From the very beginning, the Katsav affair has played out in two different arenas, the police and the judiciary, and the media.

The first involves the investigation of President Moshe Katsav's claims of blackmail and the claims by various women that he sexually assaulted them. The second arena is, by far, the more active of the two. It now seems apparent that even though the president equipped himself from the start with top-flight lawyers and media advisers, they were unable to give Katsav the upper hand in either area.

	Advertisement

On the legal front, Katsav's men were trounced, as borne out by Attorney General Menachem Mazuz's decision to indict the president. In the past two months, Katsav's legal team has made great efforts to persuade the state to investigate various claims about the credibility of the complainants. The material the lawyers passed on the the prosecution was examined but found to be unsubstantiated. Katsav's attorneys also agitated for prosecuting his accuser A., the former President's Residence employee, for attempted extortion against the president. A final decision has not been made on this issue.

Katsav is also not winning any major points in the media arena, which uber-adviser Motti Morel has taken over on his behalf. The president's associates and Katsav himself, as he demonstrated in his speech last night, feel the media has taken the complainants' side and tried him in a kangaroo court. At the same time, Katsav's entourage has continued to make excellent use of the media, repeatedly slipping reporters documents whose sole purpose was to present the complainant who got the ball rolling as a mentally unbalanced callgirl who worked as a stripper in New York. Katsav's attorney originally depicted her as a stalker a la "Fatal Attraction," but in recent months the defense team has adopted a much dirtier tactic: "Unequivocally, A. was a prostitute," Katsav associate attorney Amnon Shomron said yesterday in an interview with Army Radio. A.'s lawyer, Kinneret Barashi, announced yesterday afternoon that she was preparing to sue him for slander.

The latest addition to Katsav's legal team, Sharon Nahari, usually represents organized crime figures. He has offered his new colleagues depositions from individuals whom he says met A. in the context of her work in the sex industry.