Some things not mentioned in the article: 1) the names and accounts of the testimony of anyone who saw them together – remember doing yichud in a frum community sets off all sorts of alarms; 2) discussion of any evidence that the defendant’s lawyers claimed to have that wasn’t admitted (probably the girls sexual history, which might have provided a motive to lie); 3) the medical records and physical evidence to support the accusations; 4) the ethnicity and religion of the jury pool and what steps were taken to exclude anyone who didn’t approve of Satmar’s policy of keeping separate, or who didn’t approve of Satmar’s policy of opposition to the State of Israel; 5) discussion of the role played by “victim advocacy” groups who crated a witch hunt atmosphere (where the prosecutors announce in advance of the trial that child molesting is common among orthodox Jews and we are proud to have arrested one).
I don’t know if he was guilty. I haven’t been to Brooklyn in years. But if I heard the same evidence except that it was about a Black man raping a White woman and everyone knows such crimes are common (cf. Scottsboro), or about a Jew accused of killing a Christian to use the blood in religious rites (cf. Beilis) — I would be very skeptical. All the cases accusing the Orthodox community of sexual misconduct have a similar lack of physical evidence, lock of independent corroboration, and are brough by people who serious object to our religion, lifestyle and politics. At a certain point, they start to smell like a “witch hunt”, and while perhaps there really were witches, one should be skeptical.