A Brooklyn man who dodged prison time despite molesting a 7-year-old girl at a synagogue and sexually abusing a 13-year-old boy will finally serve a long stretch behind bars after a federal judge sentenced him to 30 years for more child sexual abuse.
In the more recent case, Joseph Grunwald, 34, coerced two minor boys into sending him sexually explicit images of themselves, one of them a 14-year-old boy he also sexually abused, federal prosecutors said Monday. He was still on probation for one of his two prior crimes.
Grunwald shared the 14-year-old boy’s image in a group chat, captioning the photo “nice d—,” and threatened to expose the boy to his mother and other friends, prosecutors said. He was busted in January 2024 and remains held at MDC Brooklyn.
He pleaded guilty in August to coercing the 14-year-old into a sexual performance and two counts of receiving child pornography. On Wednesday, Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Nina Morrison handed down the three-decade sentence.
Grunwald was already on New York’s sex offender registry after pleading guilty in 2019 to two previous crimes, but avoided serving time behind bars. He was was sentenced to 10 years and three years of probation in those state court cases in January 2019.
In the first case, in September 2017, he “snatched a seven-year-old girl from the floor of a synagogue” and “held her against his body and touched her private areas over her clothes,” according to court filings.
While that case was pending, between February and March 2018, Grunwald molested a 13-year-old boy 11 times in exchange for a cell phone and the use of his debit card. The teen told police Grunwald went to a mikvah, or a Jewish ritual bath, at the same time as young boys to find more victims, according to federal prosecutors.
He pleaded guilty to first-degree sex abuse with an individual less than 11 years old in the case of the 7-year-old and second-degree sex abuse in the other case.
“The defendant has demonstrated that he poses a grave danger to children. Today’s sentence was necessary to protect the community from this recidivist menace for decades,” U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella said. “Notably, the defendant’s prior New York State sentences for sexually assaulting minors – in each case, he received probation – failed to deter him.”
Theodore Parisienne for New York Daily News
Joseph Grunwald was busted in January 2024 and remains held at MDC Brooklyn. (Theodore Parisienne for New York Daily News)
Grunwald started in on his new victims in March and April 2023, when he was 31 years old. He started chatting with the 14-year-old boy on Telegram, lying that he was 15 and not an adult.
He convinced the teen to send him an explicit photo that May, and drove more than 40 miles from Williamsburg, where he lived, to the boy’s Rockland County home, luring the teen out of his house while he watched from his car and told the boy he was “hot.”
By June, the threats began, and he sent the explicit photo to the group chat.
“Yesterday you pushed me like a crazy person when you tried to run away from me in the shul. You’re going to get it, crazy. I am going to call your mother. I have her cell phone number. Good luck. I’m going to tell her everything,” Grunwald told the teen, according to court filings.
At some point between June and July 2023, he picked the teen up near his synagogue, drove him to a dead-end road, gave him a cell phone and a card with phone minutes, and fondled the boy, then kept the cell phone box as a “memento,” the feds said.
“The defendant repeatedly told (the teen) that he had victimized other minors. For example, he told (the teen) that he ‘do[es] it with teenagers every day,’ following this comment with an emoji making a ‘shh’ expression,” wrote Assistant U.S. Attorney Vincent Chiappini on Oct. 15.
Prosecutors describe how Grunwald “relentlessly pursued” a second minor boy, got him to send an explicit photograph, and showed up unexpectedly at the boy’s synagogue. He connected with the second victim through thousands of Instagram messages, Chiappini wrote. That victim’s exact age is not referenced in court documents.
The investigation revealed that he kept 75 images and 35 videos of child sex abuse material on a Samsung device, and he had sexually-charged conversations with two more teens, one 16, the other 17, the prosecutor wrote.
“The defendant has four known minor victims, he claims to have had many others, and all of the conduct for which he has been convicted occurred in less than six years,” Chiappini wrote.
“He pursued a months-long campaign of threats to terrify one of the minor victims of his sexual exploitation. The defendant is a grave risk to children.”