1980s Child Sex Case Is a Cause He Cannot Drop Andrew Jarecki, who made "Capturing the Friedmans," said the case involved coerced confessions and a tainted investigation. If someone ever decided to make a documentary entitled "Capturing the Jareckis," the family in question would look a lot more like a 1970s version of J. D. Salinger's Glass family than the Friedmans. It would feature a brainy group of serial overachievers, a commitment to film and social justice and a politically engaged soundtrack by Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs. Aside from disparate documentary urges, an upbringing in expensive suburbs and several male offspring, there is very little overlap between the Friedmans, the dysfunctional Great Neck, N.Y., family whose sex abuse case provided the basis for Andrew Jarecki's Oscar-nominated documentary, "Capturing the Friedmans," and Mr. Jarecki's family, which includes high-powered parents and two other accomplished filmmaking siblings. What is remarkable, almost grist for someone else's film or novel, is the degree to which a quarter-century after the guilty pleas by Arnold Friedman and his son Jesse, and a decade after his film was finished, Mr. Jarecki remains obsessively committed to Jesse Friedman's exoneration. Four days after the release of a 155-page report in which the Nassau County district attorney, Kathleen M. Rice, said firmly that Jesse Friedman had been properly convicted and did not deserve to have his status as a dangerous sex offender overturned, Mr. Jarecki found himself back in court with Mr. Friedman's lawyer, Ron Kuby, pursuing a new round of appeals. In more than a few places, the report by Ms. Rice's review team and its advisory panel of outside experts seemed as focused on reviewing Mr. Jarecki's film as on parsing points of law and fact. "The Review Team committed itself to follow the facts wherever they might lead, and found that the whole truth diverged significantly from the edited version of events portrayed in the film," Ms. Rice's report concluded. Mr. Jarecki, 50, strongly disagrees, noting that in the film and beyond it, he has interviewed 19 students of the computer classes in which Arnold and Jesse Friedman were accused of molesting boys in the 1980s, more than Ms. Rice's review team did. He called her report "a 155-page rehashing of old evidence and the development of new evidence based on discredited sources, hearsay and the admission that they didn't really talk to the witnesses." He characterized the case as one of coerced confessions and a tainted investigation. Mr. Jarecki has pursued the case with such dedication in part because he can. He was one of the founders of Moviefone, which began as a telephone movie-listing service and was sold for hundreds of millions of dollars in 1999, leaving him with a fortune large enough to serve as a financial cushion that most aspiring filmmakers can only dream of. But Mr. Jarecki's remarkable persistence is also a reflection of his family DNA and a harrowing personal journey that has played a role in turning a film into a cause. His father, Henry Jarecki, is a psychiatrist, businessman and movie and theater producer, who was a pioneer in using computers for commodities trading. His mother, Gloria Jarecki, was a film critic for Time magazine. His brother Eugene Jarecki and half-brother, Nicholas Jarecki, are both successful filmmakers. Another brother, Thomas Jarecki, is a finance executive. For all of them, interest in film and a passion for liberal causes were central threads of family life, pursued through their work and a family foundation all four brothers and their families contribute to. "My father is sort of a Teutonic taskmaster who believes in hard work; from him I get that sense that if you don't finish that brief you're not staying up late enough," said Andrew Jarecki, who grew up in Rye, N.Y., lives in Manhattan and has three children. My mother brought a lot of humanity to that, a passion for fairness. Our family really gets our energy from trying to outsmart each other in arguments. We're not a family that plays ultimate Frisbee together. His first film project morphed from a look at children's party entertainers into the dark recesses of "Capturing the Friedmans," and though the film has a haunting ambiguity, Mr. Jarecki became increasingly convinced over time that Mr. Friedman was not just unfairly convicted, he was innocent. As he worked on new projects, including fictional and nonfictional takes on another troubled family, the Dursts of New York, he has brought his father's energy and both parents" passion for social justice to Jesse Friedman's case.