Australia
Former school principal convicted of raping student
The head of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish school was accused of raping a student and sexually assaulting her sister.
Published
Sisters Elly Sapper (left), Nicole Meyer (center) and Dassi Erlich react to the verdict.
AFP
A former school principal was found guilty Monday of raping a minor and sexually assaulting two sisters at an ultra-Orthodox Jewish school in Australia. Fifteen years ago, she escaped arrest by fleeing to Israel.
Malka Leifer was found guilty of 18 counts, including the rape of a student in her home and the sexual assault of an underage student during a class trip. The facts were committed while she was a teacher of religious studies and principal of the Adass Israel school in Melbourne. She was cleared of nine other counts.
Leifer, who has always maintained her innocence, sat with her hands crossed and stared straight ahead as the verdicts were read. According to the indictment, she raped a student in 2006 after inviting her to sleep over for “kallah lessons,” a kind of premarital etiquette class. She has on several occasions told female students that she was grooming them to be wives, according to prosecutor Justin Lewis’ briefing. “It will help you on your wedding night,” she would still have said to a student after a sexual assault.
This mother of eight, now in her fifties, fled Australia for Israel after a complaint was filed in 2008 and settled with her family in the settlement of Immanuel in the West Bank. Australian authorities requested her extradition in 2014. She arrived in Melbourne at the end of January 2021, after six years of legal battle in Israel, aimed in particular at determining whether she was feigning mental illness to escape extradition and a trial in Australia.
Defense attorney Ian Hill previously said Leifer denied “all criminal acts alleged by each of the plaintiffs” and that his interactions with the students were “professional and proper”.
(AFP)