Wearing a white head wrap, accused child abuser Malka Leifer sat in silence before a Melbourne court via video link on Thursday, stooped over and hiding her face with her arms crossed.
Her hunched position was familiar from court appearances in her native Israel, but for the first time something was different: she was finally facing prosecution and her accusers on Australian soil, six years after the case against her was opened in 2014.
For the most part, Leifer, now 54, did not attend court hearings in Israel, claiming to be unwell.
“She started to shake and make noise in the courtroom, and then the fainting began, and then she refused to come upstairs from the holding cell,” recalls anti-child abuse activist Manny Waks, who attended the vast majority of the case hearings in Jerusalem’s District and Supreme courts. “Eventually, the judges allowed her to remain [in the cell].”
In 2016, Israeli courts dropped the initial extradition effort, declaring the former principal of Melbourne’s Adass Israel School was mentally ill and unfit to be tried in Australia, where she now faces 74 charges comprising 11 counts of rape, 47 of indecent assault, three of sexual penetration of a child and 13 of committing an indecent act with a child.
Read the article by Gabrielle Weiniger in The Age.