Polygamist Goel Ratzon found guilty of rape
Court rules on slew of sexual charges against Goel Ratzon, polygamist with 32 wives, charged with raping, beat women, some of whom were minors at time.
Polygamist Goel Ratzon was found guilty of a number of sexual offences Monday, including rape of a number of his wives. He was cleared of one charge of sexually enslaving one of the women, but was found guilty on the majority of the other sexually related offenses, condemning him in the highly publicized trial as a serial rapist.
Ratzon, who had been living with 21 women throughout the years and fathered 49 children, was charged with nine counts, including rape, indecent assault and sexual offenses within the family.
Ratzon was charged in February 2010 with dozens of sexual offenses, including rape, sodomy, and indecent assault of his wives, and some of his victims were said to include minors. He was also accused of fraud and treating his wives like slaves.
Ratzon was arrested in January 2010 in a wide-scale police operation which garnered much media fanfare. His son, Yigal Ratzon, continues to maintains his father's innocence.
Many of the indictment articles refer to sexual offenses allegedly committed by Ratzon and read like a horror novel. One describes a 19-year-old girl who was allegedly raped by Ratzon from the age of 15 to 17 on a nearly daily basis.
Ratzon is also accused of raping and sexually harassing a girl whose mother died when she was a baby. According to the indictment, he distanced the girl from her family and promised to marry her. He convinced her that he had supernatural powers and ignored her request to stop touching her.
Several days later, he allegedly took a shower with the girl then and raped her. When she complained that it hurt, he responded, "Don't worry, you'll get used to it." In another incident, he performed forced oral sex on the same girl and then proceeded to rape her again.
In an interview he gave to Yedioth Ahronoth in 2010, the first since his arrest, Ratzon denied the charges against him and claimed his relations with the more than 30 women who lived with him were based on love and respect.
During the interview Ratzon said: "There was no slavery. We had warm relations. (There was) full understanding between us, a genuine desire to help one another. A woman does not stay in a place she is not pleased with for 15 years."
In April 2010, two months after his arrest, the Tel Aviv District Court ordered Ratzon remain incarcerated until the end of all legal proceedings against him.
Judge Hayuta Kochan issued the verdict for Ratzon's remand, and defined him as "a base and contemptible man with a sick and perverted personality".
"In his twisted and perverse way, and his complete control of every aspect of these women's lives, he mutilated their thoughts and castrated their personalities until they totally lost their free will. His baseness and contemptibility soar to new heights with the sexual relations he forced upon them," Kochan wrote.
Vered Luvitch and Nir Gontarz contributed to this report
