Musician Yuval Vilner named as suspect in alleged rape of Shay-Li Atari, Naama Shahar

Musician Yuval Vilner, 38, was named on Sunday as the suspect in cases involving alleged sexual offenses against Shay-Li Atari and Naama Shahar.

The Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court permitted his name to be publicized following a legal back-and-forth that reached the Supreme Court and centered on the evidentiary threshold required to support claims that publication could endanger a suspect’s life.

Vilner, who has not been indicted, was also released Sunday from house arrest under restrictive conditions, including a ban on contacting both women and a ban on leaving Israel.

Vilner previously studied at the Rimon School of Music and later taught there.

On Monday, Vilner’s lawyer told the court that he was withdrawing the suicide-risk claim and agreed that his client’s name could be published, but asked that the lifting of the gag order be postponed by two weeks.

Vilner’s attorney had argued in March that publication before any indictment had been filed would cause irreversible harm. He warned that in the digital era, public exposure would amount to the permanent destruction of his client’s life. Vilner 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 that hearing, sharply criticized that argument. Outside the courtroom, she said she wanted to believe justice would be done, and rejected the idea that a suspect could avoid exposure by raising claims about his mental state when his name was about to be published. She said she herself bears scars from five suicide attempts, and questioned how the system could now give decisive weight to the suspect’s current distress.

“Fifteen years, I did not have the basic right to say the name Yuval Vilner out loud,” Atari said after the gag order was lifted. “Not in an interview, not in a post, not even in front of family members or people close to me. While he continued his life with power, money, and respect, I was the one living as if his name was explosive material, waiting to blow up my life.”

“There is something sick in a reality in which rape suspects walk free, and victims are the ones required to be silent and careful with every word, as if they were criminals,” she said. “This is the moment when people stop demanding that I pay with my life so that the reputation of the person who brutally raped me remains clean.”

Vilner’s lawyer, Moshe Weiss, said in response that his client “will not be tried on social media and will not be convicted in headlines.”

“He is a person, like any person,” Weiss said. “He has no status, power, or influence. The monster you were told about never existed. The evidence speaks for itself, and when you see it, you will understand on your own: There is only one truth, and it will come to light.”

Attorney Hila Neubach, legal director of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, said after the order was lifted that “no victim should have to fight for months in the legal system while the suspect misleads both her and the courts, presenting false claims as if his life is in danger, while he is already giving interviews to the media and trying to portray himself as the victim in the story.”

“We will continue to advance our bill on the matter so that victims will be entitled to know when suspects seek gag orders, and will be able to state their position from the beginning,” Neubach added. “No legal decision concerning their case should be made without their knowledge.”

Shahar also spoke last week in an interview with KAN Reshet Bet about the toll of the fight to publicize Vilner’s name.

“These weeks that I went through - this is something that destroys your soul. It feels like poison,” she said. “And what they say about it ruining his life - what do you think? That our souls are not destroyed?”

“A person’s name, in the end, is the real prison,” Shahar added. “I had faith that this would create an echo that would eventually, eventually, eventually reach the court.”

She said that, in her view, “he never thought about what he did, he was only afraid of his name being published.”

“The principle of open justice does not make this easy for me,” Shahar said, adding that she, too, had struggled with suicidal thoughts during the process.

Atari told the Knesset Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality earlier this year that she was violently raped on the asphalt in the residents’ parking area beneath her shared apartment, and was later found unconscious outside her apartment door by her roommate.

Before the alleged assault, she said, she had been working a shift at a neighborhood pub, where acquaintances from Rimon School of Music were sitting at the bar. She said the last thing she remembered before the violent moments of the alleged rape was raising a small glass with them and then leaving her drink near the group.

She said she remembered nothing from that point until the moments of violence she said were “carved” into her memory.

Shahar came forward publicly about a month ago in a Facebook post, identifying herself as another complainant against Vilner.

She wrote that in October 2022, she went on a date with “a friend of friends,” and ended it “foggy and weak” in his bed, trying to resist and push him away while he used force.

“I woke up and fell asleep intermittently while he violated my body,” Shahar wrote. “I wish I did not have to write these ugly words on my beautiful page, but this is what happened.”

Shahar wrote that although she was “acting bravely,” she still felt fear, but said she refused to let that fear silence her.

“I remind myself that it was exactly on that fear that he built that night,” she wrote. “You silenced me for one night, not for an entire life.”