Last update - 00:00 05/07/2007
Defense claim A. was coached influenced AG's Katsav decision
By Yuval Yoaz, Haaretz Correspondent
Attorney General Menachem Mazuz decided not to indict former president Moshe Katsav for rape due to problems with the evidence that he discovered during a hearing for Katsav's attorneys in May. To demonstrate these problems, Haaretz is publishing excerpts here from the transcript of a conversation that took place between A., who worked for Katsav when he was tourism minister, and her friend Yaron Armoza.
The defense claimed that Armoza "coached" A. on what to say, and therefore, her testimony was unreliable. Armoza rejected this claim, insisting that his conversation with A., which he recorded without her knowledge, was merely a recapitulation of previous conversations and did not include any new information.
"I recorded it because it was important to me that A.'s credibility not be undermined, and when the investigation began, I'm the one who gave the tape to the police," he said. "The conversation on the tape is meant to recapitulate all the conversations we had a million times before, and at no point did I tell her to say this or that."
But Katsav's lawyers, Avigdor Feldman, Zion Amir and Avraham Lavie, used the tape to argue that Armoza coached her. And Haaretz's review of the transcript revealed that indeed, many things that Armoza said in the taped conversation were later reiterated by A. as part of her testimony.
This does not imply that her testimony was false. The police investigators and prosecutors who heard it or reviewed it found it credible, and Mazuz even said that he would probably have charged Katsav with raping A. had a plea bargain not been signed. Nevertheless, the tape would have provided an opening for the defense to attack A.'s credibility in court, making it harder to secure a conviction.
The taped conversation apparently took place on July 12, 2006, a few days after the first sexual harassment accusations against Katsav surfaced, but before A. testified to the police. "Armoza put words in A.'s mouth, words that were repeated afterward in her testimony almost verbatim," the defense attorneys wrote to Mazuz. "He is feeding the story to A. in all its details."
At the start of the conversation, for instance, Armoza says: "He [Katsav] is actually nice ... 'how pretty you are' and all that, and after that he begins to say 'I'm pining for you, I dream of you all the time, I want to be with you' ... And then he begins going into the room and closing [the door] and speaking more intimately ... We're even talking here about ... it seems to me, even a little petting or something like that."
Later, Armoza interrogates A. about details of the rape. "Look, he started up with you right away, right? As soon as you started working in the ministry, he began?"
A.: "Right away? I hadn't been there a week, I didn't understand what was happening ... I'm telling you, Yaron, he has no control. He sees a girl and he stops. As if he doesn't see anyone [else]. It doesn't matter if it's an ambassador; he doesn't see. He loses control."
Later still, Armoza says: "He obviously begins with the hands, holding hands and suchlike, loverlike."
A: "Yes."
Armoza: "And gives a loverlike hug."
A: "Yes."
Armoza: "He also tries to tell you personal things about himself and Gila [Katsav's wife], to get close to you."
A: "Exactly. I'm telling you, he's sick ..."
Armoza: "What interest does he have in the documents you bring to his office, to his room?"
A: "Yes, exactly."
Armoza: "He's more interested in whether you come with a skirt or not."
A: "You know what, that's just how it is. He tells me 'come with a skirt; it's more comfortable.'"
In their letter to Mazuz, Katsav's attorneys said that "there is not one detail in A.'s frame story that was not said by Armoza. We claim that these things did not happen in reality; they are the product of training, coaching by Armoza and others."
The gist of Armoza's statements did in fact recur in A.'s police testimony. On August 17, for instance, she told the police that a week or two after she started work, Katsav began singling her out. First, he praised her work, "then suddenly he began flattering me about my hair. He said 'wow, what pretty hair you have' ... And he would begin telling me that he had had sex with his wife that night and he was thinking of me ... He would ask me to come in a skirt, since I usually go about in pants."
Armoza, who worked for years in a treatment center for victims of sexual assault, insisted that throughout, he used the techniques taught there: "You don't press the complainant to speak." However, he said, "the minute she told me of her own initiative that if the police asked her, she would talk, I knew she was ready."
Roni Singer-Heruti contributed to this report