Actor Moshe Ivgy sentenced to 11 months in prison for sexual assault
Monday's sentence comes after Ivgy was convicted for the sexual assault of four women and a five-and-a-half-year legal battle.
By MATAN VASSERMAN/MAARIV, JERUSALEM POST STAFFIsraeli actor Moshe Ivgy arrives to the Haifa Magistrate's Court for the verdict in his trial on suspicion of four counts of indecent assault and three offenses of sexual harassment, January 9, 2020. Photo by Flash90(photo credit: FLASH90)
Actor Moshe Igvy has been sentenced to 11 months in prison for sexually harassing and assaulting multiple women. The sentence was handed down on Monday, five-and-a-half-years after he was exposed for the allegations of his sexual harassment on the Walla news website. Two weeks ago, during sentencing arguments in the Haifa Magistrate's Court, the Haifa District Attorney's Office requested that the actor be sentenced to more than three years in prison following his conviction for indecent acts and the sexual harassment of four women. Ivgy's defense attorney objected to the prosecution's request, arguing the only thing that should be imposed on the actor is community service.In March of this year, the Haifa District Court accepted the state's appeal and convicted Ivgy of all sexual offenses attributed to him in the original indictment.This came after justices Avraham Elyakim, Erez Porat and Tamar Neot Perry discussed appeals filed by the Haifa District Attorney's Office and the actor's lawyer against the ruling of Judge Ziv Arieli in the city's Magistrate's Court last January, in which Ivgy was convicted of two indecent acts on a woman who worked with him in 2012.He was sentenced a year ago to only six months of community service, six months of probation and compensation for one woman in the amount of NIS 10,000. Many critics then protested against the lax sentencing, including women harmed by the actor, women's rights organizations and others from the general public.While in the final verdict Ivgy was convicted of indecent acts and the sexual harassment of only four women, the media published testimonies from dozens of women who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by the actor - including 12 who testified in an investigation published in Walla. The women claimed that the actor harassed them, attacked them, pushing his tongue inside their mouths and put his hands in intimate places. In some cases he did so repeatedly, even after the women asked him to stop.Two key witnesses in the investigation, actresses Dalit Kahan and Ana Stefan, who spoke anonymously at first and later publicly, described the same patterns of behavior in incidents where the actor sexually assaulted them while working together, forcefully kissing them against their will. They both pushed him away, and were fired from their jobs several days later.In an interview with Hamakor (The Source) on Channel 13 last month, Ivgy appeared to present himself as a victim in the case. Although he said he had acted badly and even apologized, he did not acknowledge the sexual harassment and assault. He denied some of the cases attributed to him, and claimed that he had forgotten other incidents, or that they had been consensual.Advocate Dana Meitav, CEO of the Women's Lobby in Israel, stated before the sentencing: "Ivgi took advantage of his position in the industry for years to harm women - he humiliated, harassed and attacked them, and retaliated in part professionally when they opposed him. We expect him to be prosecuted. Every influential person will know that he has no right to use his success to harm women, and that violent acts have a price."
