The alert went out on Wednesday, saying in an automated email to victims who had signed up for updates on the criminal case against Barry Freundel that the former Kesher Israel rabbi would be released from prison on Aug. 21 this year.
The sudden announcement that his sentence had been cut short by almost three years sent waves of shock, fear and resentment through the community. Then on Thursday, the D.C. Department of Corrections sent another alert. The original had been a mistake. Freundel’s sentence hadn’t been changed, after all.
“What’s the point of a victim-notification system, if they’re just going to [mess] with victims?” said one of four women interviewed for this article, two of whom asked not to be identified as victims of a crime.
Some of the victims said that the error caused them to confront the crime against them once again. And the Department of Corrections, blamed by some victims for forcing them to face that stress, said that it is still trying to understand what went wrong to prompt the erroneous automated email. It said that it would start “a full review of its internal records management process to determine how this error occurred and prevent it from happening again.”
“The Department of Corrections is responsible for the safety and security of inmates in its custody, and this must be balanced with the trust and respect of the victims affected. This error compromised that trust, and we offer our most sincere apologies to the victims,” Quincy L. Booth, the director of the department, said in a statement Thursday afternoon, shortly after the new notification went out to victims with a 2021 date in place of the 2018 date emailed the day before. The department said staff would also contact each person who received the original email individually to clarify.
Freundel’s attorney, Jeffrey Harris, said he didn’t know about the alert until a reporter called him. “This must be a mistake,” he responded.
Crime victims in the District have the option of signing up for the Victim Information and Notification Everyday (VINE) system to learn when the person who committed an offense against them will be released. The Department of Corrections said VINE has never sent a mistaken notification like this about a D.C. inmate before. Elsewhere in the country, the VINE system has been linked to similar problems. In Oregon in 2015, about 8,000 victims received incorrect reports that criminals would be released.
Freundel’s crime of taping women with a hidden camera as they prepared for the mikvah — a Jewish ritual bath that many invest with profound spiritual significance — rattled the close-knit Orthodox Jewish community at Kesher Israel, a Georgetown synagogue where the rabbi was long respected as a prominent intellectual.
When she heard the erroneous news that Freundel would be released this summer, Bethany Mandel said she immediately worried that when she eats at one of the few kosher restaurants in the Silver Spring area, she might run into the rabbi.
“The possibility that this is happening in less than four months — and I have spent zero brain energy on this, and now it’s fast approaching on the horizon,” she said on Wednesday night after receiving the alert. On Thursday, she was relieved to hear that Freundel would not in fact be released early. But she felt more unsettled than before that he would indeed someday return to a Jewish community somewhere.
“It just sort of brought up this thing that I’ll now be thinking about,” she said. “The whole thing sucks. It really was just unnecessary.”
The Orthodox Jewish community is closely connected across the United States and even globally, and several women said that even if Freundel moves somewhere other than the District after his eventual release, they fear crossing paths with him. “It’s not completely inconceivable that I or someone I’m close to happens to run into him. That’s just really strange and uncomfortable to think about,” said Kate Bailey, another victim.
When she got the news on Wednesday, she said, “I kind of had the thought: I feel like I’m just starting to be okay. I can deal with my life, with the situation about this. Then this happened. I was like, ‘Oh, gosh.’ It was kind of just pushing the reset button.”
Although she knows now that Freundel won’t be released soon, she also said that the mistake set back her hard-won stability. “We all thought it was real. It reminds me that that is going to happen one day; he is going to get out one day. And that is something I have to deal with.”
One of the women who did not want her name published as the victim of a sex crime said she felt when she heard that Freundel was leaving jail early that a lighter sentence would be “a slight to the victims” rather than a just punishment, given the severity of his crime. And the second victim who also did not want her name published said she feared that Freundel could damage the victims’ reputation in the Orthodox community. “Is he going to start telling people who the people are that he recorded? Will there be any personal backlash? I felt like, ‘Okay, effective August or whenever he is released, my life could be slightly more endangered,’ ” she said. “I don’t know. I have no idea what the heck he would do.”
Washington Jewish Week posted an article on Wednesday that repeated the erroneous claim, under the headline, “Rabbi Freundel wins early release; will walk free Aug. 21.” Though the article attributed the information only to “social media reports” and said that the writer hadn’t reached the Department of Corrections for confirmation, the news report added to the appearance of certainty.
One of the victims compared the mistake to the erroneous warning of an incoming missile that terrified Hawaii residents in January. While she said that obviously this alert was nowhere near as imminently frightening, she said both electronic missives showed the danger of poorly managed automated systems. “They really need to get smarter people working these systems,” she said. “Clearly, they’re messing with people’s lives and people’s psyche.”
Michelle Boorstein contributed to this report.
