Servitude case in hands of jury

Deliberations continue today

? Prosecutors said Thursday that a Newton couple operated a “house of horrors kept financially afloat by fraud” in which they enslaved mentally ill residents and forced them to work naked and engage in sexual acts, while billing the government and their families for the therapy.

Arlan Kaufman, 69, and his wife, Linda, 62, are being tried in U.S. District Court on more than 30 federal charges – including health care fraud, Medicare fraud, forced labor and holding clients in involuntary servitude – related to the treatment of residents at the Kaufman House Residential Treatment Center.

Jurors, who began deliberating the case Thursday afternoon, did not reach a verdict and went home for the evening. They were to resume deliberations today.

Arlan Kaufman’s defense attorney, Tom Haney, closed out his case saying video footage of the alleged crimes proved nothing other than successful treatment. Haney also said government agencies have been after the social worker for decades for his unconventional therapy.

Linda Kaufman’s attorney, Steve Joseph, argued prosecutors had no solid evidence against her.

Federal prosecutors contend the Kaufmans controlled the lives of mentally ill residents, including deciding who could wear clothes. They are accused of forcing residents to masturbate, fondle each other and shave each other’s genitals – or as Justice Department civil rights lawyer Kristy Parker put it in closing arguments, making the mentally ill into “uncompensated actors in a never-ending pornographic show.”

The Kaufmans are accused of crimes dating to as early as 1984. The servitude counts arise from manual labor the residents did at the Kaufmans’ farm and from their part in the videos.

Parker said the Kaufmans had an obsession with nudity. She noted that Arlan Kaufman focused on residents’ genitals in the videotapes and secretly made tapes of people at a nudist colony.

She said the Kaufmans used pure psychological coercion to control their mentally ill patients, likening it to “a cult dominated by the leadership of Arlan Kaufman.”

Defense downplays videos

Assistant U.S. Atty. Tanya Treadway ended her closing arguments with the words of one mentally ill resident who testified: “What happened at the Kaufman House was an abomination. : It was no delusion.”

Haney, representing Arlan Kaufman, downplayed videos that prosecutors called “stomach-turning,” saying the acts depicted in them happen hundreds of times a day.

Haney said the hours of footage showed only one incident in which residents engaged in oral sex and three incidents where his client may have been touching patients’ genitals.

Prosecutors cited residents’ testimony alleging such fondling happened hundreds of times.

Haney urged jurors to look at the tapes and see how happy the residents were.

“It was therapy. No one was harmed; they were helped,” he said.

He told jurors the more theatrical the allegation, the more suspect they should be of it.

“This is not a cult-like Charles Manson facility,” Haney said. “There was no crime.”

Haney said Arlan Kaufman dedicated decades to the mentally ill and was successful in his unconventional treatments.

“When you strip away all the adjectives, all the outrage : and look at the results, you will find Dr. Kaufman not guilty of a single charge,” Haney said.

Joseph, the attorney for Linda Kaufman, told jurors the evidence against his client is weak but prosecutors want the evidence against her husband to “slop over” to her case.

He noted that in one of the few videos that showed Linda Kaufman, she was sitting in a therapy session reading the newspaper and did not even look at the nude mentally ill resident.