This bizarre case, with the intense back-stabbing, bribery, lying, treachery, threats, ad nauseam, is behavior typical of members of a tribe and the clans within that tribe. The Jews of Brooklyn are a tribe and the war is between the clans within that tribe.
It became part of a larger fight when one clan member went to an authority outside of the tribe and a powerful clan leader and his clan objected.
Seeing their clan power structure being overturned by the larger outside authority, the tribe attacked the offending member who had caused the power change within the tribe and the loss of “face” to the larger nation within which the tribe was located.
Jews take the Torah and Talmud seriously, and when a fellow Jew raised the issue of sexual predation of a “Heblew”, the tribe retaliated.
Alas, their response was more primitive tribal than Moses would have approved of.
Tribalism is a nasty way to live, be the tribe in Brooklyn, the Muslim part of Detoilet, Michigan, or any Muslim community.
Note that I purposely have made no comment on tribes other than tribes of Semites.
One thing at a time.
I saw little evidence of true tribal authority. Instead, there is a tension between secular authority and a community with lots of internal and competing hierarchies, but without leadership having any power. Where were the rebbinim?
Were there true authority, Mr. Kellner would have been willing to trust a rabbinic court. Instead he sought the outside authority. That said authority wields true power (prison time), is the key distinction. The wraparound is money for politicians.
It is that disconnect in the wraparound between secular and religious authority that makes these cases so complex, with yet another source of authority (media and reputation) adding to the brew. Note also that the media are both secular and internally cultural.
Hence, to call this tribal or clannish is to underestimate the degree to which an easily corruptable secular authority plays into internal community conflict.
Non-Jews are also supposed to establish courts in order to enforce the G-d-given Noachide Laws. With the transformation of secular government into an even bigger monster than it's always been, this may be a way to circumvent it . . . by building a parallel Theocratic structure based on G-d's Laws as opposed to Obama's.
Eventually (after the coming of Mashiach) the entire world will be gradually converted to a Judaism Theocracy--a literal Kingdom of G-d on earth, as it was always meant to be. Why would any "conservative" object to that?