98-year-old 'red menace' seeks to clear her name before she dies
'I was portrayed as a monster and I did nothing wrong,' Miriam Moskowitz says
Miriam Moskowitz, a 98-year-old who served two years in federal prison after a conviction in an explosive, McCarthy-era espionage case, wants to clear her name before she dies.
Moskowitz, a retired New Jersey math teacher, filed a petition in Manhattan Federal Court on Tuesday seeking to overturn the 1950 conviction.
“I just want to end my life with a clear name,” Moskowitz told the New York Post on Tuesday. “I was portrayed as a monster and I did nothing wrong. And it affected my relationships, my entire life.”
She was found guilty of plotting to lie to a grand jury to protect herself and Abraham Brothman, her boss and then-married lover. Moskowitz was dubbed a "red menace" by New York tabloids, but court papers filed Tuesday seek to vacate her conviction because grand jury records unsealed in 2008 show Harry Gold, the man who accused Moskowitz of the plot, had lied to the FBI.
“Had the jury seen and heard this key evidence, no reasonable jury could have believed Gold’s later testimony against Moskowitz,” her petition argues. “Without that recanted testimony, Ms. Moskowitz could never have been convicted.”
She says she came across the unsealed records while researching her 2010 memoir, “Phantom Spies, Phantom Justice."
Moskowitz never testified at her trial because she says she would have had to admit her affair with Brothman — and that in 1948 she was "briefly a member of the Communist Party," the Post reported.
Gold testified against Moskowitz and Brothman, the petition alleges, after he was threatened with the death penalty.
Both Moskowitz and Brothman were convicted of obstruction of justice. Brothman died in 1980; Gold served 15 years in prison. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted on spy charges in the trial that followed, were given the death penalty.
Moskowitz says that after she was released, she was shunned by the community.
"I went to a concert about a year [after her release] and all these people I knew were there, and they literally turned their backs on me because they did not want me to approach them," Moskowitz told the Daily News. "It really cut me up.
"It made me very shy and restricted my social activity," she added. "I didn't feel at ease with people. I was always afraid I was going to be found out."
Moskowitz, who lives alone in Washington Township, New Jersey, told the Post that an overturned conviction would "also vindicate a sense of sorrow about my parents, who died shielding me from hurt."
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