SPECIAL REPORT: A prosecutor hit former Fox 5 reporter Charles Leaf hard yesterday in his child sex abuse trial, but the Emmy-winning investigator remained steadfast.
“Mr. Leaf, you said you love the victim,” Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor Kenneth Ralph asked yesterday afternoon in Hackensack. “How can you love her when she betrayed you like this?”
“She didn’t betray me,” Leaf responded.
LEFT: Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor Kenneth Ralph INSETS: Nanny Weronika Karwowska, Defense attorney Brian Neary, Superior Court Judge Guida, Leaf (STORY / PHOTOS: Mary K. Miraglia, CLIFFVIEW PILOT) Courthouse Reporter
“She did betray you,” Ralph insisted. “She told the secret you told her to keep.”
Next, Ralph asked Leaf a series of questions intended to show that he had seen the little girl he’s accused of assaulting after his 2010 arrest, in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
But Leaf said he had never been to Times Square with the victim at any time.
Ralph also asked questions that he told Superior Court Judge James J. Guida were intended to show that Leaf deleted child pornography from his computer when he realized he was the target of an investigation. Besides the alleged assault, Leaf is charged with possessing the pornography.
In response the prosecutor’s questions, Leaf said he couldn’t recall making at least four calls to attorneys at the time but could have done so for a story he was reporting.
He also insisted that he didn’t know he was being investigated until Detective Barbara Stio told him she wanted to talk to him in Hackensack.
Then Ralph asked Leaf point-blank whether he’d assaulted the girl, as an indictment alleges.
“Did that happen, Mr. Leaf?” the assistant prosecutor asked repeatedly.
“Absolutely not — no, no, no, no,” Leaf responded. “No, none of this happened, Mr. Ralph.”
Cross-examined by his attorney, Brian Neary, Leaf spoke of experiences with his father-in-law, Kristoff Wilsky, a retired diplomat who came from Poland last week to take full responsibility for the kiddie porn found as “deleted” files on a desktop computer seized from the family room of the Leaf home in Wyckoff.
Leaf said he found his father-in-law’s behavior “disgusting.”
“I’m not a pedophile, I’m a lurker, a person who “hangs around the internet and looks, but doesn’t act,” he said Wilsky told him. “That was his explanation.”
This led to a pair of confrontations, he said, one of which Leaf testified that he immediately discussed with his wife.
“We decided our kids wouldn’t be left alone with her parents, as a precaution,” Leaf told jurors.
They also severely restricted Wilsky’s use of their computers whenever he visited, he said.
“I would get on the computer as soon after he finished as I could, and check the Internet history to see what he’d been looking at,” Leaf said.
Leaf testified that he got Wilsky to buy him a new computer, which ended up having child porn on it.
He said it also “had tons of files I didn’t want to discard — family photos, work documents, my wife’s resume, things you don’t want to lose.”
So he consulted with technical people he knew from stories he had done on identity theft, and they recommended a software called “Cyber-Scrub” to clean the system, Leaf said.
Earlier in yesterday’s proceedings, Leaf accused the state’s key witness in the case — the girl’s nanny — of being untrustworthy. SEE: Charles Leaf protests innocence on stand, blasts nanny
Neary rested his case yesterday, while Ralph reserved the right to cross-examine Leaf further.
As a result, although closing statements were set for tomorrow, they could occur Tuesday morning.
STORY / PHOTOS: Mary K. Miraglia, CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter
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THE TRIAL:
EXCLUSIVE: With the final witnesses set to testify, the child sex assault trial of former FOX 5 investigative reporter Charles Leaf has been marked nearly as much by what’s gone out outside the trial as what’s been revealed inside the Hackensack courtroom. READ MORE ….
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EXCLUSIVE: The father-in-law of former FOX TV reporter Charles Leaf testified yesterday in his son-in-law’s child sex assault trial that child pornography found by Bergen County prosecutor’s detectives on Leaf’s computer was actually his. READ MORE ….
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EXCLUSIVE: The nanny in the child sex assault trial of former FOX TV reporter Charles Leaf testified today that the alleged victim told her that he touched her “there” — after previously insisting two or three times that he didn’t. READ MORE ….
Charles Leaf (STORY / PHOTO: Mary K. Miraglia, CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter)
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EXCLUSIVE: Two full days of scrupulous questioning in the child sex assault trial of former Fox 5 TV reporter Charles Leaf ended yesterday in Hackensack with a defense attorney and chief investigator from the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office continuing to butt heads. READ MORE ….
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EXCLUSIVE: A retired investigator testified today that Bergen County detectives searched for child pornography on the work computer of former Fox 5 reporter Charles Leaf — a fact apparently not told to defense lawyers or prosecutors before his child sex abuse trial began this week. READ MORE ….
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EXCLUSIVE: The second day in the child sex-abuse trial of former Fox 5 reporter Charles Leaf in Hackensack today featured a former investigator testifying about an interview she observed with the then-4-year-old girl who prosecutors say was the victim. READ MORE ….
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UPDATE: Showing considerable composure, an 8-year-old girl testified in Hackensack today that former FOX 5 reporter Charles Leaf never touched her and that molestation allegations she made to a therapist years ago were fed to her by her nanny, whom she called “Weronika.” READ MORE ….