Ten days have been scheduled for the trial for defamation and false suspicions on the part of singer Gil Ofarim. After a break, the third day is already underway; the court in Leipzig will also meet tomorrow, Wednesday (November 15th) and Thursday (November 16th).
According to the plan, nine witnesses are to be heard today; Below are eight eyewitnesses who experienced the events in the hotel. There is also another person who was a driver for Gil Ofarim. The court wants to create as comprehensive a picture as possible of the overall situation in October 2021 at the business hotel “The Westin”.
The provisional last day of negotiations is December 7, 2023.
In advance, “Focus” magazine had the opportunity to conduct a Q+A interview with Ofarim’s defense attorney Alexander Stevens from Munich. He sees the “hotel manager on duty as being convicted of what we believe is an obvious lie.” Reason: The manager stated that he did not know Ofarim beforehand. In a written statement from the internal investigation, however, a Google search by the hotel man is included.
“From our point of view, the credibility of the witness is very important and must of course be taken into account when evaluating his statement in the overall context,” said Stevens. In his argument, the lawyer zeroed in on the “Westin” employee: “Incidentally, the hotel manager’s story about immediately expelling Mr. Ofarim from the house because of the threat to rate the hotel poorly seems quite adventurous. I can reveal this much at this point: We can even prove the diametric opposite!”
Nevertheless, other statements from the trial days so far have revealed a less positive situation for Ofarim. “Focus” therefore asks whether Ofarim “still has a chance” of a positive verdict for him.
Attorney Stevens sees the central point, the alleged anti-Semitic insult over the necklace with the Jewish star, as a “classic statement-versus-statement situation,” since the previous witnesses had not directly heard the last course of the conversation.
In this interview there is already speculation about going to the highest court in the Federal Republic of Germany, the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, as Ofarim’s defense sees a “fair trial only to a limited extent” due to the Leipzig proceedings.
Before that happens, the October day in the lobby of a luxury hotel will be illuminated in further detail today.