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Hayim Cohen in 2023 (Law&Crime).
Hayim Cohen gained notoriety on YouTube and TikTok as a rabbi who took in children and cared for them. As time went on, the 40-year-old Texas man told his followers that he suffered from an illness and was in hospice.
But it turned out that, apparently, Cohen was neither terminally ill nor a rabbi — and he was sexually abusing his adopted sons.
On Monday, a Houston judge sentenced Cohen to 40 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to four counts of continuous sexual assault of a child and one count of indecency with a child.
“You realize you are never going to get out of prison, you’re going to die in prison?” Judge Lanilo Lacayo asked Cohen.
The defendant continued to feign illness during the sentencing hearing, not answering Lacayo when he asked him his age.
“I know you understand everything I’ve said to you from the beginning to the end,” Lacayo said, according to local CBS affiliate KHOU. “You ran an interesting con, sir. You violated all these boys and you’re here today facing justice.”
Houston police detectives began investigating when one of the victims called into an Atlanta-based podcast on a burner phone and detailed the abuse. The podcaster contacted authorities.
Police arrested Cohen in February 2023 on allegations that he had abused six of his nine adopted sons. When they went to his house they were met with a hospice care provider purportedly looking after Cohen. However, when detectives took him to two hospitals, doctors could find nothing medically wrong with him.
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Being in jail has apparently not stopped Cohen from continuing to fake his sickness. In a hearing about a month after his arrest, he showed up in a wheelchair and a urine drainage bag. On Monday, he appeared in court with a shaved head and face, looking like he had lost a significant amount of weight. He was still in a wheelchair.
Prosecutors still believe he is mostly faking his illness.
But for the victims, Monday was about justice.
“It feels like justice has been done for the seven boys,” Harris County Assistant District Attorney Jana Oswald told the Houston Chronicle. “I feel that justice has been done for them and they don’t have to get up and testify and recount everything that they’ve experienced by him. That’s a relief for myself and for them.”
Two of the victims filed a lawsuit earlier this year against Texas’ Child Protective Services and other agencies claiming they failed to properly vet Cohen prior to him adopting the kids.
“I think that the whole system of adoption and foster care in Texas is just awful,” one of the boys’ attorneys, Sheryl Chandler, told the Chronicle. “Cohen should never have been able to adopt one child, let alone nine. A single person, who had no job, who claims to be a Jewish rabbi and is not, and they just kept putting more and more kids in his care.”
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