By Shayna Jacobs
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT — An alleged cyber-bully accused of harassing and stealing the identities of Dead Sea Scrolls scholars testified in Manhattan Supreme Court on Monday that he was merely trying to defend his father's own work on the ancient texts.
Rafael Golb, 50, took the stand to explain why he created e-mail accounts under the names of academics who disagreed with his father, Dr. Norman Golb — a specialist in Jewish history at the University of Chicago — on the origins of the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls.
"I was defending my father against all kinds of vicious attacks against him," said Golb, who claimed his dad's name had been dragged through the mud by contemporaries and said that one rival in particular, Dr. Lawrence Schiffman, chairman of NYU's department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, plagiarized his father's work in an academic paper 15 years ago.
Golb admitted to creating the e-mail address "larry.schiffman@gmail.com" and did not deny sending e-mails from the account to Schiffman's colleagues with links to articles about the allegations of plagiarism. However, Golb said he was innocent of stealing Schiffman's identity.
"If I had really wanted to impersonate [Schiffman], I would have forged his NYU email address," Golb explained.
Golb said the people who received the e-mails couldn't possibly think they were from Schiffman himself because they were obviously written "in an outlandish manner."
His only purpose, Golb argued, was to draw people's attention to the alleged theft of his father's work, which he believed had been ignored by NYU and the academic community.
On Sept. 14, the first day of the trial, Schiffman testified that Golb's e-mails accusing him of plagiarism were unsubstantiated and said that his colleagues began to ignore and mistrust him because of them.
"My colleagues were being bombarded with stuff. It was spreading and spreading and spreading and people were beginning to take it seriously," Schiffman testified.
Golb faces charges of identity theft, criminal impersonation, harassment and forgery. If convicted of the top count, he could face up to four years in prison.
