Andrea Peyser
EXCLUSIVE
The shy, pretty victim cried tears of joy and hope. It’s over now.
“I can’t wait until he’s in prison,” said the young lady, who, starting at age 12, saw her purity, her innocence, her very life stolen by a brutish Satmar pig named Nechemya Weberman.
“I can’t wait until someone stronger, who weighs 350 pounds more, holds him down, lets him knowhow it feels to be so helpless,” she told me in her Brooklyn apartment, holding onto her husband with one hand and cradling a Shih Tzunamed Angel with the other.
“I’d like to see that,’’ she said.
Not long ago, she wasn’t so strong.
Gabriella Bass
IN GOOD HANDS NOW: The victim embraces her husband at their Brooklyn home last night after her abuser’s conviction.
But yesterday, Weberman was convicted in Brooklyn of sexually abusing this young lady, now 18, repeatedly and cruelly, for three long years. He was her tormentor. There was no escape. But after a trial that ripped open the veil concealing the Orthodox Satmar Jewish sect, a religious subset whose leaders the victim calls “the Jewish Taliban,” Weberman will never again be free to hurt girls.
“This is a happy day,’’ she said, tears in her eyes.
The victim, with her long, blond hair and pleasant smile, looks like any other girl just discovering her womanhood.
But six years ago, she was sentenced by her repressive Jewish school to go into counseling with Weberman, a charlatanwho used his practice like fly paper to catch time alone with girls in a community so sheltered and repressed, unrelated men and women are forbidden from being in rooms alone together.
The sin that led her to Weberman?
“I questioned some Jewish laws,’’ she said. “I questioned why women are sometimes — I don’t want to use word — degraded. They’re less than guys.”
And the Satmars punished her by sending her to the devil.
During her first session with Weberman, he touched her bare skin, right under her clothes. She barely knew what was happening, but she knew it was wrong.
“I asked him to stop. I felt invaded. He stopped for a minute. Then he started again.”
Three times a week, she spent time in his study or traveling upstate with him. He got increasingly aggressive.
Then, it got unimaginably worse. “He burned me with a lighter on my stomach,’’ she said almost in a whisper, recalling a terrible incident that never made it into trial testimony.
Why? “He found it arousing,” she said matteroffactly.
“He told me, ‘When you go home, you put on peanut butter,’ ” she said. “Peanut butter!” her husband cried. “I stayed in my bed for three days. I didn’t get out of bed. I didn’t eat. I just wanted to die.
“I was 13, I think.”
At one point, the Vaad Ha’Tznius — or “modesty committee,” the loathed Satmar enforcers — visited her parents.
“They made them sign papers saying we have to throw out the computer. I can’t go on vacation. I’m too rebellious. I have to dress in a certain way. I felt they were telling me how to breathe.”
Weberman was a “master manipulator,” she said. He’d call her mother, tell her her daughter was a liar, rebellious, threaten to cast her entire family out of the religion if the girl failed to improve.
“She was mad at me. We fought a lot. So there was no one to complain to,” the girl said.
So she dealt with the pain — “He liked to hurt me” — by zoning out of life.
“I didn’t love,” she said. “I didn’t hate. I felt nothing. I froze my emotions. I wouldn’t let myself feel anything.”
It ended only after the victim started a new high school, where questioning religious tenets is not heresy. At age 15, she told school leaders the awful truth.
She was the concubine of a man revered in the Satmar community. He was fed a small girl by fanatics who cared nothing about a human being.
The shy, brave girl still considers herself Jewish. Religiously so. But the Satmar sect is ancient history.
“I strongly dislike the Satmar dictators,” she said. Finally, she’s free.
