Dermer: I didn’t tell PM about Keyes warning
Ambassador says Netanyahu wasn’t notified because no info on any criminal act was passed on to him
Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer, a close confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Friday that he did not pass on a 2016 warning about David Keyes to the prime minister.
Keyes, the prime minister’s spokesman for foreign media, took a leave of absence from his job on Thursday after a series of accusations against him of sexual misconduct – including several allegations of sexual assault.
The New York Times reported on Thursday that Bret Stephens, at that time the deputy opinion editor of The Wall Street Journal, warned Dermer in 2016 that Keyes posed a risk to women employed by the Israeli government.
Stephens, the former editorin-chief of The Jerusalem Post who is currently a Times columnist, has not spoken publicly about his conversation with Dermer.
Dermer confirmed the conversation on Friday, but said the information was not passed on to Netanyahu.
“The ambassador received a phone call from Bret Stephens more than six months after David Keyes began working in the Prime Minister’s Office, regarding behavior attributed to Keyes before he joined the office,” according to a statement from Dermer’s office.
“Information of the call was not conveyed to the Prime Minister’s Office. If Stephens or anyone else had given the ambassador information on sexual assault or any other criminal act towards women by anyone in the Prime Minister’s Office – whether before or after their appointment – he would have immediately notified the Prime Minister’s Office.”
On Saturday evening, Meretz MK Michal Rozin wrote a letter to Civil Service Commissioner Daniel Hershowitz, calling for an immediate investigation into the incident and into Dermer’s behavior.
“It cannot be that turning a blind eye and avoiding responsibility constitutes a flak jacket for this apparent failure,” said Rozin, the former director of the Association for Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, “especially when above all is the thunderous silence of the prime minister.”
On Saturday, Zionist Union MK Tzipi Livni said Netanyahu should fire Keyes immediately.
“The difference between [fellow Zionist Union MK Eitan] Broshi,” who has been accused of sexual harassment, “and between someone who works in the Prime Minister’s Office, is that we can’t fire an elected representative,” Livni said in remarks in Holon. “The prime minister, in order to kick out of his office a serial harasser, just needs to tell him to go.”
In 2013, while Stephens was the deputy opinion editor at the Wall Street Journal, Keyes was barred from the newspaper’s offices after repeated advances on young women who worked there.
On Thursday, Keyes announced he was taking a leave of absence from his job “in light of the false and misleading accusations against me and in order not to distract from the important work of the prime minister.” He added that he was “fully confident that the truth will come out.”
The Prime Minister’s Office has not publicly commented on the incident.
On Thursday evening, Social Equality Minister Gila Gamliel told a Reshet 13 news program that “Netanyahu will carefully examine the situation and make his own decision.”
On Friday, an additional woman, who asked to remain anonymous, spoke to The Jerusalem Post about a consensual but disturbing encounter she had with Keyes in New York in 2011.
The woman, at the time an American graduate student looking for a job in Israel, contacted Keyes to discuss potential professional connections. He invited her to his apartment to meet and talk about work-related issues.
“As soon as he laid eyes on me, it’s like something in his eyes said ‘this is not a work thing anymore.’ He was coming on to me so strong.” The woman said Keyes removed his shirt not long after she arrived, and the two ended up having consensual physical contact.
“I didn’t feel in danger in any way,” she said. But she said she later felt that the incident was bizarre and inappropriate. The Thursday report in the
Times revealed that several offices and organizations were aware of Keyes’s inappropriate behavior. In 2014, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies imposed a new policy against visitors roaming the offices freely after complaints against Keyes. And at his own organization, Advancing Human Rights, Keyes was kept away from interns after harassing behavior.
The series of allegations against Keyes were only widely publicized beginning on Tuesday, when Julia Salazar, a controversial candidate for the New York State Senate, publicly accused him of sexual assault in a tweet.
Writing on Twitter, Salazar said she was going to be “outed as a survivor of sexual assault” in an upcoming article and decided to preempt the disclosure. “Before this runs, I want to come forward and confirm that I was a victim of sexual assault by David Keyes – the prime minister of Israel’s spokesperson to foreign media.
Within hours of her tweet,
Wall Street Journal reporter Shayndi Raice said she believed Salazar’s account, saying also had a “terrible encounter” with Keyes. “No matter how often I said no, he would not stop pushing himself on me,” she said. “I knew as I walked away I had encountered a predator.”
Further reporting over the past week have revealed close to 15 women accusing Keyes of offenses ranging from harassment to assault.
Keyes has served as the spokesman for foreign media on behalf of Netanyahu since March 2016. The vast majority of the allegations against him stem from before Keyes’s employment by the Prime Minister’s Office.
But on Thursday evening, the Times of Israel reported that Keyes made an “aggressive, sexual” advance at a woman in Israel weeks after he took the job. The unnamed woman said he “followed me into the bathroom and pushed me up against the wall and tried to come on to me. I had to push him off and ran away.”
Uri Bollag and Jerusalem Post staff contributed to this report. •