Zehava Gal-on: Judy Shalom Nir-Mozes obstructing probe into husband’s alleged sexual harassment; Zionist Union MK calls on Shalom to suspend himself
Meretz party leader Zehava Gal-on said Saturday that Judy Shalom Nir-Mozes, wife of embattled Interior Minister Silvan Shalom, should be investigated for allegedly obstructing an investigation into claims her husband sexually harassed several women over the course of more than a decade.
At least seven women have stepped forward and complained that Shalom harassed them, but none of them has filed a complaint. Police so far have not opened an investigation.
“An investigation should be opened against the Shalom couple. The minister’s wife, Judy, threatens women complainants and obstructs investigation procedures,” Gal-on said at a cultural event in Beersheba.
She said that the complaints piling up against Shalom leave the attorney general no option but to instruct police to open an investigation.
On Friday the minister’s wife said “no one will break me” on a weekly radio show she co-hosts.
“Since my brother was run over by a car and my dad was run over by a car and my first husband died in a plane crash and my mother died within the span of three months when I was young […] I hope I won’t have illnesses on account of this whole story,” she said.
Judy Shalom on Friday tweeted an implied threat against complainants but then rushed to delete it.
Unnamed police officials assessed that an investigation against the interior minister’s conduct will be opened even if no one steps forward and formally lodges a complaint, due to the sheer number and severity of complaints.
Zionist Union MK Shelly Yachimovich wrote on Facebook on Saturday that Shalom should “at the very least” suspend himself temporarily until his name is cleared.
Yachimovich wrote that she’s known the senior Likud minister for more than 30 years and that they’ve been good friends despite being on opposite sides of the aisle.
“It was not easy for me to talk about this matter. I admit that I even considered not referring to it until the matter is clarified,” she wrote. A picture she added to her post, of her and Shalom speaking at the Knesset plenum, “is not a rare occurrence,” she wrote.
“Another testimony arrived and then another, and I got more and more phone calls, the pattern became clear,” she wrote, “and then Judy’s tweet came […] I understood how concerned [the complainants are] and I decided: enough,” Yachimovich wrote. “My commitment is not to those who wield power, like me, but first and foremost to those whose faces are unknown, who have letters instead of first names.”
She alluded to the media’s identification of the women complaining of alleged abuses only by their initials.
Yachimovich praised former Jewish Home MK Yinon Magal for “setting a new and important standard. He did not badmouth the complainants, he admitted – and he quit. Magal’s conduct is part of a welcome change we are experiencing. Women stop being ashamed of what they experienced and those who are ashamed and pay the price are those who should be: the aggressors, not the victims.”
The Zionist Union MK ended her post by criticizing the remarks by some of Shalom’s colleagues that some of the complaints against him were “old or recycled.”
“Well my friends, the gun does not remember, but the target never forgets,” she wrote.
As reported by The Times of Israel