Christopher Peak Photo
Rabbi Daniel Greer.
Hartford — Rabbi Daniel Greer won’t get a new civil trial to re-litigate how his alleged sexual abuse damaged a former student, but he will be deposed to find out whether he has hidden cash to avoid paying his victim.
Those developments resulted from a series of rulings in federal court here on Friday afternoon, as U.S. District Judge Michael P. Shea dealt with requests by Greer’s attorneys to redo the trial or, at least, to lower the damages.
Reading two opinions from the bench, the judge shot down both motions, allowing the verdict to stand. Greer’s lawyers said they plan to appeal.
Shea also heard arguments about the aggressive methods a collections attorney said he needs to go after Greer’s assets. The judge held off on ruling on those matters for another week.
The rulings wrap up outstanding issues from a five-day trial in U.S. District Court this past May. Plaintiff Eli Mirlis said on the witness stand that Greer repeatedly raped him while he was a student at the Yeshiva of New Haven from 2002 – 2005; Greer took the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering the accusation. The jury ultimately sided with Mirlis, awarding him a $21.7 million verdict to compensate for his trauma.
Greer is now facing criminal charges of sexual assault and risk of injury to a minor. After turning himself in at police headquarters this July, he’s out on a $100,000 bond. Greer’s criminal trial has yet to be scheduled.
Jury’s Decision Affirmed
Greer’s defense team: David Grudberg, William Ward, and Amanda Nugent.
David Grudberg and William Ward, Greer’s two defense attorneys in the civil case, claimed that the jury had been so overwhelmed by emotion that it ignored the trial evidence in calculating eight-figure damages. And, they said, a new witness had come forward who could prove Mirlis wasn’t trustworthy.
Despite the two separate procedural arguments for overturning the civil verdict, Judge Shea said he didn’t see any miscarriage of justice that would require him to revisit the case.
Shea started out by questioning the attorneys about why the verdict would be considered unreasonable. Grudberg argued that the total is way out of line with similar cases, calling it a “runaway verdict.”
“You’ve got a lot of hot buttons here in play,” he said. “It’s a subject matter that triggers, understandably, some very visceral emotional responses in people, a lot more than auto accident cases. It’s harder to dispassionately wade through the evidence and assess damages — unless one takes the view that it’s a sex abuse case and no dollar amount is too high.”
Shea pointed out that, by law, the jurors had a lot of leeway to assign the number they felt was just. The Connecticut Supreme Court had long discouraged judges from playing the “comparison game,” as he called it. As the justices wrote in 1976, “No one life is like any other, and the damages for the destruction of one furnish no fixed standard for others,” he read.
Grudberg pursued the argument: “Even if you threw all those comparisons out the window,” the “shortcomings” in Mirlis’s case demanded Shea’s reconsideration. He said that Mirlis’s inability to connect with his wife was no different from the “emotion distance found in many marriages.” And as he did throughout the trial this spring, Grudberg questioned how the jury could possibly believe that Mirlis suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder when he chose to continue seeing Greer, even honoring him with important roles at his wedding and his son’s naming. “What did he prove to enable this jury to decide that his life has been so profoundly affected that they put a $15 million price tag on that?” Grudberg asked, citing the compensatory dollar figure later added to punitive costs.
Shea said that the trauma had been apparent throughout the trial, in testimony from Mirlis himself, his wife and an expert psychologist. “Though [Mirlis is] a good person, though he’s a good provider, I think the jury could have listened to [his wife] and said, ‘Gee, this guy’s a bit of a robot,’” Shea said. “To be honest, that was my impression.”
He added that Mirlis’s continued run-ins with Greer also didn’t strike him as unusual for authority figure who’d exploited his victims’ trust. That’s exactly he pattern he’d heard when he deposed sexual abuse victims of Dr. George Reardon, an endocrinologist at St. Francis Hospital, in a different case. “For a long time, they would go back to Dr. Reardon for advice because he became like a father figure to them,” Shea said. As with them them, “one could have inferred that need for Greer’s guidance and the community in New Haven, despite what Greer had done, only exacerbated and deepened the guilt and shame.”
Grudberg also claimed that a new unnamed witness could shake up the case. Mirlis’s math teacher at the yeshiva, now a chemistry professor at a college in New York City, emailed Ward after the case to say he could prove that his former student had behavioral issues in class, including lies and outbursts, and conspired with the school’s dean, Aviad Hack, to raise his grades.
“If he’d been on the stand in May, it would have been a very different trial,” Grudberg said. He claimed that the testimony would prove Hack, another alleged abuse victim, conspired to take over the yeshiva, using Mirlis’s allegations as leverage.
But this witness would have been long gone by the time Hack finally confronted Greer with papers to sign over the yeshiva, Shea pointed out. “Even if Mirlis sat on Hack’s desk or at one point embraced him,” as the witness said he was prepared to testify, “that would not support that Mirlis engaged in a conspiracy to bring a lawsuit 10 years later to help Hack take the school,” Shea said.
Plus, he added, the evidence of a bond wasn’t new: Mirlis had already testified that he felt he shared a “secret language” with Hack as Greer’s victims — an “unusually close, maybe inappropriately close” relationship for a student and administrator, Shea noted.
Shea ultimately rejected both motions, claiming they didn’t bring up any substantially new information the jurors hadn’t heard already before ruling against Greer.
Follow the Money
Greer’s Yeshiva of New Haven.
Despite winning on those two motions, Mirlis’s legal team has had a harder time collecting on the judgement. Greer’s lawyers have sought to keep him out of another deposition and have walled off the associated not-for-profits that control dozens of valuable rental properties throughout the Edgewood neighborhood. They also claim it’s entirely legal for Greer’s wife to withdraw hundreds of thousands in cash from a joint bank account.
Matthew Beatman, a collections lawyer Mirlis hired who has served subpoenas on nine banks and initiated foreclosures on Greer’s home and three yeshiva properties, is now seeking signed writs of execution from Shea that will allow him to comb through Greer’s accounts.
He argued that Greer has been trying to thwart the judgment. In a questionnaire Greer filled out over two months this summer, he failed to include a property he owns in Wareham, Mass., on a list of assets, Beatman said. That’s even though he likely received a property tax bill right around the same time the sheet was due, he added.
And the Greers have tried to pay themselves out before the judgment is collected, Beatman said. Sarah Greer, the rabbi’s wife, wrote herself a check for over $220,000 that she got in cash “in the immediate wake of the verdict,” Shea noted. Right after, Greer signed off on a payment from the yeshiva into Sarah’s 401(k) retirement account.
Jeffrey Sklarz, a lawyer handling Greer’s finances, said those payments weren’t fraudulent conveyances, because they technically weren’t money transfers. “There is Connecticut case law on this point that says a withdrawal from a bank account is not a transfer, because a transfer requires two parties,” he said.
“Let’s put aside whether legally it qualified as a transfer,” Shea said. “It is nonetheless suspicious conduct, under all the circumstances, wouldn’t you agree?”
“I completely disagree, your Honor. Sarah Greer is allowed to take her money,” Sklarz said.
“But why isn’t it suspicious conduct?” Shea pressed. “Is the defendant, through a close relative, taking steps to deplete his ability to satisfy the judgment? It seems like some small evidence that, without any other explanation, suggests that he might be.”
“Respectfully, your Honor, doing something entirely legal in the confines of the law is not suspicious,” Sklarz said.
Sklarz asked in a filing for the judge to hold off on the writs of execution and instead let the rabbi enter into a monthly payment plan. He also asked that all documents be marked as confidential “to ensure no confidential information is ‘accidentally’ leaked to the public.”
Beatman said that Greer could do a monthly payment plan, but Shea should still sign off on the writs of execution to lock down whatever cash and property Greer has now.
Shea didn’t issue a ruling about these other issues on Friday, because, he warned, that he has a connection to the case, if a tenuous one. Before joining the bench in 2012, he worked at the same law firm as the attorney representing Start Community Bank, where Greer keeps most of his money. They’d worked together directly on only two cases.
Federal judges are supposed to recuse themselves if they had any relationship with a party less than two years ago; otherwise, it’s discretionary. Shea said he didn’t see a reason to recuse himself. But just in case any of the lawyers saw a conflict of interest, he gave them 10 days to request a recusal before he moved ahead on Greer’s finances.
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. He and his family exposed johns who patronized street prostitutes in the neighborhood, and he advocated for keeping nuisance businesses out of the Whalley Avenue commercial corridor. in 2007, launched an armed neighborhood “defense” patrol and then calling in the Guardian Angels for assistance to combat crime.
Over the years, Rabbi Greer played an active role in politics and government, including crusading against gay rights in Connecticut. In the 1970s, he 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.’ More recently, he filed suit against Yale University over a requirement that students live in coed dorms.
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