who does for first time in the history of Nasser county, she allows cameras in the courtroom. I don’t know exactly what it’s like to be a judge, but I can imagine none of us would test out the question of whether it’s good to have cameras in the courtroom, to pick a case where it seems that someone is running for election – which was the case – she was running for election. We’re denied the ability to really understand. Whether things happened in the computer class, my sense is that Jesse didn’t have a chance to be heard. I don’t think he had a real chance to go to trial. It was too much in terms of the threats from the judge. The judge made it very clear she was going to give consecutive sentencing, so Elaine was pushing very hard for him to not go to trial. The key factor was that the judge suggested she would give him fifty years.
AM
Does the money that gets made from the film get to be split between you and the Friedmans?
AJ
I have to say that this film will probably never make money. It was a hit in the US. So I didn’t make a deal with the Friedmans to give them money, because I thought that was totally compromised, and I didn’t go into the film trying to exonerate anybody either. In the end the film isn’t an advocacy piece for a number of reasons. The film as done a great deal to raise the question that’s most important for Jesse, which was whether he was fairly prosecuted. Leaving aside the guilt or innocence question, or the Arnold question, the prosecution in this case was so poorly executed that that by itself gave him an opportunity that he didn’t otherwise have. He’s filed a thing called a four forty motion trying to get his conviction re-examined. He’s also filed a motion trying to get move out of Nasser County which was just refused by the court in Nasser County. So he’s back in Nasser County with that judge, and the detective’s husband is a sitting judge on the same court where his case is being heard. He doesn’t have a whole lot of opportunity in Nasser County. Maybe he’ll have a chance if he waits a number or years to get out of Nasser County, but that will be very expensive and difficult for him.
AM
I was also a juror at a trial last year, and it was very disturbing. I don’t know whether I could buy what you say about having multiple truths. It was something that happened or didn’t happen, and obviously people’s perceptions might vary, or they might be telling truths or untruths, or there might be witch hunts, but this film portrays something that is very worrying: there is a certain truth, and there is somebody who has been convicted of something they may not have done, or maybe he did do it, but it’s not there just for our intellectual pleasure or for us to determine whether he did it. There are a lot of miscarriages of justice, and people are treated badly by the legal system. You’ve said that Jesse Friedman is a convicted paedophile number three and maybe he is a paedophile, but I didn’t get the sense that we were getting the truth from him at all.
AJ
I don’t think Jesse Friedman is a paedophile. A paedophile is someone who enjoys having sex with children, or fantasises about it at least. I don’t think that that is Jesse Friedman. But that is not exactly what he was convicted of. He was convicted of committing these acts but not based on his own desire. I don’t think that anybody ever got to that issue. It’s easy to believe that someone who has a collection of child pornography and has spent his life in and around difficult situations with kids that he’s portrayed sometimes like Arnold who confesses to having contact with children. Here you have a 55 year old guy who’s spent his entire life grappling with that issue, and then you have an 18 year old kid who’s had no history of any of that kind of thinking, or it’s never come out in any other context. You have a situation where he’s being accused of a crime that the seed of which came from desires that his father had got. If you’re the prosecution you say that it doesn’t matter if he’s a paedophile or not in terms of his own desires, it matters that he got into this situation, if he committed any of these crimes, then he needs to go jail. I don’t think of the film as a curiosity or a game: the fact that people are interested in discussing these questions can have a resonance that goes far beyond just this case. These justice issues are important, but equally important is questioning our first impressions of things. What the film did for me was to make me wonder about how television news increasingly decreases in length. – we even have a channel called Headline News – how much truth can you really get out of that kind of situation. In a world were the bad guys are not always so clearly drawn, maybe there aren’t so many bad guys. Maybe there are just a lot of people in complicated situations, some of whom end up doing bad things some of whom don’t.
BH
It’s interesting when you chose to interject, and when you chose to step back. There were things that you corrected or questioned – like the guy who said that there was activity going on in the main room, and you said but I thought that you said that there was none. Then, on the other side there was the cop who said that there was piles of pornography everywhere, and you were shown photography were there clearly were no piles of pornography. It was interesting when you chose when to put yourself into that story.
AJ
It has to do with a clarification than anything else. When it gets to be propaganda, and I say “hold on a second, Detective Golosso, I’m going to show you some photographs!”, then the audience goes, I’ve got the picture, you’re leading me down a path, so you’re obviously trying to flog me this point of view. On the other hand, that boy sitting on the couch, he’s so hard to understand in certain ways. His way of speaking is complicated, the fact that he put himself in that posture was unusual, we were looking at his body language, he’s a very unusual interviewee. I felt like he was telling me something that was a contradiction from a much earlier statement, and I had to put a finer point on that one. Other people have said, when that women says there were foot high piles of pornography in plain view all around the house, and it’s plain that’s not true, how come you didn’t show the photographs and say, what do you make of these. There, I would say that’s something the audience has made that trip already. I find the audience are quite smart and so in issues of intuitive responses to false statements, that’s one that jumps right out. And that’s disturbing. When I first met that detective Golossa, she said the thing I worry about all the time when you’re charging someone with this kind of crime is ruin their lives, so you want to be sure. When I first heard that I thought, finally I’ve got someone here who’s rational and understands the power she wields in this situation, so she’s going to be a reliable source of some kind. Then fifteen minutes later in the film, she totally impeaches herself by telling a story that’s clearly not true. Interestingly, I believe that she thinks it’s true. She doesn’t look at those photographs, and doesn’t focus on the fact it was her detectives who wrote out the search warrant inventory that identifies what she is saying is false. She’s told the story at so many cocktail parties, at some point it becomes the story. It stops being an account. She was probably shocked when she saw the film and her reaction was to say it wasn’t true. Somebody asked her in the audience when she came – we had a crazy premier of the film at one point we got a phone call from that fella Joe, the prosecutor with the grey hair, and my assistant said, can I help you? And he said I’m just calling to RSVP to your screening on Friday, and she said OK, will it be you and Mrs Oldorado? He said, no, no: we’re all coming; me, the judge, Detective Olossa, all the detectives that interviewed the kids, all the lawyers, everyone’s wives and husbands. We’re pretty much going to fill the place. So Jennifer came to my office and she said: isn’t that the same night that the Friedmans are going to be there? I said yes. So we had this insane altercation after the film, where everybody was in the room.
BH
Was there a film of that?
AJ
Of course there’s a film of that. If you’ve learnt anything from the Friedmans, is you know where to keep the camera. So that’ll be on the DVD. But you can’t miss it, its just incredible.
AM
You talked about the five computer students, is there one who said that things happened in the computer room who is not questioned in the film? There is one who we learn has undergone hypnosis, and one who makes it clear that he was into saying it by the police, and another who said unequivocally that these things did not happen. Is there anyone who said unequivocally that these things did happen who we can question?
AJ
I eventually spoke to six of the original fourteen complainants, and the only other person that ever said to me that he had a personal recollection of having been harmed by Jesse Friedman was that boy that was lying down. So there wasn’t anybody else in the film or that I spoke to that had that recollection. The answer to your question is that there is nobody else in the film that recalls having been abused. I felt that everything that was substantive, or relevant: I tried to represent every perspective in the film. The judge and a couple of others have criticised the film by saying that it makes it seem like the children in this case were hypnotised. My response is that I don’t think the film does anything of the kind. The only person in the film that says they were hypnotised is one of the child victims himself. That’s not an editorial remark by the filmmakers. It made people very upset because that’s a classic bad technique. So the fact that one of their own home teen witnesses recalled being hypnotised is disturbing. I’m not sure that the judge knew that before she saw the film. You’re not to assume that they’re unbelievable witnesses, you’re to assume that the people I spoke to that was the only boy that gave me that account. There are many other people out there who have excellent accounts who chose not to speak to me. But I certainly made a very thorough effort to get in touch with everybody. So we put as much of that in the film as we could.
AM
There was a huge hypnotised word on the screen for quite a while.
AJ
That illustrates my point of the journalist who describes that hypnosis as described by the computer student, is considered a technique that can lead to false memories.
AM
As a filmmaker, you’re saying that a lot of people were saying differing things. So you would think that one minute you’ve got it, then the next minute you haven’t got it. Were you taking quite a lot of notes throughout the whole process about how you thought the film was going to end up. Because once you thought you had all the bits together at the end, you must have thought, Christ, how am I going to put this together?
AJ
I took notes. I’m very extensive about my preparation for the interviews. I’ll interview somebody and I’ll have twenty pages of typewritten questions. Then I would let them be on film. At the end we would watch the interviews and use the material for the interviews. So I wouldn’t also write down what the people were saying unless it was something I thought I would forget.
AM
You’re talking about the Friedmans, but Seth refused to be interviewed in the film, and I just wondered if there were any ethical issues involved in that, and whether he agreed for you to use his image but not to record his voice.
AJ
He had agreed for us to use his image in the home movies, then he decided that he didn’t want to be in the film in any pro-active way – he didn’t want to be interviewed. He in general, wasn’t much in the home movies either, he’s generally outside the frame. Unlike Jesse or David, he’s not the one making the joke, or wanting to be the centre of attention. I spoke to David and Jesse, I never spoke to Seth. I conveyed my desire to have Seth in the film many times. I emailed him and I wrote him a letter. He said that the last time the family was in the public eye it didn’t work out very well, and he didn’t feel any need to – there are people who have said to me, he’s the only Friedman that doesn’t want to have these issues raised again. He’s got a daughter, and he didn’t want to expose her.
AM
What about the effect on the son? He is in the film.
AJ
What negative impact do I think it’ll have on his mom?
AM
I wondered if you worry about the impact?
AJ
I worried about so many things. I worried about the impact on these lives. I thought about the ethical issues involved about making a film about David, who at the time didn’t want a film to be made about him. I concluded that I would continue to make the film, but I wouldn’t release the film unless I got additional permission from David, which I then did. So that even though I was entitled to make the film about whatever I wanted, and I had David’s permission for the original film, and it was a blanket release which say what releases say, like I can make any film I want, I also felt that I had a moral obligation to go back to David and give him another shot to say I don’t want you to release this film. There was not studio, so I didn’t have to release it by a certain date, so I was happy to sit on the film if was going to take a long time. For Seth, you have to look at it as a hierarchy of need. I went to visit a guy who’s an ethicist at Harvard, a guy called Robert Coles, who’s the James Agey Professor of Social Ethics, and also a child psychology expert in America, and also a documentary expert, because he’s written a great book called Documentaries. And he said to me your constituent is no longer David, and in fact there’s a lot of people her who need the film to be made in some way. Elaine, Howard and Jesse for example. So you need to start to balance these things. So we certainly minimised Seth in the film. We don’t want to use any current images of Seth. So, I do worry about those things all the time.
AM
I found the film profoundly moving, and I think because you humanised all the Friedmans. I found myself caring what happened to each one of them. What came through, is that because you told their story and actually what happened to them, you have a sense of how crazy prison is and how is a more appropriate solution, and I wondered whether the issue of treatment has been put on the agenda as a result of the film.
AJ
How many people in the audience felt that Jesse going to jail at the end of this process was unfair? And a fair outcome? That’s different from what you get in the States, I think. There is this issue in the States of punishment and plea-bargaining, it’s a different system. We show the film in Canada and he never could have got fifty years. The maximum is twenty-five years, even for capital murder – I said not if you go twenty-five miles south of where we are right now. It goes straight up to fifty years. It has to do with people’s feelings about the nature of crimes and all that stuff. In general I think prison is a pretty lousy place to put people anyway… the money or desire to do the real work. I don’t think that’s going to change very much. It’ll destroy the economies of various countries. To change completely the way that they handle people that don’t end up fitting into society either by accident or on purpose.
AM
Since the film has come out, has there been any reporting of children who have been abused in similar circumstances, and of them coming forward either many years, or any children that have been groomed by the Friedmans, not in the computer classes, but in other circumstances, or children having been passed on to other paedophiles, as they very often do?
AJ
I’m not sure I agree with a few of those thoughts. I don’t know that paedophiles are passing children onto other paedophiles. I’ve heard that people who are child abusers are in general abused by their own parents: I’m not sure that’s statistically accurate either. There haven’t been any reports of people who have had previous contact with the Friedmans other than people who were in the computer classes have come forward as a result of the film or in any other context.
AM
Or people who have had no contact with the Friedmans who saw the film and that generated their idea to tell someone about it?
AJ
I’m not aware of anyone that saw the film and reported any other kind of child abuse.