MK Eitan Broshi was suspended from the party and urged to quit the Knesset after a woman accused him of having sexually assaulted her in an elevator 15 years ago.
By GIL HOFFMANUpdated: JULY 31, 2018 02:48Eitan Broshi(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
Zionist Union MK Eitan Broshi will sue his party leader Avi Gabbay because he failed to apologize by a 9 p.m. deadline on Monday for calling him a sex offender, said Broshi’s lawyer, Ilan Bombach.Facing a NIS 300,000 libel lawsuit, Gabbay refused to back down from his insistence that Broshi quit the Knesset, due to an anonymous complaint from a woman who told Channel 10 that he had fondled her in an elevator 15 years ago.“Ensuring that the public sphere will be safe and protected for women is a goal that we will continue to fight for,” Gabbay said. “Scare tactics will have no impact.”To win in court, Gabbay will need to prove that what he wrote on Facebook on Sunday was true: that Broshi had committed “shameful acts” and was a “sex offender” who “does not belong on the street or in the Knesset.”Broshi has immunity from prosecution as an MK, but Gabbay is not an MK and does not.Broshi said on Monday that Gabbay had executed him without checking his facts. He noted that when Gabbay was director- general of the Bezeq phone company, he also had been accused of wrongdoing and was even briefly under house arrest before being cleared.Female Zionist Union MKs continued on Monday to insist that Broshi resign. MK Michal Biran said he should fight for his innocence from outside the Knesset.“He should free us of the shame of him remaining in our presence,” MK Shelly Yacimovich said.Despite the efforts to pressure Broshi to quit and MK Zouheir Bahloul’s announcement on live TV that he was resigning from the Knesset Saturday night, neither of them is the one Zionist Union MK who will be leaving the Knesset on Tuesday.That is when Sunday’s resignation of new Jewish Agency chairman Isaac Herzog will take effect.
