Posted on 12/04/2001 4:20:54 PM PST by PJ-Comix
The middle school student who police say had an 18-month affair with his teacher testified at her trial Monday that he lived a teenage fantasy.
The teen said Beth Friedman, 43, seduced him by plying him with lavish gifts -- trips, money, clothes, jewelry, a car and drugs -- and even did his homework for him.
The affair was a fantasy, Friedman's lawyer countered, but one that existed purely in the teen's imagination.
Friedman is charged with indecent assault, unlawful sexual activity with a minor and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. She faces 76 years in prison if convicted.
``She was the teacher everybody wanted because she let you do whatever you wanted in her class,'' the teen, now 19 and working as a roofer, testified in the first day of Friedman's trial. ``I could do stuff other people would get in trouble for, and she would just look the other way and pretend she didn't notice. So I started to sit at her desk just to see what would happen, and she just let me sit there all the time.''
The teen, who was 14 when he met Friedman, testified that he used drugs, his grades in school were ``horrible,'' and he was often in trouble for fighting. He said his friendship with Friedman grew as she began giving him rides home from school, and eventually became friends with his mother, the teen testified.
He would eat lunch with Friedman and another teacher in their room because he was new to Silver Lakes Middle School and couldn't get along with other kids in the cafeteria.
``They ordered pizza and Chinese food,'' the teen testified. ``I'd come back bragging to the other kids `I had Chinese food for lunch, what did you have?' ''
She started doing his school work, and getting permission from other teachers to let him sit in her room all day.
``She'd take my work from me and do it. Sometimes I didn't even know it was done. I'd just get a grade back,'' he said.
Friedman started taking him and his younger brother to a video arcade, then to movies and out to dinner.
``I'd page her and say: `Me and my friends are hungry,' and she'd come take us out to eat,'' he said. ``But then it got too expensive so she'd just take me and one friend out.''
Eventually, the teen's brother, mother and mother's boyfriend moved into Friedman's Hollywood condo. She took the boy on trips to Busch Gardens, Universal Studios and the Keys, with her and the teen sleeping in one bed and a friend of his or his brother sleeping in another, he said.
On one of those trips, he said, e Friedman performed a sex act on him while his brother slept. On the way home in the car, he said ]she performed another.
When he was 15, he wanted a car.
``She said: `If you have sex with me I'll buy you a car,' '' said the teen, who chewed gum and played with a rubber band on the witness stand. ``So I did, and she did.''
The teen said Friedman gave him money to buy drugs, introduced him to cocaine and would challenge him to contests to see who could take the most Xanax without falling asleep. She also bought him lavish gifts and let him drive her car and her father's Rolls-Royce, he said.
``Whatever I wanted, she got it for me,'' he said.
But Friedman's lawyer, David Bogenschutz, peppered the boy with questions about his story, particularly the teen's assertion that the affair ended after Friedman offered him $25,000 to impregnate her.
The teen said he asked his mother, who had been unaware of the affair, for advice. She went to the police, and he got angry because he didn't want the affair to end. He moved out of the house and in with a stripper, but sent Friedman notes asking for money.
Broward Circuit Judge Stanton Kaplan occasionally had to intervene when the teen gave defiant answers to Bogenschutz's questions.
``Why would a law school-educated teacher, who lives in a nice place, who drives a newer Jeep Cherokee, whose father drives a Rolls-Royce, pay $25,000 to be impregnated by a 16-year-old dropout with a drug habit?'' Bogenschutz asked the boy, who shrugged his shoulders in response.
Prosecutor Stacey Honowitz told jurors that no matter how consensual or bizarre the relationship seemed, it is still against the law for an adult to have sex with a minor.
``She did it for love, she did it because she craved him,'' Honowitz said. ``The theory that she's a wonderful, beautiful teacher can't protect her when she crossed that line.''
The trial continues today.
ROFL... naive.
PJ's way right.
The correct, but wildly unpopular answer is : becase Americans sexual views and beliefs are entirely screwed up and puritanical.
Hillary Klinton ladies and gentlemen... she's here nightly.
This thread is living proof that FibreCon and Metamucil will always have market share :)
No, but I am.
If you're just in it for a *body* get yourself a *perfect* blow-up doll.
WHETHER or not a teen/pre-teen boy WANTS sex and gets it....are two different things. A teacher who does this should be locked up FOR LIFE, never allowed to teach again. Let her TEACH the male prisoners.
SICK woman!
She's hot,not doubt about it. Besides trying to "tone it down" to make the court less likely to believe she has any interest at all in attracting males,she is also scared. Imagine her happy and smiling with make-up on. Or happy and smiling with nothing on.
I'm with PJ,here. The only way a woman like that can sexually abuse a teenage boy is make him perform more than 5 or 6 times a day.
Admit it,you're just steamed becasue some woman is giving it up without playing all those "sex as a weapon" games.
Actually,you are wrong. A teenage boy is too old for a NAMBLA member. They prefer them under 10. Anybody who can't understand the difference between a grown woman and a teenage boy having consensual sex,and a grown man and a young boy havn't non-consensual sex has problems with sex,not the details of this case.
I agree. This young man would have been MUCH better off if he had devoted himself entirely to one fat girl who refused to put out more than twice a year,and who demanded he work 16 hours a day 6 days a week to be able to afford to support her in comfort while all she does for him is whine and shreik about how her spandex pants are just too damn tight and cutting off her circulation.
I guess you don't know what it does to me when you post text like this without pictures. Next time please, post pictures. LOL!
Calling him a sick-o doesn't change the facts.. he is telling it the way it is. Reality. The way that guys at that age think!! Like it or not.
And here lies the root of the problem for American women,and why they are so outraged about this. This teacher had sex for FUN! She didn't make the male jump through flaming circus hoops or buy her a new SUV. She broke "union rules".
Is there any wonder nobody who has lived in other countries wants American women?
I have a different take here. This is a teenaged boy who has been in all kinds of trouble before. Would it really take a car to entice him to have sex with the teacher? No way. The boy would have done it for nothing. He's lying on this one.
And if they say "No",it makes them Elton John.
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