A 98-year-old retired math teacher has asked a Manhattan federal judge to clear her “good name” — insisting she was never a “Red Menace” despite her 1950 conviction in an atomic espionage case.
“I just want to end my life with a clear name,” Miriam Moskowitz of Washington Township, NJ, told The Post on Tuesday.
“I was portrayed as a monster, and I did nothing wrong, and it affected my relationships, my entire life.”
Relying on recently unsealed court papers that appear to show she was framed, Moskowitz filed a petition in Manhattan Federal Court on Tuesday seeking to overturn her McCarthy-era conviction on conspiracy to obstruct justice.
Lawyer Roy Cohn, who gained fame during the McCarthy hearings, was one of the prosecutors in Moskowitz’s trial. He famously called it a “dry run” for the notorious spy trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Moskowitz spent two years in a federal prison and was hit with a $10,000 fine after being convicted along with her married lover and one of his associates.
She was accused of lying to a grand jury to protect herself and the men — her boss and then-lover, chemical engineer Abe Brothman, and Harry Gold.
Gold threw Moskowitz under the bus at trial by testifying that she knew he and Brothman were plotting to lie to the grand jury.
But six-decade-old grand jury records unsealed in 2008 show that Gold had previously told the opposite to the FBI many times.
Moskowitz’s petition to vacate her conviction alleges that Gold fingered her only after the government threatened him with the death penalty.
“Had the jury seen and heard this key evidence, no reasonable jury could have believed Gold’s later testimony against Moskowitz,” the papers say. “Without that recanted testimony, Ms. Moskowitz could never have been convicted.”
Moskowitz, who didn’t testify at her trial, says she refused to take the stand because she would have had to admit she was having an affair with a married man.
She also would have had to say she was briefly a member of the Communist Party, in 1948.
She said her relationship with Brothman ended once she “realized” he “was not an honorable man.” Brothman died in 1980.
She never married or had children.
“I was afraid to do anything socially or interact with people,” Moskowitz said. “I was shy because I didn’t want people finding out” about the past.
She said she finally put her fear of being “blacklisted” to rest late in life while “setting the record straight” in her 2010 memoir “Phantom Spies, Phantom Justice.”
“It would also vindicate a sense of sorrow about my parents, who died shielding me from hurt,” she said of her current court action. “ I just wish they were here now to see that I am going forward with this action.”