The Supreme Court on Thursday temporarily barred publication of the name of the suspect accused of raping singer and creator Shay-Li Atari, holding off on disclosure pending further arguments over whether a psychiatric opinion is required regarding claims that publication could trigger a suicidal act.
The decision came at the end of a hearing on the suspect’s appeal against a lower court ruling that had allowed his name to be published. Supreme Court Justice Alex Stein said there was a “first-order public interest” in publication of the suspect’s identity, but held that the court must still examine whether publication could pose a suicide risk before allowing that publication to go forward.
The suspect’s attorney argued that publication at this stage, before any indictment has been filed, would cause irreversible harm. He warned that in the digital era, public exposure would amount to a permanent destruction of his client’s life, while the suspect himself told the court that friends had distanced themselves from him and that he had lost his job, saying publication would “collapse his world.”
Atari, who was present at the hearing, sharply criticized that line of argument. Outside the courtroom, she said she wanted to believe justice would be done and rejected the idea that a suspect could avoid exposure simply by raising claims about his mental state at the moment his name was about to be published. She said that she herself bears scars from five suicide attempts and questioned how the system could now give decisive weight to the suspect’s current distress.
The case stems from a complaint Atari filed in 2022 over an alleged rape and fraud offense tied to an incident she says took place in April 2011 in the parking area beneath the Tel Aviv apartment where she then lived. She told the Knesset Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality earlier this year that she had been violently raped on the asphalt and was later found unconscious outside her apartment door by her roommate.
The complaint was initially closed by the prosecution, but the case was later reopened. The latest hearing followed appeals by Atari and the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel (ARCCI) against an earlier magistrate’s court decision not to allow publication of the suspect’s identity. A separate lower-court ruling last week had permitted publication, prompting the suspect’s appeal to the Supreme Court.
Concealing suspect's identity may harm other victims, Atari argues
Atari has publicly argued that concealing the suspect’s name does not only affect her own case, but may also prevent other alleged victims from realizing they are speaking about the same man. After the earlier ruling in favor of publication, she said that when a suspect’s name is hidden, other women who may have been harmed cannot “connect the pieces” and understand that it is the same person.
The affair has drawn wide public attention not only because of Atari’s standing as an artist, but also because of her public profile since the October 7 attack, in which her husband, filmmaker Yahav Winner, was killed in Kibbutz Kfar Aza while she and their infant daughter survived. The legal battle surrounding the rape complaint has accompanied her for years, and she has increasingly spoken publicly about both the alleged assault and what she describes as systemic failures in the way sexual-offense complaints are handled.
The immediate result of Thursday’s hearing is procedural but significant: the Supreme Court did not reverse the idea that the suspect’s identity may ultimately be made public, and indeed signaled that the public interest in doing so is substantial. But it stopped short of allowing publication immediately, leaving the gag order in place until it decides whether further psychiatric material or legal argument is required.