Jennifer Sellitti: A study in class-based hypocrisy.
/By Rubashov
Jennifer Sellitti is a well-paid, well-perked, high-ranking bureaucrat in state government. Since 2007, she has been the Director of Training and Communications for the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender.
Sellitti grew up in Ringwood, where her father was the well-paid, well-perked Superintendent of the Ringwood School District. She graduated from Boston University with a degree in public relations/ image management, and then from Suffolk University Law School. She now resides in one of the richest, most exclusive towns in New Jersey. This is all public information, written and prepared for the world to consume by Jennifer Sellitti herself. Her biography reads:
“Jennifer Sellitti is Director of Training & Communications for the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender (OPD), where she is responsible for teaching trial advocacy and substantive law to public defenders in all of the agency’s practice areas. She works at the direction of the public defender on special projects that impact OPD clients such as forensic science education and litigation, police accountability, and pretrial justice reform. In addition, she represents clients charged with serious felonies at trials.
Prior to her appointment to director, she was the managing attorney for the Middlesex Trial Region and an assistant deputy public defender in the Essex County Adult Region. She worked as a staff attorney for the Committee for Public Counsel Services in Massachusetts before joining the OPD. Jennifer began her legal career at Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, where she worked on the organization’s Prison Brutality Project investigating claims of prison violence and representing inmates housed in solitary confinement at super maximum security prisons in civil rights lawsuits against correctional facilities and individual officers.
Jennifer is a faculty member at trial advocacy programs across the country including the National Criminal Defense College and the National Forensic College. She speaks nationally at professional conferences about issues surrounding legal representation for the accused. She a trustee of the Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers of New Jersey and serves on the Advisory Boards of the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Forensic Science Major and the State of New Jersey’s newly formed Conviction Review Unit. A graduate of Suffolk University Law School, Jennifer obtained a B.S. degree in public relations from Boston University. When she is not training lawyers or advocating for clients, Jennifer and her partner operate D/V Tenacious, a dive vessel that discovers, explores, and salvages shipwrecks in the North Atlantic.”
Wow… a dive vessel. Expensive hobby.
Jennifer Sellitti has made a career of arguing that people should be given the benefit of the doubt. That even in cases of extreme and brutal violence, their rights should be meticulously protected. It doesn’t matter if the person in question raped a child or murdered a grandmother, they have rights under the Constitution and its Bill of Rights.
Her partner/spouse is also an attorney. His professional biography notes that he has “successfully represented clients charged with offenses ranging from murder, aggravated assault, and drug offenses to driving while intoxicated and other motor vehicle violations. He has handled cases in municipal courts across the State as well as Federal District Court” and has “also appeared before the Family Court in domestic violence matters.”
We find it strange then, to see Jennifer Sellitti as part of a chorus, a kind of socially distanced mob, calling for the will of the voters to be reversed, and an elected member of the Ringwood School Board dismissed, simply because he said something that offended them. Is that how it works now? The next time one of her clients holds a knife to a woman’s throat while raping her, instead of a trial we should organize on social media, a few letters-to-the-editor, demand an immediate execution, and get it over with?
The target of Jennifer Sellitti’s ire is a blue-collar worker who ran on a platform of better fiscal discipline and lower property taxes. Unable to defeat him at the polls, the trolls got to work on him and found something they could complain about to demand his resignation and undo the election. What they found were instances of plain-spoken, honest, irreverent blue-collar language. A fat politician was correctly identified as fat. It was said that the Governors of New York and New Jersey were copulating (possibly fornicating) wankers, which, given the fact they are men who lost their virginity some time ago, is probably true. Again, we volunteered to pay for the Governors’ polygraphs to test the veracity of the statement. In this way, maybe, we could certify them as wankers.
In a column, published by Gannett yesterday, Jennifer Sellitti called such language “unprintable”. How very Victorian of her. Puritan even.
The target of Jennifer Sellitti’s ire is a blue-collar worker who ran on a platform of better fiscal discipline and lower property taxes. Unable to defeat him at the polls, the trolls got to work on him and found something they could complain about to demand his resignation and undo the election. What they found were instances of plain-spoken, honest, irreverent blue-collar language. A fat politician was correctly identified as fat. It was said that the Governors of New York and New Jersey were copulating (possibly fornicating) wankers, which, given the fact they are men who lost their virginity some time ago, is probably true. Again, we volunteered to pay for the Governors’ polygraphs to test the veracity of the statement. In this way, maybe, we could certify them as wankers.
In a column, published by Gannett yesterday, Jennifer Sellitti called such language “unprintable”. How very Victorian of her. Puritan even.
Sellitti went on to attack the accused for accessing a social media network called Parler, which she called “a platform disabled by Apple and Amazon because it fueled misinformation, incited violence, and exacerbated racial divides”. Instead of such a rush to judge, maybe Sellitti should take a moment to consider what a civil libertarian like Pulitzer prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald has to say…
In her Gannett column, Jennifer Sellitti offers a great many summary judgements against the accused, stated that his “divisive words on Parler matter, and he should pay the cost of speaking them by forfeiting his position.” Sellitti claims that he “incited violence” but does not explain how. Sellitti, who has argued on behalf of some very terrible people, who has asked judges and juries to remember their humanity, and for the possibility of redemption… denies all of that in this case:
“None of (the accused’s) excuses or apologies matter. It does not matter that he made the comments in his free time or that he was fired up about politics when he made them. As an attorney, I am keenly aware that people have the right to Free Speech. (The accused) is free to spew whatever hateful speech he wants. He does not, however, have the right to avoid the consequences of that spew. The emphasis (the accused’s) supporters put on freedom of speech is misplaced. It is not about speech. It is about accountability.”
It is about accountability! That sounds like an argument for mandatory minimum sentencing, for expanding the prison system, for the death penalty.
Sellitti then pronounces sentence: “There is no place in the educational system for a man like (the accused). Anything short of his immediate dismissal is a tacit admission that slurs can be tolerated, especially when made by a white man in a position of power.”
White? Why the racialist terminology? Power doesn’t come from skin color. Power comes from money, and from position.
When your neighbors elect you to represent them on a school board, that is less power and more chore. School superintendents have real power. So do lawyers. So do high-ranking state bureaucrats. Regardless of their skin color.
Jennifer Sellitti posts BLM images on social media, and she is evidently a fan, but the Marxism expressed by BLM’s founders misses the point of Marx if it negates class in favor of surface “identities” possessed by so many members of the One Percent. Take away the component of economic class and what is BLM? A species of religion?
Does Sellitti understand this? Whatever the case, she doesn’t appear to be against “offensive” speech in all instances.
For example, when two New Jersey judges came under fire for making comments that appeared to minimize the trauma of rape victims, Jennifer Sellitti was featured in an NJ.com story about public defenders and criminal attorneys coming to the judges’ defense. Judge Marcia Silva came under fire for her comment that the rape of a 12-year-old girl was not “especially heinous or cruel.” Judge James Troiano drew rebuke for saying a defendant, accused of raping a girl at a party and sharing video of it with his friends, “comes from a good family who put him in an excellent school where he was doing extremely well.”
Protests ensued, citizens demanded their resignation. State legislators called for disciplinary action, with both leaders of the New Jersey Legislature saying the judges should quit or be removed from office. But Sellitti and her colleagues were more understanding. The state’s top Public Defender argued: “Vilifying or seeking the removal of judges who make unpopular or even erroneous decisions threatens the independence of the judiciary.” NJ.com quoted Sellitti:
“Obviously, any allegation of sexual assault is a serious allegation,” said Jennifer Sellitti, the public defender’s office’s director of communications. “But one of the things a judge is charged to do is to look at a crime, whatever crime is charged, and to look at underlying facts.”
Hey, we get it. Rich lawyers deserve the benefit of the doubt. Blue-collar guys who the taxpayers elect to a school board… not so much. Marx would recognize it. This is about class. Economic class.
And it is a timely lesson on how hate works. Societal hate, institutional hate, systemic hate – it is always top down. For hate to flourish, you need permission to hate. Permission and societal support.
Hate is always with us. It is the object of hate that changes. Based on fashion. It was once fashionable to mock Irish people. Just look at some of Thomas Nast’s cartoons. It was popular to hate the Irish – and lucrative, those cartoons sold well. The ruling elites of their day looked on when mobs (real, not virtual) burned Roman Catholic Churches and lynched Italians. Quakers were burned at the stake by the good people of Boston. They held the wrong opinions, you see. It was once fashionable to abuse Black Americans and Jews and Mormons.
Today, it is fashionable to hate the white working class. They are the new “those people”.
Hate remains. Merely the object of hate changes. And it is with this perspective that we view Jennifer Sellitti and all those miserable hangdog faces, without mercy, out to destroy someone in Ringwood.
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?”
“The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy – everything.”
-George Orwell
N.B. We welcome a conversation on this and all topics raised on this website. Jersey Conservative is entirely open to your ideas and opinions. To submit a column for publication, please contact Marianna at Marianna@JerseyConservative.org.
