{"id":112298,"date":"2026-01-25T23:33:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-25T23:33:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/112298\/"},"modified":"2026-01-25T23:33:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-25T23:33:08","slug":"nyc-da-appears-poised-to-try-to-help-free-infamous-pedophile-critics-claim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/112298\/","title":{"rendered":"NYC DA appears poised to try to help free infamous pedophile, critics claim"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzales\u00a0appears poised<\/a>\u00a0to try to help free a convicted pedophile from the Hasidic community, critics say\u00a0 \u2014 and things got so heated about it at the State of the State address that he and a foe had to be separated.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Activists opposing the upcoming resentencing of disgraced former prominent Hasidic school mental-health counselor Nechemya Weberman said they fear that the DA will ask for a new sentence of time served, effectively freeing the convicted sicko.<\/p>\n

Nechemya Weberman (center, without tie), a former counselor at a Brooklyn yeshiva, was originally sentenced to 103 years in prison for repeatedly sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl Gregory P. Mango<\/p>\n

Hasidic victim-advocates\u00a0claimed that Gonzalez is clearly showing his hand about what he intends to do by posing for pictures with Weberman supporters and icing out the victim so harshly that she was forced to hire her own advocate lawyer.<\/p>\n

Weberman, a former counselor at a Williamsburg Yeshiva, was convicted on 59 counts and\u00a0originally sentenced to 103 years in prison<\/a>\u00a0for repeatedly sexually abusing then-12-year-old Rivky Deutsch for three years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzales has been freezing out the victim and her supporters, activists claim.\u00a0 Paul Martinka<\/p>\n

That triple-digit sentence was later knocked down by state statute to 50 years, and he is now up for resentencing.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s exceedingly rare for a victim to feel so unheard by the prosecution,\u201d said lawyer Sarena Townsend, who worked as a prosecutor in Brooklyn for a decade \u2014 including alongside many of the ADAs who put Weberman behind bars in 2013.<\/p>\n

A source claimed that a meeting between the DA\u2019s office and Deutsch over the resentencing ended with her team \u201cwalking out furious at him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lawyer Sarena Townsend, who worked as a prosecutor in Brooklyn for a decade, said the DA\u2019s handling of the case has been very odd at times. Erik Thomas\/NY Post<\/p>\n

\u201cIn most cases, the victim hopefully feels comforted by the prosecutor to do the right thing,\u201d Townsend said. \u201cIt is definitely rare to hire an attorney for this purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n

Victims\u2019 advocate Asher Lovy \u2014 director of the Orthodox Jewish victims group Za\u2019akah \u2014 said that when he saw Gonzalez after this year\u2019s State of the State event in Albany, he did not hesitate to let his frustration be known.<\/p>\n

\u201cBasically, no one has been able to get a hold of [Gonzalez],\u201d Lovy said of himself and other victims groups furious about the DA\u2019s possible decision to not oppose Weberman\u2019s resentencing.<\/p>\n

Victims advocate Asher Lovy (at podium) angrily confronted the DA at a recent state event. Matthew McDermott<\/p>\n

\u201cI went over to him, and I said to him: \u2018Eric, I\u2019m surprised to see you here. I thought you\u2019d be working overtime to get Weberman out of prison,\u2019 \u201d Lovy recalled.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd he and we were off to the races at that point.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lovy said Gonzalez repeatedly claimed he wasn\u2019t trying to get Weberman out.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou wrote a letter in 2021 to\u00a0Cuomo asking for his commutation<\/a>,\u201d Lovy recalled telling Gonzalez. \u201cYou aren\u2019t taking a position here against anything except the victim.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eventually an unnamed New York City Council member had to separate the two.<\/p>\n

The case was heard in Brooklyn criminal court. Michael Nagle<\/p>\n

While the DA\u2019s office would not confirm the confrontation \u2014 nor Gonzalez\u2019s reputed decision to\u00a0push for time served for the convict \u2014 it did claim to both support Deutsch and a resentencing for Weberman at the same time, stating that the sex criminal\u2019s original 103-year sentence was \u201can extreme outlier\u201d and \u201cmotivated by politics.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe considered these facts and agreed to allow the Court to hear from all parties and make a fair determination that spares the defendant from dying in prison while serving this clearly excessive sentence,\u201d said DA spokesman Oren Yaniv.<\/p>\n

Weberman\u2019s lawyer, Donna Aldea, did not respond to Post messages for comment.<\/p>\n

Gonzalez has repeatedly ignored calls to appear with Jewish victims groups, activists said, instead spending time with major Hasidic community power brokers, including at\u00a0one event just last week.<\/a><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in\u00a0a recent\u00a0amicus brief filed by Lovy and others<\/a>, they noted that Weberman published a letter in a Hasidic paper last month comparing himself\u00a0 \u201cto Jacob the Patriarch, and how his release will be analogous to Jacob, coming home to a beautiful family and great wealth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTo give him this massive benefit that basically nobody else gets \u2014 for somebody who\u2019s so abhorrent and unapologetic and unremorseful and eager to return to his former glory \u2014 it\u2019s sickening,\u201d Townsend said.<\/p>\n

Members of Weberman\u2019s Satmar community vilified and attacked Deutsch during the trial \u2014\u00a0attempting to bribe her with $500,000 to drop the case<\/a>\u00a0and then revoking the kosher certification for her husband\u2019s pizza shop, effectively shuttering it.<\/p>\n

During Weberman\u2019s trial, three people also were arrested for\u00a0tweeting surreptitious photos of the victim in the courtroom,<\/a>\u00a0while a supportive rabbi allegedly had bleach thrown in his face by a Weberman supporter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzales\u00a0appears poised\u00a0to try to help free a convicted pedophile from the Hasidic community, critics say\u00a0…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":112299,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[10916,5533,50114,57,50115,9,56,63,65,64,58,1424],"class_list":["post-112298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-brooklyn-supreme-court","tag-eric-gonzalez","tag-hasidic-judaism","tag-metro","tag-nechemya-weberman","tag-new-york","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news","tag-us-news","tag-williamsburg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112298\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}