For more than a decade, three sisters have fought to have their allegations against their former school principal Malka Leifer tested in court. This week, a case that involved political and legal manoeuvres spanning the globe came to its conclusion in full view of the Australian public.
High school is often a place where teenagers broaden their horizons. But at this Melbourne school, they only looked inwards.
In 2003, an increasing number of students were owning mobile phones, Australian Idol was a pop culture phenomenon and the first Pirates of the Caribbean film was in cinemas. All of this would have meant little — or nothing at all — to the students at the ultra-Orthodox Adass Israel School.
Lawyers in Victoria's County Court described how families from the tight-knit Adass Israel community adhered to a strict interpretation of the Jewish faith in their daily lives.
A typical family home would not have a television or newspapers, and many never left their neighbourhood in Melbourne's inner south-east.
They did not go to the movies, join sporting clubs or mix with others. Later on, marriages were often facilitated by so-called matchmakers to keep ties within the community, or with similar-minded families in Israel.
Sex was not a topic to be discussed at home, nor was sex education taught at school.
The court was told the measures at the Adass Israel School were so strict, pages from library books were ripped out if they were considered to be too risque.
It was the world that existed for teenagers Nicole, Dassi, and Elly Sapper.
The Sappers were part of the Adass Israel fabric. But even within a community where everyone knew everyone's business, their family's dark secrets were kept buried.
During evidence in the County Court, the sisters alleged they were regularly abused and traumatised by their mother during their childhood. Elly said the abuse was physical and emotional, sometimes involving belts and kitchen knives.
"There wasn't a day where there wasn't some kind of beating," Elly told the court, adding she longed for a mother who showed her love and care.
In evidence, the sisters said they thought they had finally found that person when they met their new school principal, Malka Leifer.
More than a decade later, Leifer would be convicted of abusing Dassi and Elly.
'Mrs L'
Leifer was the most respected staff member at the girls' campus of their school. She was the Menaheles, effectively a role that enabled her to dictate how the religious ethos would be implemented.
Leifer was recruited from Israel in 2001 and quickly established herself as a revered figure, several witnesses told the court.
Aside from running the busy school, she was also a mother of eight children.
Her former colleagues agreed Leifer was dedicated and extremely hard working.
She became someone the sisters could trust, so much so that she was considered as a "replacement mother", they said. The girls confided in "Mrs L", and she in turn made them feel special, taking them shopping, on outings, and having them at her house for sleepovers.
The private time the teenagers were spending with the school principal had the approval of their parents, and made other girls at the school jealous.
But it was in these moments the sisters said Leifer abused them.
Leifer told the girls to keep quiet, the court heard, and her standing in the community meant they dared not disobey her. For years, the sisters didn't even speak to each other about what was going on.
During Leifer's sex abuse trial in the County Court, prosecutors outlined a series of horrific allegations spanning between 2003 and 2007.
Prosecutors said the offending grew increasingly brazen, including rapes and assaults on school camps, in locked offices and even at Leifer's family home.
One of the charges — which Leifer was ultimately cleared of — involved allegations of a rape at a school camp when Nicole was a student teacher.
Nicole told the court she was frozen in fear as Leifer told her: "This will help you on your wedding night".
On another occasion, Dassi was assaulted in a school office while other students were away on an excursion.
In 2007, Elly was raped by Leifer in the bedroom of the principal's Elsternwick home.
Crown prosecutor Justin Lewis said the sisters "did not have any understanding of sex" when the alleged offences occurred, due to their strict upbringing.
He said Leifer's offending continued after they finished Year 12, and stayed on at the school as junior religious studies teachers.
"These sisters had a miserable home life, and so far as the accused was concerned they were ripe for the picking," he told the jury. "She manipulated their emotions while abusing them for her own sexual gratification."
Testifying in court, Elly described how she was groomed by Leifer. Sometimes she was made to feel like the centre of Leifer's world, then she would go weeks without the principal speaking to her.
"I felt like I needed to earn back her love," Elly said.
When asked why she didn't speak about the abuse — even to her own sisters — Elly said it was because Leifer was "the most respected person in the community".
"If Mrs Leifer was doing something then it must be OK," she said.
Elly said the assaults inflicted by Leifer left her feeling "ashamed", but that it wasn't until 2008 that she began to gain an understanding of what had happened.
"Every part of it was extremely traumatic to disclose," she said.
Chain reaction
The first time one of the sisters spoke up about Malka Leifer was in late 2007 or early 2008.
Dassi, who had moved to Israel with her new husband Joshua Erlich, was struggling to adjust to life in a new country.
For the first time she had freedom, but found it difficult to cope.
Suffering depression and having developed an internet addiction, she arranged sessions with a social worker who had also recently relocated from Melbourne to Israel.
Those meetings with Chana Rabinowitz set in motion a chain reaction that would trigger a major police investigation, a series of legal cases with dozens of court hearings, and an extradition process which required significant lobbying from the sisters and Australian politicians to bring Leifer back to Melbourne.
Ms Rabinowitz said Dassi was distraught during some of their meetings, and whispered the words "It was Mrs Leifer" when she finally disclosed who had abused her.
"I remember she was hunched over into herself and she could only whisper," Ms Rabinowitz testified.
Ms Rabinowitz, who knew Leifer personally, raised the alarm with Vicki Gordon, a psychiatrist who also had connections to the Adass Israel community.
According to Supreme Court documents from 2015, psychologist Ruthie Casen called a senior Adass Israel school staffer, Sharon Bromberg, to raise concerns about Leifer's interactions with students in 2007, and again in late February 2008.
The documents reveal Ms Bromberg raised the matter with Leifer directly in 2007 but her concerns were brushed off. When the issue came up again, Ms Bromberg called Dassi in Israel, and met with senior religious leaders and the school board. They knew trouble was brewing and convened an urgent school board meeting on March 5, 2008. Leifer was confronted about allegations against her and told she would be stood down.
While there are varying accounts of what unfolded at the meeting, people who gave evidence to both the Supreme and County courts said Leifer protested her innocence.
The Supreme Court found the wife of a school board member called a travel agent that night, and booked tickets for Leifer and four children to travel to Israel, via Hong Kong.
Leifer and the children left Melbourne Airport at 1:20am on March 6.
In a published judgement, Justice Jack Rush was scathing of those who organised the principal's departure, saying they were "determined to get Leifer out of the country within a matter of hours".
"The timing of the booking of the tickets and departure of Leifer and members of her family is extraordinary," he said.
Justice Rush said the school did not inform police of the allegations against Leifer before she left the country, and he said it was "likely" investigators were the ones who initiated contact after The Age newspaper published a story on March 14.
Justice Rush described the cover-up as "disgraceful", saying those involved had shown "a complete disregard for Leifer's victims".
During the same month, Dr Gordon, who was seeing Elly Sapper as one of her patients, asked the youngest sister if she too had had similar experiences with Leifer. Dr Gordon said Elly confirmed Leifer had been abusing her too, sometimes up to four times a week.
'Completely ostracised'
While Leifer's departure from Australia was swift, the process of getting her back to face a local court was excruciatingly slow.
It took several years for the sisters to make formal police statements, putting them in a position where they had to re-live their trauma while dealing with the social fallout in the community after Leifer's sudden exit.
Speaking to the ABC years later, Elly described how she was "completely ostracised" by the Adass Israel community and often verbally abused in the street. Dassi spoke about how the ordeal left her suffering flashbacks and nightmares.
For Victoria Police, the task of laying historical child sex abuse charges was never going to be easy. It was a case involving a community where few trusted police and wanted to talk, an alleged offender who was overseas, no DNA evidence and no witnesses, other than the sisters themselves.
Police investigators also made errors and lost items, including an officer's notes and diary entries given to them by Dassi.
Nevertheless, police charged Leifer in absentia with sex abuse offences, putting in train an extradition process in 2014 that should have taken no longer than 18 months.
"It seemed very simple," Nicole would later tell the ABC. Added her sister Dassi: "We thought, OK, finally something is going to happen."
With Leifer out of the country, the sisters commenced separate legal actions against the Adass Israel School. Nicole and Elly reportedly reached out-of-court settlements. Dassi's case in 2015 was settled in the Supreme Court, which awarded her more than $1.2 million in damages after finding the school "directly liable" for Leifer's conduct.
But the quest for justice was not about money. Leifer's victims wanted her behind bars.
What they did not account for was the support Leifer had back in Israel — something that allegedly stretched from the new community she was living in, to the halls of the country's parliament.
Leifer, who the sisters said had manipulated them with devastating effect, then began to manipulate the Israeli justice system.
Numerous extradition court hearings were delayed because Leifer claimed she was mentally unfit to be returned to Australia. The hearings were dramatic affairs, with Leifer flanked by security guards who would march her through the court in view of journalists and photographers. Leifer would often cower her head as she sat in the dock, cameras thrust in her face.
The case appeared to grind to a halt in 2016, when a court ruled Leifer be released from home detention due to the severity of her mental illness. It was a devastating blow for the sisters, who often made trips to Israel to watch proceedings in court.
"The term we heard was she was like a sack of potatoes," Nicole said. "That's how mentally incompetent she was."
Later, it would be revealed that Israel's deputy health minister Yaakov Litzman played a part in protecting Leifer. He was accused of pressuring health ministry employees to alter their evaluations of Leifer, to ensure she would not be deemed fit for extradition. In 2022, Litzman signed a plea deal and paid a nominal fine, but charges of obstructing justice were dropped, the Times of Israel reported.
The sting
Leifer eventually lowered her guard. A photo of her enjoying a religious festival was posted on social media in 2017, and was seen by Nicole, Dassi and Elly back in Australia.
The photo led to suspicions Leifer was, after all, completely fine and had been feigning her mental illness.
Shana Aaronson, from the Jewish Community Watch group, came up with a plan to expose the ruse. She hired private investigators to tail Leifer. The men were dressed as construction workers, and carried cameras hidden in plastic water bottles and car keys.
In late 2017, Leifer was captured walking the streets of the town Immanuel, chatting to people and running errands, including buying a loaf of bread and a packet of biscuits. In total, 200 hours of mundane footage of her daily life would be the compelling evidence to bring about Leifer's undoing.
Dassi also spearheaded a public campaign, Bring Leifer Back, gaining an ally in former Victorian premier Ted Baillieu. The sisters had meetings with then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who conveyed the importance of the case to his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu. Dassi also travelled to Israel to lobby local politicians.
Leifer was re-arrested in 2018 and the extradition court hearings continued. Finally in late 2020 the breakthrough occurred during Leifer's 74th court appearance, when her extradition to Australia was rubber-stamped by Israeli authorities.
"We just kept holding on hope that we would get to this point," Dassi said at the time.
Facing justice
Some 13 years after departing Melbourne, Malka Leifer's return was markedly different.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, she was handcuffed and under police guard when her flight touched down in January 2021. She was driven off the tarmac and straight into police custody, to complete a fortnight of quarantine.
During her first Australian court hearing, Leifer was non-responsive and slumped over a desk when a magistrate asked her if she could hear proceedings.
Leifer was initially charged with 74 offences, but those were whittled down to 29 by the time her criminal trial got under way in Victoria's County Court in early February.
During the trial, the judge struck out two of those charges because Leifer was prosecuted under laws that didn't exist when the alleged offences occurred.
When the trial began, sisters Nicole Meyer, Dassi Erlich and Elly Sapper strode into the court building arm-in-arm in a show of strength. It was the moment they had waited 15 years for.
The change in Leifer's appearance was stark compared to the last time she was seen in public. No longer sullen and slumped, she remained alert and listened closely as evidence was heard in the court over several weeks. During breaks in proceedings she would chat pleasantly with her legal team. Some days, Leifer clutched what appeared to be a prayer book, and would silently recite passages to herself during quiet moments.
The lengthy trial included evidence from police, social worker Chana Rabinowitz, psychiatrist Vicki Gordon, Dassi Erlich's ex-husband and a host of others.
Mr Erlich recalled overhearing his ex-wife Dassi speaking to one of her sisters over the phone in 2008, after she had told Ms Rabinowitz about allegations involving Leifer.
Mr Erlich told the court his ex-wife had for years spoken about Leifer in "glowing terms", and that Dassi had believed Ms Rabinowitz's shocked reaction to claims of abuse was out of proportion. Mr Erlich — who Leifer's lawyers described as a "critical witness" — said he also heard the three sisters laughing as they hatched a plan to "harass" Leifer.
But the key evidence the case ultimately hinged on came from the sisters themselves.
For days they each took the stand, systematically going through their allegations as well as incidents from their traumatic childhoods. According to transcripts, defence barrister Ian Hill, a veteran silk, rigorously cross-examined them about their memories from the time.
With no eye witnesses, lawyers from both sides told the jury this would be a trial decided by the sisters' credibility and reliability.
While addressing the jury, crown prosecutor Justin Lewis conceded that some elements of the sisters' stories had changed over time. "Memory is simply not like watching a video and looking at a picture," he told them. Mr Lewis said the sisters needed to be believed, and had provided "lengthy and detailed accounts".
But Mr Hill pointed to the inconsistencies as a critical reason the sisters couldn't be relied upon. Leifer's alleged offending was so risky, so brazen, that it was implausible, Mr Hill argued. He highlighted the evidence of Dassi's ex-husband to make the argument that a small lie about Leifer "grew like wildfire". "The only proper verdict is not guilty," Mr Hill told the jury.
During the trial, the jury was never told about the steps Leifer took to avoid facing justice in Australia. They were not told about the last-minute flight bookings, or Leifer's claims of mental instability and lengthy extradition fight. As far as the jury was concerned, the story essentially had an unexplained 13-year gap. The jury was told to keep this omission out of their minds, and the media was barred from reporting on what had happened while Leifer was out of Australia.
But far from her prolonged absence counting against her, Leifer's lawyers sought to use it to their benefit. Mr Hill suggested his client was "disadvantaged" because so much time had passed between the original allegations and the County Court trial. "There's a loss of opportunity to make any defence other than a simple denial," he opined.
'The truth will prevail'
After seven full days of deliberations, the jury came back with unanimous verdicts on all 27 charges.
In a tightly packed courtroom, it would have been possible to hear a pin drop as the jury foreman began announcing the verdicts.
Leifer rose to her feet, while the sisters sat metres away.
The first five announced verdicts were not guilty.
Leifer continued to stand resolute, as tears began to well in the eyes of the sisters.
But then the tide turned.
The next string of verdicts were all guilty.
Leifer remained unmoved, while reaction in the rest of the courtroom was muted.
Ultimately, the jury declared Leifer guilty of 18 offences, including six counts of rape, relating to Dassi and Elly.
The jury found Leifer was not guilty of the charges relating to Nicole and some of the charges relating to Dassi.
Speaking outside court, the sisters were unified once again.
"Her abuse has held us hostage for so many years," Dassi said.
"Today we can start to take that power back that she stole from us as children."
While Nicole expressed disappointment Leifer was found not guilty of abusing her, she said the outcome was "bittersweet".
"I believe in myself. My sisters believe in me," she said.
The sisters urged all survivors of sexual abuse to "stay strong".
"This will and can tear you apart and the process is re-traumatising and awful," Elly said.
"But when you know your truth … the truth will prevail."
