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| Alleged monster Weberman |
Article by Andrea Peyser of the New York Post, Friday edition
This is not kosher.
Nechemya Weberman lumbered into a Brooklyn courtroom yesterday as big as a rabid bear in an oversized black coat and matching yarmulke, side curls tucked behind his ears.
The slimy bastard, 54, is charged with repeatedly and monstrously sexually assaulting a young girl he controlled by counseling the child in the office of his Brooklyn home deep inside the Orthodox Satmar religion, a cult-like sect more secretive than Scientology.
It’s a place where laws governing girls’ dumpy dress code are enforced by the masked men of the “modesty police’’ — a terrorist group that might well be called the Jewish Taliban.
He played your jolly old Yiddish uncle on the witness stand. With an arrogant smile, he described running a kind of Hasidic shelter for wayward girls under his own roof, doling out beds to at least three young ladies — including his niece — who had refused to cover themselves like mummies, just like Mom.
All were welcome, the less clad the better.
Weberman was having a high time until prosecutor Kevin O’Donnell asked him flat-out, “You’re a well- respected man. In the Satmar community, [the accuser] is considered a piece of dirt?’’
With a smirk I’d like to rip off his fat face, Weberman demolished his alleged victim without as much as a forbidden kiss.
“There are people who are better than her, right,’’ he said.
Later, he explained that this child was “fresh’’ and “immodest’’ unlike other girls. “That’s why these were girls who were better than her.’’
What would Moses think?
The accuser, who turned 18 yesterday, had the grave misfortune of loving and revering this human piece of filth.
And her parents paid for it.
Weberman agreed on cross-examination that he took his accuser to upstate Monsey, charging $150 an hour. It was a 14-hour trip but he charged only $1,500. What a guy!
When they got home at midnight, the girl’s mother freaked out, yelling that they’d violated the rules of yichud that prohibit men and women from being together alone in the same room, or even a car.
Weberman was sore at the mom’s tantrum, and threatened to stop counseling the daughter.
The mother should have said fine. Instead, she wrote Weberman an apology note. His power over these people was frighteningly vast.
I’m ashamed to be of the same faith as this evil, malicious creep. But then, it seems that fanatics have taken full control of the Satmars, making all of them look to outsiders like incurable freaks.
It also didn’t help that in the morning court session, two Hasidic hotties came out to praise Weberman as the greatest thing since matzoh brei.
One of them, Baila Gluck, 23, took the witness stand — in Weberman’s defense! — and told about the three years she spent as a teen living in a fold-up bed in Weberman’s home office.
“He was Hasidic, but he was different,’’ she said approvingly.
Before she was a live-in, Gluck got a visit from Vaad Ha’Tznius, the Gestapo-like fashion police, rifling through her clothes and warning her to keep in line, or else. They took her cellphone.
After that, the girl ran away, couch-surfing and sleeping in cars, until Weberman took her in.
Weberman, who is not licensed as a therapist, for years took in counseling clients recommended by Vaad Ha’Tznius idiots. He took on all the girls.
Another man took the boys, the prosecutor suggested.
But the Satmars continue to love him. As a freelance charlatan, Weberman is not bound by confidentiality rules, and can tell anyone anything that happened in a therapy session without fear of legal recourse, it came out in court.
He also is not obliged to tell authorities about sexual abuse within the community, which is why the police-averse Satmars use him to keep kids in line.
UPDATED THURSDAY 10:31PM
He left himself wide open.
A Hasdic leader, on trial for allegedly molesting a 12-year-old girl, took the stand in his own defense yesterday — and ended up admitting that he raided his community nonprofit to pay for everything from his kid’s tuition to frilly lingerie.
Leaving himself vulnerable to a barrels-loaded cross-examination by Brooklyn prosecutors, accused child molester Nechemya Weberman denied sexually abusing a Williamsburg girl who had been sent to him for counseling sessions from the age of 12 to 15.
Defense attorney Michael Farkas asked him: “Mr. Weberman, have you ever inappropriately touched [the alleged victim]?”
To which Weberman answered, “Never ever.”
But once prosecutors got a crack at him, rather than hammer away at the sex-abuse allegations, they got the Satmar counselor to admit to a host of financial misdeeds.
“You used this not-for-profit for your own personal gain?” Assistant District Attorney Kevin O’Donnell asked.
“Yes, I did,” Weberman said.
The 54-year-old Weberman, a well-respected member of the Satmar sect, also copped to using money from his nonprofit organization, B’lev V’Nefesh, to pay for his own child’s tuition at the United Talmudical Academy, the very yeshiva that threatened to expel his accuser if she stopped seeing Weberman for counseling.
“So you’re getting a salary and paying your children’s tuition?” asked O’Donnell.
“I did if I needed to,” Weberman replied.
The most salacious details Weberman revealed about the nonprofit, which he claims to use to pay for housing and sabbath dinners for the poor, was that one of the nonprofit’s credit cards was used to buy lingerie.
“Doesn’t the organization buy lingerie?” asked O’Donnell, naming BMG Corset and Lingerie Shop in South Williamsburg, as well as other “unmentionables” stores.
“Maybe some other people in the organization did,” Weberman said.
The trial has provided a rare glimpse into the normally closed-off world of the Brooklyn ultra-Orthodox — and into the sometimes-squabbling sects within.
Besides using the nonprofit as his personal piggy bank, Weberman also used Vaad Ha’Tznius, the so-called modesty committee that enforces the strict dress codes of the Hasidic community, as his referral agency in the past.
“The Vaad Ha’Tznius would have people see you for counseling so you could make money?” O’Donnell asked.
“Yes,” said Weberman, who has 10 children and 18 grandchildren.
When asked if any of his children were no longer Satmar, he said, “No, thank God.”
His other lawyer, George Farkas, called prosecutors’ focus on the nonprofit an attempt “to paint this man as a dirty, money-grubbing Jew.”
Weberman also described his first counseling session with the victim — who turned 18 yesterday.
“She said, ‘Why should I trust you? Why should I talk to you? You look like a Hasidic f--k. You look like my father,’ ” Weberman testified.
The teen said Weberman was the first one who listened to her and she wanted to continue seeing him, he testified.
Earlier in the day, the defense called a woman who lived in Weberman’s office for two years.
Baila Gluck, 23, a pretty brunette who was raised Satmar, testified that she and several other young woman stayed in Weberman’s office at various times.
“Do you recall an occasion when [another girl] walked into the room and you were sitting on his lap and the defendant had an erection?” O’Donnell asked.
“No. That never happened,” Gluck answered.
Weberman was the defense’s last witness. Both sides will sum up today.
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