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.

A couple in California is accused of abusing, torturing and murdering their adopted son, with the 10-year-old being rushed to a hospital “in medical distress” before dying several hours later, according to cops.

Alejandra Marin, 51, and Juan Sanchez Moreno, 59, have been arrested on felony murder and torture charges, including one count of willfully causing or permitting harm to a child, according to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office. The couple was booked on Friday, Nov. 22, following an investigation by the department’s Central Homicide Unit and Special Victims Unit.

On Nov. 21, deputies responded to a call of a 10-year-old boy “in medical distress” at a home in the 13000 block of Malibu Court, Moreno Valley, per an RCSO press release. Authorities found the child and rushed him to a local hospital, where he was stabilized.

Thanks to nearly two-years of COVID-19-related shutdowns and sheltering-in-place orders, working from home has become the new normal. Face-to-face interactions have been replaced by meeting on real-time videoconferencing platforms such as Zoom, FaceTime or Microsoft Teams, while cloud-based collaborative programs have become absolutely vital if any work is to be done.

And, of course, long commutes and dressing up in business casual or office attire have been replaced by rolling out of bed and making sure you’re somewhat presentable when you fire up the camera on your home computer.

As with many things that people are forced to do for extended periods of time, many got used to the new normal and actually found some of it to be enjoyable and more productive. As things are opening up again and people are getting back to how they lived before the COVID-19 pandemic, will that spell the end of the remote-work era?

Not for Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. The litigation powerhouse made headlines in December, when it announced that partners and staff could work from home permanently if they chose to. At the time, founding partner and chairman John B. Quinn said adopting this policy would allow the firm to recruit the best litigators, regardless of where their desks were.

Quinn joins the ABA Journal’s Victor Li to talk about the reasoning behind that policy and the challenges of maintaining the firm’s culture in an increasingly virtual world. Quinn also talks about how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the practice of law, especially in the litigation world in which Quinn Emanuel makes its money and reputation.