Christopher Peak Photo
Prosecutor Maxine Wilensky leaves court after first day of trial.
Rabbi Daniel Greer gave the 14-year-old his first taste of wine, told him not to worry about the family problems once landed him in protective custody — then put a hand on his upper thigh and leaned in to kiss him.
Eliyahu Mirlis, a former student at the Yeshiva of New Haven, recounted that as the very start of three years of Greer’s sexual abuse, after being sworn in as the state’s first witness in Superior Court on Church Street on Monday afternoon.
A civil jury already found that Rabbi Greer should pay $21 million to Mirlis by a lower evidentiary standard. A criminal jury is now deciding whether he is guilty of charges of sexual assault and risk of injury to a minor.
Over four hours on Monday, Mirlis described what happened to him from 2002 to 2005 as a student at the Yeshiva of New Haven in the Edgewood neighborhood. He spoke matter of factly, and he paused to pull at his forehead and wipe his eyes only when he thought of bad things that happened to other family members.
At times, the testimony came across as disjointed. That’s because the state is trying to put Greer away on second-degree sexual assault charges, where a victim must be under 16 years old. The judge and the attorneys pressed Mirlis to specify dates.
Almost two decades later, though, Mirlis said he was having trouble recalling the exact details of what happened during just the very first year of the alleged molestation. At one point, he said he felt “pigeonholed” by that cut-off date.
By the end of the day, Mirlis, wearing a blazer over an open-necked pink button-down, was hunched over. He kept both hands in front of him at chest level, one wrapped around the microphone stand and the other splayed on the witness box’s perimeter.
But his testimony still laid out a clear narrative, in which the rabbi — “a spiritual and moral leader” who “gives guidance” based on Jewish law, in Mirlis’s definition — allegedly took advantage of the boy’s trust.
Mirlis arrived at the Yeshiva of New Haven, a boarding school located on the corner of Elm and Norton Streets, in 2001, shortly after his 3‑month old brother died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and child-protective services took him away from his parents.
Greer’s school seemed like “a nice place,” “small and intimate,” Mirlis thought after his first visit. “It seemed like the right fit.”
He testified that he quickly found out that Greer was an exacting teacher, constantly berating students for mixing up words, showing up late, “running too fast or walking too slow.” Mirlis himself was disciplined for sneaking out to a movie theater once and for smuggling in a radio. Punishment might mean hours of waiting outside Greer’s office or a night alone in an unfurnished apartment.
Mirlis said that the sexual abuse started his sophomore year, when Greer invited him to an empty apartment complex on Edgewood Avenue.
According to him, one night, the rabbi sat him down on the couch, offered him peanuts and poured him a “big red Solo cup” of wine from a brown-bagged bottle. “Drink,” he remembered Greer saying.
As his head got “fuzzy” from the alcohol, Mirlis remembered Greer telling him not to worry about his younger brother, to first worry about himself and his future in order to take care of his family later.
That’s when he said Greer touched his thigh, close to his crotch, and kissed him on the lips. He said he “pulled back” in shock.
“What are you doing?” he remembered asking.
“It’s not a big deal,” he remembered Greer responding. “This is what I do to my kids.”
Mirlis said that left him feeling “confused” and “bewildered.” “Maybe it’s normal?” he said, recounting that he’d been prohibited from watching television, reading newspapers or even being alone in a room with a girl. “But it didn’t feel right.”
From there, the abuse continued on a regular basis. He described sexual assaults in Edgewood Park, in vacant apartments around the neighborhood, in the Branford Motel.
He described how he was thankful Greer almost always got him drunk on wine, bloody marys and scotch before sex. He said he never used condoms, just lube. He said Greer always told him he had a “bright future,” that he had “so much potential,” and that he believed the rabbi meant it.
He described how he refused to let Greer ejaculate in his mouth, how he yelled out in pain when Greer tried to anally penetrate him, how he eventually learned it was quicker to unbutton his own pants and get it over.
Most of all, Mirlis described the feeling of being lost throughout his teenage years, looking at Greer with both respect and contempt. “Just shame, guilt, confusion,” he recalled.
Maxine Wilensky, the senior assistant state’s attorney prosecuting the case, asked Mirlis at one point why he didn’t try to stop the abuse, even agreeing to go along with Greer on an out-of-state trip to Pennsylvania and Maryland that he knew would mean nights stuck in a hotel alone with the rabbi.
“You say you felt honored yet he sexually abused you,” she said. “Can you explain that dichotomy, what’s going on?”
“It’s hard to explain,” Mirlis said, after breathing out a long sigh. “It’s a mind game. On one hand, I got all the preferential treatment. I had someone who was believing in me, showing me life and things. But at the same time, it came at a cost.”
“What kind of cost was that?” Wilensky asked.
“Sexual encounters,” Mirlis said.
“What did it do to you, personally, at the age of 15 to be going through this?” she asked.
“I was confused,” Mirlis said. “I was angry at him, and I was likely angry at life. I felt stuck.”
“How did you feel about [Greer]?” Wilensky asked later on.
“I relied on him during those years as a father figure, someone I looked up to, someone who cared about me,” Mirlis said. “He was successful, he had money, he was powerful, he had a lot of assets.”
Mirlis said he couldn’t tell his parents, because he didn’t want “to burden them.” He doubted who would believe his accusations. He didn’t tell two mentors at the school, because he thought they knew already and had “also gone through it” themselves.
He finally told his soon-to-be wife, Shira, about a year after meeting her, in 2006. He said that it took him years after to finally find a community of his own, when he moved to Edison, N.J., where he works as a nursing home administrator.
On Tuesday morning, Mirlis is expected to finish testifying, including about the details of Greer’s naked body that led police to make the initial arrest, before defense attorney Willie Dow begins cross-examination.
Witness Goes AWOL
Rabbi Greer.
A second alleged sexual abuse victim might not show up to testify against Rabbi Greer — and his past accounts might not make their way into the courtroom, either.
Attorneys Monday morning argued about how to deal with this key witness, who has resisted an out-of-state subpoena.
This witness, Aviad “Avi” Hack, a former student who later became as dean and assistant principal at Greer’s school on Norton Street, corroborated Mirlis’s account by describing his own sexual encounters with Greer. In a lengthy deposition for the civil case, Hack said he allegedly had a 13-year sexual relationship with Greer, for part of which he was underage. (Click here to read a previous story that includes the detailed deposition.)
From about 1991 through 2004, Hack said, he and Greer had sex, almost weekly, in apartments throughout the Edgewood neighborhood owned by Greer’s not-for-profit groups, in the basement of Greer’s Orange Street law office building, in the park, and in out-of-town hotels.
Hack said that he kept it secret, as his parents helped the rabbi found the school and restore the surrounding Edgewood neighborhood. “I was afraid of losing my specialness. I was afraid of what it would do to my family,” Hack explained, according to the transcript. He stated that he didn’t want to “destroy what my father has been working on.” He also suggested that, as a dorm counselor, he knew about the abuse but did not report it to authorities as required under state law. “You know I do this with Eli,” he said Greer told him.
Hack never showed for the civil trial, though. He dodged service of the subpoena, once running out of his job in Rhode Island to avoid a judicial marshal. So the federal judge, Michael Shea, allowed the attorneys to play a video-recording of the deposition for the jury in the civil trial, in which a jury returned a $21 million verdict against Greer.
The question before Judge Jon Alander in the criminal trial on Monday was whether he too should allow the jurors to hear that evidence if Hack, once again, doesn’t show.
Hack had initially indicated to prosecutors that he would come to New Haven to testify. But he skipped out on a meeting and then sent a lawyer to argue against forcing him to take the witness stand.
Marshals tried to subpoena him multiple times at his home and work, but they could never locate him, said Karen Roberg, the assistant state’s attorney prosecuting the case.
“Our burden is to demonstrate a diligent, reasonable effort, not to do everything conceivable,” she said. “To serve him in Rhode Island, we’d have to take a Connecticut police officer with a material witness form, which is different from a fugitive from justice; expect that Rhode Island would care that it was issued; then be able to take A.H. into custody out of state.”
That led the state to ask Judge Alander if it could have someone read the transcript of Hack’s deposition, which Roberg argued would be “substantially similar” to having him there in person.
Willie Dow, Greer’s defense attorney, said that the standards of evidence are higher in criminal court for a reason, where a defendant’s liberty is on the line. He said that simply replaying a deposition wouldn’t give him the chance to grill a witness that could sway the jury.
Dow added that prosecutors hadn’t done enough to try to get Hack to the courthouse or even to try to get a copy of the video-recording that’s currently been sealed in a federal appellate court after a blogger tried to get a copy.
“It’s like a Rubix cube of badness, every way you twist it,” he said. “The state was really sitting on its hands.”
Judge Alander ultimately said he didn’t think it was fair to have a document from the civil trial read out to the jurors. He agreed with Dow that, in a criminal case, there’s far more at stake that leads lawyers to go harder with witnesses.
“The purpose of a deposition at a civil trial is discovery, that a lawyer is trying to find out primarily as much information as they can from a particular witness,” he explained. “Cross-examination, at a criminal trial, is very different. The objective of a criminal attorney is to impeach that witness. They’re trying to test the validity of that testimony.”
Alander added that he might reconsider his decision if prosecutors were able to obtain the video of the deposition, which would give the jury greater insight into Hack’s demeanor as they tried to assess his credibility. But he added even that might not be enough to convince him.
Previous coverage of this case:
• Suit: Rabbi Molested, Raped Students
• Greer’s Housing Corporations Added To Sex Abuse Lawsuit
• 2nd Ex-Student Accuses Rabbi Of Sex Assault
• 2nd Rabbi Accuser Details Alleged Abuse
• Rabbi Sexual Abuse Jury Picked
• On Stand, Greer Invokes 5th On Sex Abuse
• Rabbi Seeks To Bar Blogger from Court
• Trial Mines How Victims Process Trauma
• Wife, Secretary Come To Rabbi Greer’s Defense
• Jury Awards $20M In Rabbi Sex Case
• State Investigates Greer Yeshiva’s Licensing
• Rabbi Greer Seeks New Trial
• Affidavit: Scar Gave Rabbi Greer Away
• Rabbi Greer Pleads Not Guilty
• $21M Verdict Upheld; Where’s The $?
• Sex Abuse Victim’s Video Tests Law
• Decline at Greer’s Edgewood “Village”?
• Rabbi’s Wife Sued For Stashing Cash
• Why Greer Remains Free, & Victim Unpaid
• Showdown Begins Over Greer Properties
• Judge: Good Chance Greer’s Wife Hid $240K
• Sex Abuse Too Much For Many Jurors
• Potential Greer Juror Grilled On “Truth”
• Greer Jury Finalized