NY Times [...] Five years ago, Mr. Kellner, a 52-year-old Hasidic Jew, chose to step off a cultural cliff. He spoke out about the sexual abuse of his 16-year-old son by a prominent Hasidic cantor. And he helped a police detective ferret out other victims of this cantor, whose connections ran to the most powerful reaches of the Satmar community.
Retribution became daily fare for Mr. Kellner. His rabbi denounced him as a traitor. Yeshivas locked out his sons. He pawned his silverware.
Then the former Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, who had proved a most considerate ally of Hasidic leaders, drove a stake into Mr. Kellner’s heart. After gaining a conviction of the cantor, Baruch Lebovits, Brooklyn prosecutors turned around and indicted Mr. Kellner. Basing their case on the questionable testimony of a prominent Satmar supporter of the cantor, they accused Mr. Kellner of trying to shake down Mr. Lebovits.
Mr. Kellner faced decades in prison. He posted bail, only to watch as Mr. Lebovits’s lawyers used his indictment and other technicalities to persuade a state appeals court to overturn the cantor’s conviction.
“My father was an Auschwitz survivor; right away he got sick,” Mr. Kellner recalls. “Within six months, he died. Then my mother had a devastating stroke.”
He pauses, like a sprinter catching his breath. “How do I tell my daddy, ‘I was found not guilty, it was just a libel, just bad people’?” he said. “The government needs to understand it did a pretty good job of killing me.”[...]
Still, an image that remains from Friday was that of a Hasidic father standing in court, rocking slightly, as an assistant district attorney described wildly inconsistent statements and witnesses who lacked any shred of credibility.
The people, the prosecutor said at last, “do not have a credible case.”[...]
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