"Mom, I was raped": The nightmarish night that changed the life of the 17-year-old

"There is something in me that still doesn't believe that such a thing can happen," says prosecutor Adv. Rotem Neuman-Wasserman about the case that is well etched in her memory. She was a young prosecutor, with less than four years of experience in the Tel Aviv District Attorney's Office (Criminal), when she received the difficult case in which a 17-year-old boy who was returning from his girlfriend's house in Bat Yam was brutally attacked by Matan Lugasi (21) - who also robbed him and sexually abused him.

"A child walks down the street, and a person he doesn't even know attacks him in such a way," she recalls. "It's really all the biggest nightmares. You say to yourself, it can't be that such a thing happens. It just can't be." In the verdict, the judges described a violent sequence that lasted for long hours. The defendant, Matan Lugasi, it was determined, pounced on the complainant without any prior acquaintance, beat him brutally, committed a long series of sex offenses, threatened him, robbed him, and left him bruised and wounded. In the sentencing, the judges wrote that these were acts "shocking in their wickedness and cruelty," and later the Supreme Court also determined that it was an "exceptional and difficult" case, in which a stranger turned a young boy's life into an "unimaginable nightmare."

"There was plenty of evidence," recalls Adv. Neuman about the management of the criminal procedure. "Already on Thursday of that same week, the indictment was filed. We didn't see any reason to wait or delay." But before all the decisions and headlines, there was one meeting that left a particularly deep mark on Rotem. Shock before they filed the indictment, Adv. Neuman and her department manager met with the boy and his father. "It's something we do in sex cases," explains Neuman. "Even when there is no doubt at all. It is important for us to get to know the victim of the offense, to explain to him who we are, where we are going now, and for him to get to know us. It's not just a case. It's a path we are walking together." She still remembers every detail: "He still had the bite marks on his cheek that Lugasi caused him." This was a few days after the attack. "In retrospect," she says, "I think that maybe even then we saw the strengths he had. It's not taken for granted to come to such a meeting a week after such an event."

Also, prosecutor Lital Koren remembers exactly the moment the case reached her. She had already managed complex sex offense cases in the past, but this time something was different. "They told me I was getting a not-so-simple sex case," she says. "I didn't know anything. And then Rotem said to me a sentence I won't forget: 'There is evidence here that can be divided between several cases'." Usually, when it comes to such cases, one prosecutor is enough to manage it. But when Koren opened the indictment, she understood what it was about. "When I started reading, I said to myself, it's lucky that Rotem is with me," she recalls. "Not because I don't know how to manage such a case, but because I felt I needed someone to be an anchor, with whom I could share the emotional burden. I didn't know the complainant yet, and I didn't know his family. I just read the indictment and I got chills."

After years of work in the prosecution, both of them find it difficult to remember another case that aroused such feelings in them already at the first reading. "This is one of the most shocking cases that have passed through here," says Rotem. Because it was such an exceptional case, both of them clarify that the difficulty was not legal. "Evidentially, there was no challenge here," says Rotem firmly. "On the contrary. There was evidence in abundance here." She details: the medical findings that proved the sexual injuries and the violence, the findings at the scene, the testimonies of the eyewitnesses, the leading and pointing, the security cameras, the documentation from the ATM, the complainant's phone that was found with the defendant, the defendant's clothes that were stained with the minor's blood.

Also in the verdict, it was emphasized that the complainant's version was supported by a long series of external evidence. The court determined that his testimony was consistent, coherent, and reliable, and that one should not expect a victim of sexual violence to remember every detail perfectly. But despite this, the boy had to go through a series of torments on the way to justice. Lugasi did not admit to the sex offenses attributed to him, despite all the evidence. Therefore, the boy was forced to testify in court and tell in detail everything that happened. "The law asks us to take a boy who has gone through the most terrible thing imaginable, and tell him: now come to court and tell everything all over again," says Koren, and emphasizes the word "everything." According to her, "we always explain to complainants in sex cases that it is not enough to say in court 'I was raped'. You have to detail. To explain. To get into resolutions. But here it was not just to tell about a rape. Here it was necessary to describe a sequence of humiliation and sadism." Therefore, even before he reached the courtroom, the prosecution tried to prepare the boy for the testimony and for what awaits him in court as much as possible. They met with him one more time, went over with him the statements he gave to the police, explained to him how the testimony would look, conducted a tour of the court for him, and asked that he testify through a closed-circuit video system - so that he would not have to look at the defendant while he tells about the night that changed his life.

But despite the great experience of both of them, nothing prepared them for what happened on the day of the testimony. In most sex offense cases, explains Koren, the stage where the victim sits on the witness stand is always accompanied by great tension. "Usually," she says, "complainants in sex offenses testify in a very detached way. It's a known defense mechanism. They describe as if they are reading a book. 'And then he took me, and then he did like this, and then he said to me'. Without emotion, detached, not because it doesn't hurt them, but because otherwise it's impossible to go through it." So the boy sat in front of the panel, breathed deeply, and started telling. He went down to the details, as they asked him to do. Every stage. Every moment. Every humiliation. Every threat. Every blow. Not because he wanted to remember, but because in court you have to explain, describe, and take everyone - and especially yourself - to the place from which you have been trying to escape for months. "I remember that he was just detached," says Koren. "As if he is telling about a movie he saw. That was the only thing that allowed him to go through the testimony."

But the defense had other plans. "We always explain to complainants that the cross-examination will be difficult, that they will try to undermine them and say that they are wrong or lying," says Koren. "But we also expect basic fairness to be maintained." But this time, according to them, this expectation was shattered. Just a week before the early testimony, the defendant's defense attorney changed, and the defense line changed completely. Thus, at the beginning of a hearing, the defense attorney raised a new claim for the first time - according to which the boy tends to offer men to have sex with him, and that if they refuse, he frames them that they raped him. "He also said that he has videos that prove all of this," recalls Neuman, and emphasizes that this claim did not even come up in the defendant's own version. "Lugasi didn't even claim that this is what happened between him and the complainant," says Neuman. "He admitted to the violence and admitted to the robbery, he only claimed that there was no sexual contact. So even if, for the sake of the discussion, all these claims were true, what are they even relevant to this case? They were not relevant and they had no justification, and we opposed them from the first moment." Koren remembers the feeling in the hall. "After the boy had already gone through such a difficult main examination, suddenly they started throwing all these accusations at him, and in very blunt language that should not be heard at all in court. 'You are like this, you do like this, you blackmail people'. Think about what this does to a 17-year-old boy." According to the prosecution, the defense attorney repeated again and again the promise that he has videos in his possession that will prove the things. "I remember that I said to him in one of the hearings, 'Present the videos to us already'," says Koren. "Then he said, 'I forgot them in the car', 'I burned the disc'. To this day we haven't seen any such video."

The difficult feeling did not end with the boy's testimony. The claims, according to them, were also directed towards his parents, and also towards a minor eyewitness, who studied with the complainant at school. "It was no longer just inside the courtroom," says Neuman, "because that same child returns later to school. Suddenly rumors are circulating. Suddenly everyone heard the accusations. This is already damage in itself." The court was also impressed in a similar way. In the verdict, the judges criticized the defense line sharply, and determined that not even a beginning of evidence was brought for the difficult claims that were thrown at the complainant, and that the questions asked of him and his family members were blunt and caused them great embarrassment. Later, the Supreme Court also referred extensively to that same defense line, defined it as a "base and vile plot," and emphasized that a defense attorney's duty to defend a defendant does not override his duty to refrain from unsubstantiated statements towards other parties in the process.

But the moment that is most etched in the memory of the prosecutors was not necessarily in the boy's testimony, but when his mother went up to testify. "This I will never forget in my life," says Koren quietly. "If the boy testified in a detached way, his mother spoke from the heart. She told what she went through that morning, from the moment he entered the house. She cried. Rotem cried. I cried. It was also seen by the judges that it touches them." The mother's testimony was not just another testimony in the case from the point of view of the two prosecutors, it was the moment when everything that was written in the indictment, in every medical document, and in every expert opinion, received a face and a voice. Koren finds it difficult even today to reconstruct her words without stopping. "She told how she sat at home and waited for him to return," she recalls. "He always used to notify where he is and when he arrives, and suddenly he doesn't answer. She calls, again and again, and there is no answer. She waits all night. In the end, towards morning, she already enters to shower because she needs to go to work. And then she comes out of the shower, raises her head, and sees his feet first. Then his face. All bloody. And he says to her: 'Mom, I was raped'." For a moment she closes her eyes. "She told that her legs turned into cotton wool, and that she went to her husband and said to him: 'Get up, they raped our son'. To this day, when I remember her words, tears come to my eyes."

According to Koren, "sometimes people think that a prosecutor comes, presents evidence, and goes home. But there are cases that you take with you. You go home, your children go out in the evening, and you think about that same child. It remains." Also in the verdict, extensive space was given to the damage caused to the mother, and not only to her son. The judges noted that the indirect harm to the entire family is an inseparable part of the price that such a brutal sex offense collects. Precisely because the evidence was so unequivocal, the two lawyers were convinced that the process would be conducted differently. "It was supposed to be a confession case," says Koren. "Really. There was no real evidentiary dispute here. Nothing was missing. Therefore, this defense line also surprised us so much." After every evidence session, they returned again and again to the same question: how can it be that this defense line is even conducted in the hall? "Of course, every defendant has the right to defend himself," says Neuman, "and we are the first to defend this right. But there is a difference between trying to undermine the credibility of a witness and inventing a humiliating and criminal story about him, which has no anchor in reality." Koren adds: "I work with many professional and fair defense attorneys. It is possible to conduct a very difficult cross-examination, and still maintain the dignity of the complainant. Here it was something else."

When the sentencing was given, it seemed that at least legally the case had reached its end. The District Court sentenced Matan Lugasi to 21 years of actual imprisonment, a suspended sentence, and compensation of 100 thousand shekels to the complainant. The judges determined that it was a "continuous sequence of events" of violence, sex offenses, and robbery, and that the acts were committed "for the sake of satisfying the dark and sadistic needs" of the defendant. But even then, the story had not yet ended. Lugasi appealed to the Supreme Court. At first, he also appealed against the conviction itself, and later he withdrew the appeal on the verdict and focused on the punishment. One of his claims was that the defense line taken in the trial was a failure of his previous lawyer, and not his. The Supreme Court rejected the appeal. Judge David Mintz wrote that it was an "exceptional and difficult" case, and emphasized that he did not find grounds to intervene in the punishment. Judge Isaac Amit, today the President of the Supreme Court, went even further. He described, as mentioned, the defense line taken towards the complainant as a "base and vile plot," and determined that no evidence was presented that would support the accusations thrown at him. Alongside this, he emphasized that even someone who committed such difficult acts "is not a monster," and expressed hope that he would use his years of imprisonment for rehabilitation.

The prosecution remembers well the day the verdict was given in the Supreme Court, and not because of a feeling of victory. "There is no victory in such cases," says Neuman. "Even when there is a conviction, and even when there is a heavy punishment, no one really wins. There is only an attempt to do justice." And there is also a ray of light in all the darkness, and perhaps - after all - also a victory. About a year and a half ago, the two prosecutors were surprised when they received an invitation from the family to the wedding of that same boy. "We were both moved as if we were marrying off our own son," they say. "The knowledge that he managed to continue his life, to get out of such a difficult situation and to rehabilitate with the help of assistance and a wrapping family, made us happy in a way that is difficult to describe in words."