Sara Netanyahu testifies in employee mistreatment lawsuit against her
‘I am afraid of every employee, as if I’m living in the shadows’
By YONAH JEREMY BOBSara, wife of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, arrives at a court hearing in the fraud trial against her(photo credit: REUTERS)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, testified on Monday at the Jerusalem Regional Labor Court in her defense against a lawsuit for mistreatment by former employee Shira Rabban.Rabban only worked in Sara Netanyahu’s residence over a one month period, but has claimed that the prime minister’s wife harassed her so severely that she was emotionally traumatized.Claiming over NIS 200,000 in damages, Rabban, a haredi woman in her mid-20s, is only the latest of several ex-employee lawsuits against Sara.Former employees Meni Naftali and Guy Eliyahu previously won civil damages judgments for mistreatment and underpayment of overtime.Responding to the allegations on Monday, Sara said that Rabban was lying and that she had “become afraid of every employee, as if I’m living in the shadows…Maybe if I say ‘hello,’” someone would sue her and pretend she had yelled at them.During the hearing, Rabban’s lawyer Naomi Landau, who also represented Naftali and Eliyahu in their successful lawsuits, pressed Sara about multiple witnesses who had testified that she frequently yells at employees.Sara rejected the allegations and shot back at Landau “you should be the last person” to accuse her since Sara said Landau was profiting by filing so many allegedly false legal claims against her.Sara also accused Naftali of pressuring Rabban into suing her and claimed that Rabban might be a mentally weak or naïve pawn in a war of other former employees and the media against her.Sara did not deny an incident in which Rabban complained about work conditions, but Sara responded frankly that when employees do not like their work they are always free to quit.Mostly, Sara acted as if the allegations if mistreatment could not be true because she said that she and Rabban did not interact many times, with a supervisor usually serving in between them.
As in past cases, Sara accused the media of a more than 20-year campaign to falsely blacken her name.The hearing came two months after Sara had been scheduled to testify with a confusing dispute between the judge in the case and Netanyahu’s lawyer about whether she could come late to the hearing since there had been many witnesses scheduled.Following the hearing, Sara put out a video statement condemning the entire case as a reality show put on by the media and her detractors to defame her.Despite Sara’s claims, she has not only lost multiple civil cases, but also plead guilty in June to corruption charges involving her directing employees to commit fraud to squeeze additional funds out of the state for her personal use in hosting guests.
