Teenager Confronts Rabbi at Molestation Sentencing Hearing

Standing in court just a few feet from the man who molested her on an international airplane flight last spring, a teenage girl spoke Thursday of the shame, anger and loneliness that followed the incident.

“I was abused by the man sitting to the right of me,” the 16-year-old Australian said during a sentencing hearing for Yehudah Friedlander in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. “He violated me in the very deepest possible way.”

Friedlander, 44, a New York rabbi, pleaded guilty last fall to federal charges in the case, which shocked the Hasidic community and drew international headlines.

In comments in court and later to the press, the victim’s father said the episode had turned his child from a “a gregarious, outspoken, friendly girl” at the top of her ninth-grade class to a tearful teenager unable to sleep, study or maintain her grades.

Addressing Friedlander, who wore the traditional Hasidic garb of black coat and skullcap, the girl’s father chastised him: “You’re a father of children. Until this gets cleared up in your consciousness, you have no right to be with children of any kind.”

Friedlander, who faces a maximum of two years in prison for sexual abusive contact with a minor, will be sentenced today by Judge J. Spencer Letts.

Speaking on Friedlander’s behalf, Rabbi Efroim Stein of New York urged Letts to return Friedlander to his community where, he said, shame and embarrassment would be far greater punishment than prison.

“There is contrition, there is remorse,” Stein added, saying the nature of the accusation was abhorrent to Friedlander’s community.

Friedlander and Rabbi Israel Grunwald, a leader of a New York-based Hasidic sect, were returning from a visit to the Australian Hasidic community, sitting in the same row with the girl on the flight, when the molestation occurred.

Prosecutors also originally charged Grunwald but later dropped the counts.