Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzales appears poised to try to help free a convicted pedophile from the Hasidic community, critics say — and things got so heated about it at the State of the State address that he and a foe had to be separated.
Activists opposing the upcoming resentencing of disgraced former prominent Hasidic school mental-health counselor Nechemya Weberman said they fear that the DA will ask for a new sentence of time served, effectively freeing the convicted sicko.
Hasidic victim-advocates claimed that Gonzalez is clearly showing his hand about what he intends to do by posing for pictures with Weberman supporters and icing out the victim so harshly that she was forced to hire her own advocate lawyer.
Weberman, a former counselor at a Williamsburg Yeshiva, was convicted on 59 counts and originally sentenced to 103 years in prison for repeatedly sexually abusing then-12-year-old Rivky Deutsch for three years.
That triple-digit sentence was later knocked down by state statute to 50 years, and he is now up for resentencing.
“It’s exceedingly rare for a victim to feel so unheard by the prosecution,” said lawyer Sarena Townsend, who worked as a prosecutor in Brooklyn for a decade — including alongside many of the ADAs who put Weberman behind bars in 2013.
A source claimed that a meeting between the DA’s office and Deutsch over the resentencing ended with her team “walking out furious at him.”
“In most cases, the victim hopefully feels comforted by the prosecutor to do the right thing,” Townsend said. “It is definitely rare to hire an attorney for this purpose.”
Victims’ advocate Asher Lovy — director of the Orthodox Jewish victims group Za’akah — said that when he saw Gonzalez after this year’s State of the State event in Albany, he did not hesitate to let his frustration be known.
“Basically, no one has been able to get a hold of [Gonzalez],” Lovy said of himself and other victims groups furious about the DA’s possible decision to not oppose Weberman’s resentencing.
“I went over to him, and I said to him: ‘Eric, I’m surprised to see you here. I thought you’d be working overtime to get Weberman out of prison,’ ” Lovy recalled.
“And he and we were off to the races at that point.”
Lovy said Gonzalez repeatedly claimed he wasn’t trying to get Weberman out.
“You wrote a letter in 2021 to Cuomo asking for his commutation,” Lovy recalled telling Gonzalez. “You aren’t taking a position here against anything except the victim.”
Eventually an unnamed New York City Council member had to separate the two.
While the DA’s office would not confirm the confrontation — nor Gonzalez’s reputed decision to push for time served for the convict — it did claim to both support Deutsch and a resentencing for Weberman at the same time, stating that the sex criminal’s original 103-year sentence was “an extreme outlier” and “motivated by politics.
“We considered these facts and agreed to allow the Court to hear from all parties and make a fair determination that spares the defendant from dying in prison while serving this clearly excessive sentence,” said DA spokesman Oren Yaniv.
Weberman’s lawyer, Donna Aldea, did not respond to Post messages for comment.
Gonzalez has repeatedly ignored calls to appear with Jewish victims groups, activists said, instead spending time with major Hasidic community power brokers, including at one event just last week.
Meanwhile, in a recent amicus brief filed by Lovy and others, they noted that Weberman published a letter in a Hasidic paper last month comparing himself “to Jacob the Patriarch, and how his release will be analogous to Jacob, coming home to a beautiful family and great wealth.”
“To give him this massive benefit that basically nobody else gets — for somebody who’s so abhorrent and unapologetic and unremorseful and eager to return to his former glory — it’s sickening,” Townsend said.
Members of Weberman’s Satmar community vilified and attacked Deutsch during the trial — attempting to bribe her with $500,000 to drop the case and then revoking the kosher certification for her husband’s pizza shop, effectively shuttering it.
During Weberman’s trial, three people also were arrested for tweeting surreptitious photos of the victim in the courtroom, while a supportive rabbi allegedly had bleach thrown in his face by a Weberman supporter.
