Hartford —
Speaking publicly for the first time about sexual abuse allegations
that have ripped apart the Orthodox Jewish community he built in New
Haven, Rabbi Daniel Greer denied under oath ever having counseled a
teenaged yeshiva student named Eliyahu Mirlis about spiritual matters.
Then,
under further questioning, Greer refused to say whether he took Mirlis
to motels overnight, showed him porn, plied him with alcohol, molested
him in the bedroom where he sleeps with his wife and fondled him at
several other rental properties he controls throughout the Edgewood
neighborhood.
“Did you force Eli Mirlis to have sex with you when
he was a child?” Antonio Ponvert, Mirlis’s attorney, questioned after
Greer took the stand here Thursday in a civil lawsuit here in U.S.
District Court.
“I advise Mr. Greer to invoke his privilege” —
the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination — David Grudberg,
one of the rabbi’s three defense attorneys, interrupted.
“I invoke the right to privilege,” Greer said. Ponvert moved on to the next allegation.
That
back-and-forth — an accusation of sexual assault and silence from the
alleged perpetrator — characterized a significant portion of the
Thursday testimony in Mirlis’s civil suit. (Greer explicitly denied only
one allegation: having sex with Mirlis on a parcel of land in Hamden.)
The federal suit seeks damages from Greer, who revived a struggling
portion of the Edgewood neighborhood and is known statewide and
nationally for advocacy on social issues; Yeshiva of New Haven and
several Greer-controlled housing not-for-profits for allegedly allowing
Mirlis to endure sexual abuse for three years as a boarding student.
In
a packed, five-hour day, jurors heard from three witnesses. Greer drew
the contours of his relationship with Mirlis — that is, when he chose
to answer. Jurors watched the deposition of Aviad Hack, the yeshiva’s
assistant dean who claimed Greer also sexually abused him. (The
Independent wrote about the deposition at length in this story;
jurors watched a video of that depisition, because Hack dodged a
process server on four occasions across two states.) And finally, the
plaintiff’s wife, Shira Mirlis, recounted how the couple fought over why
Greer continued to be involved in Mirlis’s adult life, despite alleged
childhood abuse.
Adverse Inferences
Christopher Peak Photo
Antonio Ponvert outside court.
Absent a confession, Greer’s pleading the Fifth was almost exactly what
Ponvert, of the firm Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder, expected to hear. In
his opening statement, the lawyer readied the jury for Greer’s
non-answers.
“He will take the Fifth Amendment about every
substantive question. He will not deny anything, but he will not answer
either. He will not deny that he abused Eli. He will not deny that he
brought him to hotels and his bedroom, that he fondled him and raped
him,” Ponvert said, speaking so faintly it was difficult to hear at
times from behind the bar. “On the one hand, you’ll hear direct
testimony from Eli and Aviad Hack about what this man did to them. On
the other side, you will hear silence, evasion and a refusal to
testify.”
Minutes into the cross-examination, that’s exactly what
happened. Ponvert explicitly asked Greer if he had assaulted Mirlis, and
he invoked his right to not answer.
Judge Micheal P. Shea halted
the proceedings to clarify what had happened. Each time the Fifth
Amendment shielded Greer from answering, he explained, jurors “may, but
are not required to, infer from such a refusal that the answers would
have been adverse to the witness’s interests and any party’s interests.”
Ponvert appeared unprepared for just how often Greer chose to keep mum.
Ponvert: “Did you teach them religious and secular studies?” Greer: “I invoke my privilege.” Ponvert: “You’re really saying you take the Fifth when saying whether you taught religious or secular studies?” Greer: “Yes.”
Ponvert
produced a copy of Mirlis’s report cards from his four years at the
yeshiva and handed them to the witness. Peering through his glasses,
Greer flipped through each page, hitting the microphone with the papers. Ponvert: “It’s true, is it not, rabbi, that you taught ethics and theology?” Greer: “I invoke my privilege.”
Throughout
his hours on the stand, Greer attempted to minimize his role in the
yeshiva he created. He claimed his title of dean was really just an
honorific, that the school was actually run by his assistant Hack.
Without
resorting to the Fifth Amendment, Greer did deny speaking to Mirlis
about faith or his family. The rabbi said the only conversations he had
with the teenage student were to encourage him to improve his grades, to
take the requisite standardized tests and get into a good college.
“Your
statement to the jury is that never on one occasion did you have one
conversation about anything personal to his life, other than his
education?” Ponvert asked.
“Not while he was in school,” Greer answered.
How Bad Can It Be?
Defense attorneys David Grudberg, William Ward and Amanda Nugent.
Given the damaging inferences jurors may draw from Greer’s invocation
of the Fifth Amendment, the defense has already ceded much ground.
That’s
partly because the standards for how jurors will weigh evidence when
testimony concludes next week differ from criminal trials. “Those of you
who have sat on a jury in a criminal case or watched one on television
may have heard of ‘proof beyond a reasonable doubt.’ That does not apply
to a civil case,” Shea instructed jurors. “The burden is different:
It’s called proof by a preponderance of the evidence.” Simply put, are
the allegations more likely to have happened than not?
Picture a
scale, Shea continued. Stack up all the credible, relevant and
supportive evidence for each side. If the scales are equal and it’s
truly unclear who’s right, Greer gets off. But if the scale tips, even
in the slightest, toward proof of sexual abuse, Mirlis has met his
burden.
Without a direct denial from Greer, the defense attorneys
can concede sexual abuse occurred but question whether it was
emotionally distressing enough to be worthy of damages.
Grudberg
hinted at this strategy in his opening statements, pointing out that
Mirlis had brought legal action nearly 15 years after the abuse first
occurred. He questioned whether Mirlis was suffering, painting him as
well-adjusted with a “very active, thriving career” as a nursing home
administrator.
“I think the statement I heard in the opening was
that Mr. Mirlis continued for a number of years before the full impact
became known to known to him,” Grudberg said. “You will learn that
[Mirlis] did not seek any treatment of any kind for his claimed abuse
until after he had retained counsel and entered as a plaintiff. Except
marriage counseling, the only treatment he ever got was after a lawyer
got involved.”
Throughout the day, the defense team repeatedly
called attention to the fact that Mirlis invited Greer to play a key
role at several milestones in his adult life: delivering an elegy at his
father’s memorial service, acting as a witness to the signing of a
marriage contract and holding his firstborn son during a circumcision
ceremony.
Grudberg added that any psychological issues Mirlis
displayed could be attributed to a difficult upbringing, long before
being dropped off at the yeshiva, that included frequent interaction
with New Jersey’s child welfare department.
“You will have to
consider all of that in deciding what — if something did happen here, if
you get to the point where something did happen — what has been the
impact on his life?” Grudberg closed.
The strategy’s outcome will likely depend on how jurors perceive Mirlis’s behavior when he takes the stand on Monday afternoon.
Greer’s
lawyers previously stated in a motion that the rabbi planned to invoke
his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination, in part because
he has “discussed his allegations with the police authorities” and
therefore “may be the subject of an ongoing police investigation.”
However, law-enforcement officials familiar with those discussions told
the Independent that those discussions took place last year and New
Haven police decided not to pursue an investigation.
Beginning in
the 1980s, Rabbi Greer oversaw the revival of the neighborhood around
his yeshiva at the corner of Norton and Elm streets, renovating
neglected historic homes.
Over the years, Greer has also crusaded
against gay rights in Connecticut, at times played an active role in
politics and government, and advocated for keeping nuisance businesses
out of the Whalley Avenue commercial corridor. He and his family earned
national attention for exposing johns who patronized street prostitutes
in the neighborhood, for filing suit against Yale University over a
requirement that students live in coed dorms, and then in 2007 for
launching an armed neighborhood “defense” patrol and then calling in the Guardian Angels for assistance to combat crime. In the 1970s, Greer also led a successful campaign to force the United States to pressure the Soviet Union into allowing Jewish “refuseniks” to emigrate here and start new, freer lives.
