When Senator Robert Menendez was charged last year with involvement in an elaborate bribery scheme, headlines highlighted a bizarre detail: Investigators had discovered more than $480,000 in cash and 13 gold bars during a search of his house in New Jersey.
A few days later, Senator offered an explanation for money, saying he regularly withdrew large sums of money from his savings account, a custom he said he learned from his Cuban immigrant parents.
Now Mr. Menendez’s lawyers went further, saying the habit was rooted in deep psychological trauma linked to his father’s suicide and a family history of confiscated property in Cuba.
They want a psychiatrist who evaluated Mr. Menendez, 70, to testify at the senator’s federal corruption trial about what they described as “traumatic experiences from his past related to money and finances.”
Mr. Menendez’s father was a compulsive gambler who committed suicide after Mr. Menendez “finally decided to stop paying his father’s gambling debts,” the senator’s lawyers said in a recent letter to the government describing the psychiatrist’s conclusions.
The psychiatrist’s findings were disclosed in detail for the first time Wednesday evening in a government court filing containing the letter. In the filing, the office of Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, asked a judge to bar psychiatrist Karen B. Rosenbaum from testifying.
The dispute over Dr. Rosenbaum’s potential testimony comes less than two weeks before the start of Mr. Menendez’s highly anticipated trial in Manhattan.
Dr. Rosenbaum would testify that the death of Mr. Menendez’s father and his parents’ background as Cuban refugees left him with a “fear of scarcity” that led to a “long-standing coping mechanism consisting of to regularly withdraw and store cash at his home,” the senator’s lawyers said. , wrote Adam Fee and Avi Weitzman.
Prosecutors, in asking Federal District Court Judge Sidney H. Stein to bar the testimony, said Dr. Rosenbaum’s opinion “does not appear to be the product of any scientific principle or method.” reliable “.
They also argued that having the psychiatrist testify appeared to be an “unconscionable attempt” by Mr. Menendez to ensure that the jury was informed of the family history he shared with the doctor, without subject to cross-examination while testifying.
Prosecutors also called it an inappropriate attempt to “generate sympathy based on his family history, under the guise of expert testimony.”
They said that at a minimum, if Judge Stein was inclined to allow Dr. Rosenbaum to testify, the prosecution should be able to have the senator examined by a government-hired psychiatrist.
Mr. Menendez, a Democrat and former chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is accused of accepting bribes in exchange for his willingness to use his influence to help New Jersey’s allies and governments Egyptian and Qatari.
He will be tried along with two New Jersey businessmen who were also charged with participation in the bribery conspiracy. The senator’s wife, Nadine Menendez, was also charged but obtained a separate trialin July, after her lawyers said she had a serious health problem this would require surgery and a prolonged recovery period.
All four defendants have pleaded not guilty.
The indictment, which runs to 66 pages, describes various schemes. But maybe nothing has attracted public attention as much as his descriptions of cash, gold bars and a Mercedes-Benz convertible found during a June 2022 search of the senator’s home in Edgewood Cliffs, NJ
Investigators found much of the cash in envelopes and hidden in clothing, shoes, a duffel bag and a safe, according to legal deposits.
After having been billed in September, Mr. Menendez offered what he called an “old-fashioned” explanation for at least some of the money discovered during the search. He said that for 30 years he had withdrew money each week from his savings account for “emergencies”.
He told reporters he did so “because of my family’s history of being threatened with confiscation in Cuba.”
Prosecutors, however, said some of the money discovered in the house was wrapped in tapes indicating it had been withdrawn, at least $10,000 at a time, from a bank where neither Mr. Menendez nor his wife had an account. This indicated “that the money was provided to them by another person,” they wrote in court documents.
Mr. Menendez was born in New York in 1954 to parents who had fled Cuba in the years before Fidel Castro took control of the country. He has spoken and written about growing up in an apartment building in Union City, a densely populated northern New Jersey community that has become a magnet for refugees from the Cuban diaspora.
His mother was a seamstress and his father, a carpenter, died when Mr. Menendez was 23, he told the New York Times in 2005.
Dr. Rosenbaum, a forensic psychiatrist based in Manhattan, has testified in other high-profile criminal cases in New York. Reports filed with the Internal Revenue Service indicated that Mr. Menendez used his legal defense fund to pay $4,200 to Dr. Rosenbaum in late March.
