Israel’s Miss World Speaks Out, Alleges She Was Raped

When Linor Abargil returned home late last year with her new Miss World crown, tears glistened on her cheeks. Tears of joy, fellow Israelis might have assumed.

In fact, the tears shed by the brown-haired beauty may have been those of a hidden ordeal. In her first public statement on the matter, Abargil alleged Thursday that she was raped seven weeks before the Miss World pageant by an Israeli travel agent whose help she had sought in the Italian city of Milan.

The alleged assault has been reported in the foreign media and on the Internet, but a gag order had prevented news of the incident from being published or broadcast in Israel.

Gag orders are used here frequently to prevent publication of military-related news such as army clashes. In this case, Abargil’s attorneys and an Israeli court said, censorship was used by authorities to capture the rape suspect, Shlomo Nour.

Nour, an Egyptian-born Israeli, arrived at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport over the weekend, apparently unaware that an arrest warrant had been issued against him. He was promptly detained, and police say they expect to charge him in the next few days.

Through a public defender, Nour, 43, on Thursday denied any wrongdoing.

“I would like to hope that her status as Miss [World] . . . does not deprive my client of a fair and just trial to prove his innocence,” attorney Inbal Rubinstein said.

Abargil took the unusual step of petitioning to have the gag order lifted once Nour was in custody. She said she wanted to serve as a role model for sexually abused women while also squelching rumors that swirled around her, despite the gag order, over what exactly had happened.

“I am not ashamed of the incident,” the 19-year-old communications student said in a statement released through her attorney. “I did not cause it. I want to [tell] women . . . that they do not have to take for granted any incident of assault, sexual or otherwise.

“Women who have suffered an assault must react to this crime, even if this exacts a certain price as a result of the public exposure, so that such acts do not become an integral part of us as a society.”

Abargil’s willingness to come forward won praise from women’s groups.

Orit Sulitzeanu, a spokeswoman for the Israel Women’s Network, cited studies that have shown that only about 10% of rape victims in Israel call one of the country’s nine crisis centers, with a lower percentage going through the additional trauma of filing a formal complaint.

“Her act of publicly going out is very, very important,” Sulitzeanu said. “For such a famous woman doing such a courageous thing, it will give a lot of strength to other women.”

Abargil, in her public statement Thursday, said she was trying to book a flight home Oct. 5 from Milan, where she had traveled on a modeling assignment. She said Nour, a travel agent she had consulted, offered to drive her to Rome to catch her flight.

Shortly after their drive began, she alleged, he pulled over, jumped into the back seat where she was sitting, raped her at knifepoint and then tried to suffocate her with a plastic bag over her head.

“I fought him with all my power,” she said, “and when he did not succeed in strangling me, he let me go and demanded that I not turn to the police. I tried to maintain my composure and promised that all would be OK and that I would not complain.”

She filed a complaint with Italian police, and then with Israeli police after she felt the Italians were dragging their feet. Italian police detained Nour but released him.

Seven weeks after the alleged rape, Abargil went on to compete in the Miss World pageant in the Seychelles. There, she was able to impress the judges to win the crown over 85 other contestants.

Abargil’s attorneys said she isn’t ready to grant interviews.

“This was very traumatic,” said Eitan Maoz, one of her lawyers, “and she is trying to recover.”