New Jersey senator Rob Menendez is to launch a “Finding Your Roots” defense in his federal corruption trial — claiming his Cuban heritage has given him PTSD.
The indicted Democrat will claim he suffers from “intergenerational post-traumatic stress disorder” thanks to his parents’ experience in Cuba before he was even born, federal court papers say.
The claim will form a key part of his defense once a jury is sworn in at Manhattan federal court, where jury selection began Monday.
Menendez, 70, is accused of 16 criminal counts, including wire fraud, extortion, obstruction of justice, and conspiring to act as a foreign agent for Qatar and Egypt — with prosecutors saying he was bribed with gold bars, nearly $500,000 in cash and a luxury Mercedes convertible.
The senator is accused of stashing the spoils in the Englewood Cliffs, NJ, home he shares with his second wife, Nadine Arslanian Menendez, who he married in 2020 and who is also indicted but will go on trial separately in July.
Menendez, Arslanian and their co-defendants, New Jersey businessmen Fred Daibes and Wael Hanna all vehemently deny all charges. If found guilty he would face expulsion from the Senate and a sentence of up to 200 years.
US District Judge Sidney Stein warned potential jurors Monday that the trial is likely to take up to seven weeks.
It is unclear if Menendez himself will take the stand but he has already revealed parts of his potential plan to secure an acquittal.
Jurors are expected to hear from at least two expert witnesses who are poised to testify that his parents fleeing Cuba in the early 1950s shaped Menendez’s life — even though he was born in New York in 1954.
Psychiatrist Karen Rosenbaum, one of the two expert witnesses, is expected to testify that Menendez experienced two “significant traumatic events” that led to “intergenerational post traumatic stress disorder,” court papers say.
The events related to Menendez’s family’s “experience as refugees, who had their funds confiscated by the Cuban government and were left with only a small amount of cash that they had stashed away in their home,” court papers say.
But Menendez himself has offered apparently shifting accounts of why his parents — both now dead — left Cuba.
While he was a rising political star in Union City, NJ, in 1980, he told the Jersey Journal that his father, Mario, was a government minister in Cuba who moved to the US when he foresaw political trouble in pre-revolutionary Cuba.
But in 2014 he told the Jewish Standard that it was his mother who pushed to leave, and said nothing about his family being politically connected.
In the 2014 interview he claimed his parents were “ordinary working people” and that his father ran a factory for a New York-based necktie manufacturer.
Menendez said his father was hesitant to leave, but Evangelina, who already had two young children, was determined to leave, several years before revolutionary Fidel Castro came to power and began expropriating local companies.
“My mother didn’t like [Fulgencio] Batista,” he said, referring to the dictator who took over in 1952. “She didn’t like what she saw in the mountains, with the cattle barons, and she didn’t like what she was afraid was coming.
“They didn’t have much – but what they had was in Cuba. And she said, ‘Either you come with us or we leave you behind.’”
Neither account said his parents’ cash had been taken. Public documents confirm that his mother, Evangelina Lopez Menendez, whom he has often described as an impoverished immigrant, left Cuba in the early 1950s.
The potential defense means prosecutors will have to dig down into Menendez’s origin story if he sticks with the plan to use it, a legal expert at the University of Chicago Law School told The Post.
“I’m sure that the government is going to want to prove that everything Menendez is saying is correct,” said Sharon Fairley, a professor of practice at the law school.
Menendez has also indicated he could claim that he is traumatized by his father’s death. In court documents, his attorneys said that Mario, “a compulsive gambler,” committed suicide when Menendez decided to stop paying his gambling debts.
The combination of his parents fleeing Cuba and his father’s gambling led him to stockpile cash at home as a “coping mechanism” to his “fear of scarcity,” he has said he may argue.
According to public records, Mario Menendez died in Hoboken on June 1, 1978 when he was 63 years old.
Fairley said that Menendez’s lawyers are using the trauma defense likely to prove that he did not have evil or corrupt intentions when he hoarded the cash or allegedly accepted bribes.
Menendez may also blame his wife for introducing him to their co-defendants, according to court documents unsealed last month.
He may argue that his wife “withheld information,” leading him to believe that nothing illegal took place when they accepted the gold bars and cash in exchange for political favors.
Menendez last faced a federal corruption trial in 2017, accused of taking lavish trips to the Caribbean on the private plane of benefactor Salmon Melgen, a Palm Beach eye doctor, who was also indicted on bribery and corruption charges.
The case ended in a mistrial, and the Department of Justice dropped the charges after the Supreme Court narrowed the definition of bribing a public official. Melgen was separately convicted of Medicare fraud.
