On Tuesday, singer and actor Gil Ofarim appeared before the Leipzig Regional Court to face charges of defamation, false suspicion, false affidavit and process fraud.
The trigger for the legal dispute is a video that Ofarim posted online in October 2021 in which he made serious accusations against an employee of a Leipzig hotel. The musician claimed that he asked him to take off his Star of David necklace so that he could check in.
After evaluating eyewitness reports and numerous data, including that from surveillance cameras in the hotel, the city public prosecutor’s office came to the impression that Ofarim’s description did not happen. The affected hotel employee then filed a complaint for defamation.
Gil Ofarim: The process
Ofarim is said to have been accompanied by six judicial officers and security personnel, as “Bild” reports, and three police vehicles also secured the court building.
The accused hotel employee was not personally present at the start of the trial. He was initially represented by his co-plaintiff. However, he is expected to testify as a witness at a later date. Gil Ofarim, who was represented by four lawyers, reportedly appeared tense during the trial and insisted that he had been subjected to anti-Semitic insults at the hotel because of his Star of David necklace.
word agains word
The public prosecutor’s office is said to have ultimately assumed that Ofarim had invented the incident in the hotel lobby because he had to wait too long to check in and was annoyed that other guests were allowed to come in. There is no audio recording from the hotel. It’s a classic case of testimony against testimony.
Finally, in the surveillance video published by Bild, a chain was not visible and the hotel employee claimed not to have noticed it, which led to the investigation against him being dropped. The musician who can be seen in the video contradicts this representation and emphasizes that he did not leave out or distort any information. He also explains that the video is still available on his Instagram profile and that he would make the same decision again, although he did not expect the reaction it would trigger.