Naomi Ragen sued for plagiarism - again

According to NIS 1 million lawsuit, novelist copied storylines and sequencing from US-born writer.

By DAN IZENBERG
ragen 88 (photo credit: )
ragen 88
(photo credit: )
A second woman has filed suit in Jerusalem District Court against popular novelist Naomi Ragen on charges of plagiarism and copyright infringement in her book, Sotah. The plaintiff is American-born haredi writer Sarah Shapiro. She is represented by attorney Gilad Corinaldi, a specialist in copyright law. According to Corinaldi, Shapiro published a personal diary called Growing Up with My Children: A Jewish Mother's Diary, in which she described the daily struggles of raising her children while struggling to achieve self-control. According to the NIS 1 million lawsuit, Ragen copied storylines and sequencing, and also copied text word-for-word from Shapiro. It alleges that Ragen invited Shapiro to her home to congratulate her after the book was published. Several years later, by chance, Shapiro found that "many parts" of her book had been inserted into Ragen's work. Originally, Shapiro filed a similar suit against Ragen in a haredi court (Beit Din Tzedek) established by Rabbi Baruch Levin in Jerusalem's Mekor Haim neighborhood. According to Corinaldi, Ragen refused the summons to the court, which is not a state court and is therefore based on voluntary participation. The court then granted Shaprio rabbinic permission to file suit in civil court. The suit was filed on Thursday. Shapiro originally accused Ragen of plagiarizing from her book after reading a report in The Jerusalem Post that another novelist, Michal Tal, had sued Ragen for having allegedly copied from her novel, The Lion and the Cross, for Ragen's best-selling book, The Ghost of Hannah Mendes. In response to the allegations by Shapiro at the time, Ragen told the Post, "this woman has been hounding me for 13 years because two pages of my book resembled two pages in hers." Ragen said that, in 1994, Shapiro had written to Crown Publishers, the publisher of Sotah, accusing her of plagiarism. "I showed the publishers the pages in dispute," Ragen told the Post. "They reviewed them and determined that there was no plagiarism. That's the whole story."