Sara Netanyahu testifies in court: ‘I’m media’s punching bag’

“I’m the media’s punching bag,” said Netanyahu’s wife while calling the former employee in the prime minister’s residence who is suing her a liar.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Sara Netanyahu testified Monday in regional labor court in Jerusalem against a former employee who is suing her for workplace abuse, Kan Israel News reported.

The wife of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the court that she had never acted in the insulting and cruel way that Shira Raban, a cleaner in the prime minister’s residence, described in her testimony in June.

“I’ve become the media’s punching bag,” she said in her opening remarks. “It’s the easiest thing to sue me.”

In the body of her testimony, the first lady continued in the same vein.

“They’ve told so many horror stories, that employees almost never come to work for me,” she said. “They demonized me in this regard, as well as saying that I run the country and appoint senior officials.”

She called Raban a “plant,” and denied the cleaner’s charges.

“Everything that Shira Raban is saying is a lie,” she said.

She also accused a former senior employee of being behind the lawsuit.

“I heard that Meni Naftali called dozens, if not hundreds of people to sue [me],” she said, referring to the caretaker of the prime minister’s residence who was awarded damages in 2016 in a case he brought against the first lady for the “harmful working conditions” he had suffered there.

The court’s verdict at the time ruled that “helpless employees are forced to work very many hours while being exposed to exaggerated demands, insults and bursts of rage” from Mrs. Netanyahu, who runs the residence “with a strong grip.”

Raban had worked for the Netanyahus for one month in 2017 and sued shortly thereafter for NIS 225,000, saying that her conditions were “not a day’s work, it’s a day of abuse.”

When the trial opened in June, she claimed that Mrs. Netanyahu had forced her to change her clothes and wash her hands dozens of times a day, forbade her to eat, drink or rest, and would not give her time off to take care of a sick child.

She also claimed that at one point, she believed Netanyahu was going to assault her. “The situation seemed as if she was going to hit me, and I think that if I hadn’t run away she would have hit me,” the young ultra-Orthodox mother of three said.

Netanyahu had just sent her lawyer when the trial began, not coming herself. This had earned her a tongue-lashing from the judge, who had said that “the defendant should have testified first.”