“Noodles” Sideshow Stalls Sentencing

Rabbi Daniel Greer succeeded in pushing back Judgement Day, by having his scheduled child-molestation sentencing delayed two more weeks by an ultimately unsuccessful day-long quest for a new trial.

That sideshow took over what was supposed to be Judge Jon Alander’s sentencing Wednesday in State Superior Court at 235 Church St., and instead sent the court on a improbable search for evidence of prosecutorial misconduct.

Nothing turned up.

Two months ago, a jury found Greer guilty on four felony counts of child endangerment, which each carry a maximum penalty of up to 20 years in prison. (Other sexual-assault charges were dismissed on a technicality.)

During the criminal trial, Eliyahu Mirlis said that Greer repeatedly raped him from 2002 to 2005, when he was a student at the Yeshiva of New Haven. Another former student, who went by the initials R.S.A., said Greer also felt him up and tried to kiss him in 2008.

Greer’s defense team made a last-ditch effort to stop the sentencing Wednesday by filing a motion seeking a new trial. During six circus-like hours, the lawyers accused a blogger of unnerving two witnesses so badly they forgot what they wanted to say on the witness stand — a legal maneuver that led to frustrated questions from the judge, derisive snickers from observers and even reluctant testimony from the prosecutor.

The Greer team accused the blogger, Lawrence Dressler, who on a site entitled ​“Larry Noodles” has intensely covered the rabbi’s travails, of acting as an ​“admitted agent of the state.”

Even as Judge Alander kept pausing to ask whether this was turning into a ​“fishing expedition,” the defense team succeeded in having almost the entire day’s proceedings dedicated to that motion, along with a few other motions to dismiss that Alander quickly brushed aside.

Dressler used to attend services at Greer’s Yeshiva of New Haven, and his son enrolled in classes there for a single year. But when rumors of sexual abuse first came out in 2016, Dressler turned on his old rabbi.

Under his pen name — or ​“nom de guerre,” as Alander suggested — Dressler wrote at least 453 online posts about the case — reporting that was often caricatured and satirical. The posts obsessed over Greer’s efforts to get enough congregants for weekly prayers, Greer’s legal disputes with his Edgewood tenants and Greer’s travels to a Rhode Island synagogue.

Online, Dressler described himself as a ​“hardened criminal and soulless suspended attorney.” He named Greer as ​“a depraved monster” and the Yeshiva of New Haven as ​“the Nightmare on Elm Street.” Even reporters from the Independent became the ​“local Communists,” who were part of on some vast conspiracy of Yale grads.

But whatever jokes he thew in, Dressler routinely urged readers to call the authorities in his stories. In one post, he even wrote about assisting prosecutors in finding witnesses.

Grudberg said that Dressler had been acting as an agent of law enforcement, essentially becoming part of the prosecutorial team. That became problematic, he went on, because two witnesses in the trial, Jean Ledbury and Thomas DeRosa, accused Dressler of intimidating them outside the court about their testifying.

Grudberg argued that Dressler had frightened DeRosa, a former science teacher at the Yeshiva of New Haven, by showing up at his Southbury home.

DeRosa had flunked Mirlis for not showing up to class, but the school’s dean, Avi Hack, changed it to a passing grade — evidence, prosecutors said, of the special treatment Mirlis received during the sexual abuse.

DeRosa remembered Dressler slipping through the hedges onto his front lawn, saying, ​“You’re a hard guy to find.” He said Dressler then went on a tirade against Greer, saying the rabbi had tied up three students and raped five others. ​“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” DeRosa remembered saying, before he walked back inside.

“I was frightened,” DeRosa testified on Wednesday. ​“As far as I was concerned, he was a madman.”

Grudberg also argued that Dressler had frightened Ledbury, the secretary for Greer’s housing non-profit, by taking her picture and popping up behind her just before she was set to testify.

One day in the courthouse hallway, Dressler told her, ​“I hope you’re going to the tell the truth.”

The next day, Dressler told her, ​“I hope you know that, either way this goes, you are out of a job.”

Later that day, while she was refilling the meter, he said, ​“Hello, Mrs. Ledbury.”

On the stand Wednesday morning, Dressler repeatedly invoked his right against self-incrimination, based on his attorney’s advice. Again and again, he repeated, ​“I assert my Fifth Amendment right under the United States Constitution and the Constitution of the State of Connecticut.”

But online, Dressler said he had gone it alone.

“Does the Goat actually believe that the State’s Attorney’s Office would hire a convicted felon like myself, who did 18 months in Federal prison, to work on one of its cases?” he asked in a recent post.

Thinking that the Fifth Amendment had him covered him, Dressler didn’t produce any of the records that Grudberg asked for in a subpoena, and Judge Alander said it wasn’t worth delaying the hearing to get them.

But Grudberg did get pages of emails and text messages from a subpoena to prosecutors. Those showed that Dressler had texted with Maxine Wilensky, a senior assistant state’s attorney, near-daily from mid-June through September, advising her even on where to stand when questioning witnesses at trial.

Wilensky added, though, that just because Dressler had texted her didn’t mean she read them.

Still, because Dressler had stayed silent, Grudberg got to question Wilensky about her dealings with Dressler, as he tried to dig up evidence that Dressler acted an ​“agent” of the state.

In one message Grudberg read aloud, from the Sunday before the trial started, Wilensky wrote to Dressler, ​“Make sure to … behave yourself. No talking about the trial.”

Grudberg suggested that the text related to all the witnesses who’d be coming into the courtroom. But Wilensky clarified that the texts concerned only R.S.A, whom she knew to be Facebook friends with Dressler.

“I would never have asked somebody to go out and interview witnesses like that,” Wilensky said at another point. ​“Never.”

After reading the texts himself, Alander asked Grudberg what link he was trying to make. He said he couldn’t see how any of them made Dressler’s actions ​“attributable” to the state’s attorney. He said prosecutors try to interview as many people as they can before bringing a case, ​“including unsavory people which they probably have to deal with all the time.”

Grudberg admitted that he didn’t have a ​“smoking gun,” but he said the regularity of contact with Dressler — someone so zealously committed to Greer’s conviction — constituted bringing him ​“into the fold.”

“If you lie down with dogs, you get fleas,” he said. ​“He certainly wasn’t mysterious about his intentions, and the state chose to accept his help for this and to interact with him. When you do that, given his background, I think you’re bound by what he does.”

Ultimately, Alander ruled against Greer’s motion.

“The fact that, on his own, [Dressler] contacted those witnesses cannot be laid at the door of the State of Connecticut,” he said. ​“There’s no evidence that he had the actual authority to contact them, the implied authority to contact them, or the apparent authority to contact them.”

Alander went on to say that just contacting a witness, like Dressler had, didn’t amount to tampering. Even if it might have been ​“unpleasant,” he said those actions didn’t amount to ​“harassment,” ​“an inducement not to testify [or] to have them tailor their testimony.”

Alander added that didn’t buy any of DeRosa and Ledbury’s arguments about being so freaked out by Dressler that they screwed up on the stand.

But by then the clock had ticked past 4 o’clock and there were still two more motions for a new trial to hear, requiring a rescheduling. The new date is Dec. 2.

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 advocated for keeping nuisance businesses out of the Whalley Avenue commercial corridor, exposed johns who patronized street prostitutes in the neighborhood, and then in 2007 for launching an armed neighborhood ​“defense” patrol and then calling in the Guardian Angels for assistance to combat crime.

Over the years, Rabbi Greer also received national attention for his political stands. 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. Greer has also crusaded against gay rights in Connecticut, and 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
• $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
• Greer’s Accuser Recounts Sexual Abuse
• Attorney Grills Greer Accuser
• Religion’s Role Raised In Greer Trial
• Another Greer Accuser Testifies
• Trial Question: Can Sex Crimes Victims Love Their Abusers?
• State Screws Up: 4 Greer Counts Dismissed
• Jury Finds Rabbi Greer Guilty