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Netanyahu Aide Steps Aside After Sexual Assault Allegations

JERUSALEM — A top aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel stepped aside Thursday after several women accused him of sexual assault, denouncing what they called his “predatory” behavior.

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Netanyahu Aide Steps Aside After Sexual Assault Allegations
By
David M. Halbfinger
, New York Times

JERUSALEM — A top aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel stepped aside Thursday after several women accused him of sexual assault, denouncing what they called his “predatory” behavior.

The official, David Keyes, Netanyahu’s English-language spokesman, was publicly accused of sexual assault Tuesday by two women, Julia Salazar, a New York state Senate candidate, and Shayndi Raice, a Wall Street Journal reporter. Two other women made similar accusations in interviews with The New York Times.

Keyes, who was reported by Israeli news media to be under consideration for appointment as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, has denied the allegations, which had become a political liability for Netanyahu. But late Thursday, Keyes said he was taking a leave of absence.

“In light of the false and misleading accusations against me and in order not to distract from the important work of the prime minister, I have asked to take time off to clear my name,” he said in a statement. “I am fully confident that the truth will come out.”

The allegations concern events that predate his appointment by Netanyahu in March 2016.

Salazar publicly accused Keyes on Tuesday of coercing her into having oral sex with him in 2013. Three other women told The Times of similar attempts to bully them into sex, sometimes using physical force.

Employees at several organizations, including an advocacy group he ran, said Keyes’ aggressive sexual advances toward young women in their workplaces repeatedly led to measures to keep him away from them. In 2013, he was restricted from wandering the offices of The Wall Street Journal’s opinion section after he propositioned several women there, employees said.

Before joining the Israeli government, Keyes, 34, a California native who became an Israeli citizen, ran two small advocacy groups based in New York promoting conservative Middle East policies. As he gained prominence, he had frequent speaking engagements and television appearances, and generated publicity with satirical stunts mocking the human-rights records of countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Salazar said in an interview that Keyes first contacted her in November 2013, when she was a senior at Columbia University and an activist for J Street U, the campus arm of a liberal pro-Israel lobbying group. She felt “flattered” by his interest, she said.

They went to a coffee shop, and then to his apartment.

“In hindsight I wish I’d left, but I had no reason to think he’d do anything inappropriate or aggressive,” she said. “I was kind of naive. I was 22. I just thought, I’m an adult and I can just leave when I want to. It turned out that that wasn’t true.”

After she entered his apartment, his “demeanor changed,” she said. “He told me to sit down on the couch.” He put his arm around her and tried to kiss her, she said.

She said she tried to leave but Keyes, whom she recalled as a much taller “bear of a man,” pulled her to his bedroom. “He starts taking his clothes off,” she said. He demanded oral sex, saying “you’re not going to leave until” he was sexually satisfied, she said.

Salazar said she argued with him “for 30 minutes” but was afraid to try to leave. She started crying, but performed oral sex on him, “crying the entire time,” she said.

“It was completely nonconsensual,” she said. “But I don’t think I had the language or wanted to consider myself someone who’d been sexually assaulted. And I didn’t even consider reporting it.”

Keyes has called Salazar’s accusation “false” and has attacked her credibility, citing a series of recent reports — published in the context of her political campaign — challenging her statements about her personal biography.

But other women have come forward to say Salazar’s experience matched their own. Keyes declined to respond to those accusations. Elizabeth Schaeffer Brown, a human-rights activist based in Brooklyn, said in an interview that she had met Keyes in July 2015.

Keyes told Brown about one of his advocacy groups “and was insistent that I come over to his apartment” to learn more about it, she said. She did. “That was a stupid move,” Brown said. “He assaulted me. It was the most aggressive situation I’ve ever experienced.”

“He made it extremely difficult to leave by grabbing me toward him forcefully,” she said.

Raice, the Wall Street Journal reporter, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday that she, too, had “a terrible encounter” with Keyes.

“No matter how often I said ‘no,’ he would not stop pushing himself on me,” Raice said. “I was able to extricate myself quickly and it was a very brief and uncomfortable moment, but I knew as I walked away I had encountered a predator.”

The two met at a party, and two days later went out for coffee and had what she called “the worst date of my life.”

Keyes told her he wanted to play a song for her on the piano and asked her up to his apartment. When Raice, who was 31 at the time, eventually agreed, but only after making clear that “I’m not hooking up with you,” she wrote.

But Keyes quickly started “mauling me” anyway, she wrote.

“I repeatedly said ‘no,’ multiple times,” Raice said in the interview. “He repeatedly ignored me. He was basically trying to bully and pressure me into having sex with him.”

It was Keyes’ behavior toward young women that resulted in measures being taken to insulate them from his advances, according to interviews. That is why he was curbed from the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section, which he frequented to make common cause with its conservatives, in November 2013, according to several Journal employees, including four who said he propositioned them.

The section’s deputy editor at the time, Bret Stephens — now a columnist for The New York Times — said he gave Keyes a dressing-down, calling him a “disgrace to men” and “a disgrace as a Jew,” and barred him from the office without an appointment.

Keyes sent email messages to several Journal employees apologizing “for being less than gentlemanly,” as he put it in at least two of the emails. One of those employees, Kate Havard, was an intern. Keyes, in late-night text messages, dangled the possibility of having her work for him and asked her to come to his apartment then to discuss it. When she declined, the texts show, Keyes said he would have to find someone else for the assignment.

Another former Journal writer said Keyes had attacked her, pushing her down on his bed and ripping her tights, after luring her to his apartment in November 2012. “He started trying to take off his clothes, while trying to keep me on the bed with one arm,” she said, speaking on condition of anonymity because she is looking for work and fears that being identified as a victim could harm her prospects.

In late 2014, Keyes was reined in again, this time at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a conservative policy group in Washington, according to four workers there, after he made several unwelcome advances to two young female employees, one of whom had been assigned to coordinate his appearance at an event hosted by the organization.

When the two women complained, the foundation imposed a new policy restricting visitors from roaming the offices freely, according to two people who worked there at the time. The foundation confirmed it had “put in place strict policies and best practices that reflect zero tolerance for harassment or any form of inappropriate behavior.”

Sometime between 2012 and 2014, Keyes was also kept away from interns at one of his own organizations, according to three former co-workers there, each of whom insisted on anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their careers.

One, a former employee of Advancing Human Rights, said Keyes routinely made “lewd comments” about women’s bodies and attractiveness, and asked interns out on dates so frequently that some quit.

A female manager in the organization, aware of the complaints, responded by establishing a new system under which interns reported to her, not to him, a former employee said.

The allegations against Keyes have prompted some members of Parliament to attack Netanyahu for keeping him on staff.

Allegations against Keyes had circulated among a network of East Coast conservatives and pro-Israel activists almost from the moment he was named as Netanyahu’s spokesman. In early 2016, The Times of Israel published an article describing Salazar’s allegations without naming her. Keyes denied them, saying through a spokesman that there had been “absolutely no coercion in our encounter.”

On Nov. 2, 2016, after an Israeli reporter began inquiring about Keyes, Stephens said he contacted Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, warning him that Keyes posed a risk to women in Israeli government offices.

Neither Salazar nor a number of other women who complained of Keyes’ actions agreed to go public with their accusations until this week. Several said that they grappled with whether Keyes’ behavior was criminal or merely caddish, or something in between. Several said that as they watched the Me Too movement unfold, they grew impatient to speak publicly about Keyes but were leery of being the first.

Salazar said she decided to speak publicly only after a reporter with another news organization said he was going to “out her.”

Raice posted her story on Twitter hours later.

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