N. was in charge of the civil guard in the settlement, a man who watched over children while wearing a uniform, a father figure to many. When he was caught on his way to meet a 12-year-old girl and immediately confessed his intentions regarding her, some residents wanted to take the law into their own hands. Understandably so. Does no one like this kind of person who betrays their trust to be their neighbor?
N., a 67-year-old man, was waiting in his car in North Tel Aviv for a 12-year-old girl. In the correspondence preceding the meeting, she asked him to bring a bouquet, but on the evening of August 24, she did not come to receive the praise he got with him. Instead, four adults approached his table, three men and a woman, who demanded to know what he was doing there and who he was waiting for.
N. did not try to hide his intentions at all. He even apologized to those present, volunteers in the “Caught red-handed” group headed by the so-called “pedophile catcher” Avi Dubitzky. Part of the modus operandi of Dubitzky and his men is to pose as minors and conduct chats with men looking for too young prey; Dubitzky claims to have uncovered more than a thousand pedophiles this way. But N still did not understand at this stage that he had never talked to a girl.
Come on, tell me what you’re apologizing for,” said Dubitzky, who introduced himself as the 12-year-old’s mother when volunteers put him on the line from his home in Florida.
I connected with this young lady in one of the chats, and we had a lovely conversation, and it started to descend into very unpleasant lines. I see now that it doesn’t suit me […], and therefore, I apologize to you from the bottom of my soul,” said N. to Dubitzky and his people. In a live broadcast on Facebook, “I had no bad intention.”
Are you single?” Dubitzky asked.
“No, I’m married.”
“Does your wife know you came to meet my daughter?”
“I admit that I didn’t… I didn’t want to share her because I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted to do.”
Dubitzky (to the volunteers): “What did he say about the kiss in the pee? What happened there?”.
N.: “I said I’ll kiss her in the pee and B&Bs and whatever you want.”
Dubitzky: “So you said you would kiss her on the pee. Who initiated this thing?”.
N.: “She.”
Dubitzky: “She told you she wanted a kiss in the pee?”.
N.: “Sorry, I correct myself.”
Dubitzky: “You offered to kiss her on the pee?”
N: “Let’s say yes, okay.”
Dubitzky: “Yes or no?”.
N.: “Yes, OK, yes […] I don’t know why,
In an inspection conducted in advance by “Caught red-handed” people, it turned out that N. is in charge of the Civil Guard volunteers in his locality. Now Dubitzky demanded: “First of all, you resign.” N. accepted the sentence, and in a telephone conversation with the settlement’s security officer, he said: “I would like to hand over all the equipment to you, and I want to withdraw from the system […] I chatted with a 13-year-old girl, and we arranged to meet. I came to a state of discomfort with myself and the whole environment, and the world, so I decided in my personal decision with all the factors I undertake to resign. I’m 12, not 13; I’m asking you to help me retire from the system.” The rest, Dubitzky said, now, we would leave to the police.
Apparently, it was possible to breathe a sigh of relief at this point. Avi Dubitzky recorded another success; in N.’s locality, they received the information, and N. himself was arrested. But now he is free, and if we can even talk about a happy ending for such a story, it has not yet been written. But, given how things have been going, it is doubtful it will ever be written.
The video of the confession, the arrest, and N’s photo were immediately circulated on social networks. They also reached the Facebook page of the settlement where he lives, a small place – less than 10,000 residents – where everyone knows everyone. And everyone also knew N., the polite pensioner who was always in a hurry to help everyone. Now the residents faced the difficult news about a man they had entrusted their safety too. Many expressed outrage; some wanted to take the law into their own hands. The fear that N. hurt their children, the feeling of betrayal, and the explicit and graphic confession drove the mind crazy.
At eight thirty in the evening I opened the phone and I had 80 WhatsApp messages,” recalls M., the head of the settlement administration. “There was crazy hysteria among the residents, they asked if it was really him. It was clear in the photo he posted that it was him, but it’s so hard to believe. I called the person in charge of security, the one N. called to resign, and he told me what exactly happened.”
We meet in N’s office about two weeks after the arrest. It’s not yet noon, but it’s already very hot and the streets are empty. There is one cafe, one restaurant that is supposed to be Italian, one pharmacy, a supermarket, and an amphitheater where all the residents gather on Independence Day. One poster announces a special meeting for residents with a well-known Chief of Police, on Zoom. Adjacent to the community center is the small building of the Civil Guard. Since N.’s arrest, many of the women of the settlement have asked to volunteer. The members of the Civil Guard, about 50 in number, are filled with a sense of mourning. They are a tight-knit bunch and some saw him as a father figure.
C, the head of the settlement’s house: “N. is the last person I would have believed could do this. He lives across the street from me; we would meet every day when he would walk his two small dogs. I didn’t talk to him anymore after I heard what happened; I had nothing to tell him. Even if he doesn’t stand trial, for me, he doesn’t exist.”
“N. is one of the favorite people in the settlement, someone who always walks around in his police uniform between the schools and kindergartens to see that everything is alright,” says M. “This is a massive trauma for the residents, and we had to figure out how to treat it efficiently and quickly. Right at the beginning, we said we wait; we needed to take care of his wife. She is sick, alone at home, and they have no children. So we took her out of the house to spare her the shock, but they announced that she was returning to the apartment the next day at seven in the morning. I understand she knows about the chats, but I am not sure what exactly but she knows in general and wants to be near him. It was hard to digest. The neighbors who were traumatized, but took care of her above all, were shocked.”
L., the deputy head of the regional council, says that things remained under control as long as N. was under arrest, and then they reached a boiling point. It happened at five in the morning the day after his arrest, when he arrived accompanied by police officers, bent over and embarrassed in front of his neighbors who had not slept that night for a five-day house arrest in his apartment. “In such a small community, you can’t leave the door of the house after doing something like that, after they know about you,” says L. “You can’t go to the supermarket, you can’t take the elevator down. It’s either suicide or move and if you move, it’s better at night.”
Avi Dubitzky described it as a scenario that could end in a lynching, but in the end, no one lifted a finger at the older man.
“There were calls for violence. We stopped it.”
Did you try to find out if he hurt others? Usually if there are others someone comes forward if they aren’t afraid but not in this case.
M: “We are not the police, but a complaint has not yet come from anyone in the settlement, and there would likely have been. He is a coward and probably did not do it here.”
L.: “Everyone is shocked, but I’m not. I was sexually assaulted when I was 13 years old, and many emotions and a desire to vomit came over me when I found out about N. At no point was l surprised. They think that people like him have horns, and you see something is wrong with them. This is not true. My assailant was a senior police officer, many of whom were normal, holding respectable jobs. It will always hurt me to find out something like this about a person from my community, but I will never be surprised.”
In a country that is not famous for the patience of its citizens, in a situation that in other places they might have tried to sweep under the carpet, the leadership of the settlement acted transparently, and the residents showed restraint. Maybe it’s part of the same mindset that made them protect N’s wife; it’s perhaps a matter of crisis management ability. “After we realized that his wife did not need our help, we turned to take care of the community,” says L. “There were days of mourning here. It took us by surprise.”
Noa, a community resident: “My daughter was at the youth club in the settlement when the affair exploded. They were immediately called in and talked to without giving any details, even though it was already running in their WhatsApp groups. The next morning we already received a detailed WhatsApp about what was done and what would be done, and a line was set up. A Zoom meeting was held where they explained how to talk to the children about internet safety measures to be taken online. After all, we are dinosaurs. So all day long, you could meet professionals to talk to them. During this period, all residents felt helpless and worried.”
The owner and three employees in their 20s sit around one table in the only cafe in the community. One of them, Ben, is a security man who patrols the schools and kindergartens to check that no one is suspicious or dangerous. “We had another story a week ago,” he says. “Girls went out for a walk with the dog, and someone sat on the bench and exposed his penis. There was movement and a mess, but they couldn’t catch him or identify who it was. Probably not local. About two months ago, another case was about someone sitting in a car in front of the school and masturbating. He was arrested, and we know he has a removal order. But N. is a more serious story, at least in feeling.”
"Right at the beginning, we said we wait, we need to take care of his wife. She is sick, alone at home.
The owner, A.: “I moved here with my husband and children two years ago. We always felt safe here, with nice people caring for each other. The case of N undermined this.”
“Because he was magic, how I loved him,” interjects one of the workers.
“He used to sit here with his wife a lot, drinking coffee,” continues A. “Everyone would say what a man, how polite, but I have an intuition, and something didn’t please me. He was too much for Abu Dhabi, too much of an effort, too much of an effort. But everyone gave him kisses and hugs, so I said to myself, ‘ Well, maybe this time you’re wrong,’ and look what happened. Do you know that he used to watch over the children here? They let him and his wife watch over them for half an hour. Now the parents want to go on patrols at night; they feel that there is no one to trust, and it’s ridiculous that he was on the watch of the civilian. The police also need to be shaken.”
Avi Dubitzky: “We talked to him with the help of a program that knows how to sound like a girl, and N. was interested in her and her family situation, if there is a Father and a Mother in the picture, He was asking these questions to understand what the chances are of being caught.”
A good friend of mine is N’s neighbor. On the day it happened, we were at her house; we were cooking. At five in the morning, she saw the police bring him, he went in, and they left without taking anything. He has an office in the apartment with cameras and nothing; they didn’t search There. Why? I don’t know. We knew they would feel sorry for him, that they would say his wife was sick and that he wasn’t caught at the time of the act. My friend has a 12-year-old daughter; she used to go up in the elevator with him. The friend immediately checked to see if anything had happened to her, and not. But unlike the police, the settlement came out, And he did. You can’t do that in the city, only in small colonies.”
He told her how old he was and sent a picture.
The decision taken by the residents was not to allow N. to return to his routine. A protest vigil was held in front of his house. However, his house arrest was not extended, and the man left the settlement before the initiative was implemented. No one knew where.
About two weeks after N. left, one of his neighbors sat in the garden, looked at her pomelo tree, and saw the neighbor standing on his balcony again. Others saw him walking the dogs in the street. The demonstration initiative came to fruition when word spread about his return to the settlement. Dozens of residents lined up in front of the house with signs in their hands. But N. himself left the community again, this time with his wife.
Someone vandalized the door of the couple’s apartment; it is not clear whether before or after they left. “They threw chairs and glass at the door, startled the neighbors who filed a complaint with the police, but they still don’t know who did it,” says M., head of the settlement’s administration. “Now our ranger walks around there more because there is a limit, and we completely condemn acts of violence. It’s also not fair to the neighbors.”
The residents are afraid that he will return, and they intend to continue protesting,” says the neighbor who recognized N. on the balcony. “You can’t force him to leave, but on the other hand, it’s not like I want him to become a problem for children in another city.”
Many residents share this concern. If at first there was a sense of relief that the man had been caught, along with the shock, over time, the settlement understood the significance of the action of Avi Dubitzky and his men: N. was not caught red-handed. At most, it would be possible to attribute to him an intention to commit a crime, but this crime has no victim. In the absence of other complaints, even if indicted, he could quickly become another city’s problem. As of this moment, in any case, it is not even possible to determine with certainty that he is indeed a pedophile.
Avi Dubitzky’s operating patterns are controversial in the eyes of his critics. Most have been exposed as manipulating the legal system to get an unjust result. See the story of Attorney Asaf Dok, from Tel-Aviv, who was caught explaining to an undercover detective how to lie to the Police and destroy evidence.
Police officials can’t explain why they didn’t catch N before Dubitzky did, so they tend to claim that if Dubitzky had contacted them with the chat documentation and not acted on his own, it is possible that an undercover investigation would have revealed victims or clues that could have lead to serious criminal charges. “Of all the cases from Dubitzky, hardly any indictments came out. The way he acted did not allow the police to build a case professionally with an orderly chain of evidence, he was not assisted by legal support, and many times his correspondence in chats fell into places of improper solicitation,” an anonymous police official told a reported about six years ago when doubts began about Dubitzky’s methods. Despite these anonymous and empty claims of entrapment, there has not been one person that can show Avi Dubitzky has entrapped him. “Besides, how can a normal person be entrapped by a 12-year-old girl,” asks Avi Dubitzky? Does that seem a legitimate claim a sane person would make?
“Pedophiles are attracted to chat rooms because, unlike Facebook, you don’t have to put a picture, and you can remain anonymous,” Dubitzky explains his modus operandi. “From there, they switch to WhatsApp, where the voice messages start. We talked to him with the help of a program that knows how to sound like a girl, and N. was interested in her and her home lifestyle, if there is a Father and a Mother, to understand the chances of being caught. He told her about his wife’s health condition and said he was taking her for chemotherapy treatments. I think he wanted a friend he could tell everything to. Unlike others who tried to hide their details, he didn’t hide anything from her. Told where he was from and how old he was and sent a picture where his Police uniform was hanging in the background.
How long have you corresponded?
“Two weeks. Then the meeting was scheduled, and I asked him to bring the flowers for identification.
When did the subject of the meeting at the kiss come up?
“In the beginning, he said, ‘Let’s sit and talk, then ‘I’ll give you a kiss on the pee.'”You were using a shaming method here. If you had turned the chat to the police and not gone to the meeting and from there to YouTube, an orderly investigation would have been opened in N’s case. His lawyers will now argue that the evidence is inadmissible, that he was entrapped.
“I tried many times to do it, I suggested the police action following a chat, and they said, ‘It’s not possible.'” WHY?
“Ask them; they don’t have a satisfactory explanation. It’s not a creative body. I don’t want to come down on them, but they don’t do their job eagerly. So I compare myself to Donald Trump and them to Joe Biden. They’ve been in the system for decades, tired, and they only go for it when there is a real girl. But you don’t look at the dam and see it crack, and wait for it to burst to care for it.”
At first, there was a feeling of relief that the man had been caught, but over time the settlement understood the meaning of Dubitzky's action: N. was not caught red-handed. At most, it would be possible to attribute to him an intention to commit a crime, but this crime has no victim.
That is inaccurate, as the police have agents who pose as minors.
“They do operations and catch people but don’t file charges. They don’t want me to expose pedophiles because it makes them look bad. It’s like with cancer – as long as you don’t go to the doctor, you’re not sick.”
There is no minor - there will be a less severe punishment
The hasty action of the “caught in the act” people has legal significance. “There is a person here who has gone from fantasy to reality in the virtual world – that is, he has not yet met the girl on the street – but even in what is done online, there is a degree,” explains attorney Daniel Haklai, who owns an office in the areas of criminal law and white collar crimes. “The ruling distinguishes, for example, between who just writes and who sends pictures, and if he gives minor instructions like ‘look at yourself.’ It gets worse if she agrees. The next step – does she turn on a camera, and he instructs her to touch herself. There can already be a crime of indecent act.”
Attorney Daniel Haklai: “There are cases born from civil activity in which you can see how the impersonator leads it to a sexual place, even when the adult objects. In such cases, the case will be closed. This unequivocally hurts the possibility of catching the person.”
What happens when you move from the virtual world to the physical world?
If he tried to touch her and, at the last minute, the police jumped on him, then this could be the offense of attempting an indecent act or rape. If he touched her and there were no policemen around, then it is an act of rape or sodomy. In general, the punishment is much more severe when moving to the world the physical”.
There was no physical aspect here, and the virtual was also fake. How does the court treat impersonation in an attempt to capture pedophiles without a victim?
“It depends on who and how they impersonate. Police officers who do this will usually open a fictitious profile in which the age is apparent, say ‘Shiri 12’, and wait for a message from an adult. They cannot initiate a conversation on their behalf. They have to respond, and even then in a restrained and careful manner, so that the defense attorney will not come and say that there is a police agent here, which will reduce the punishment of the accused. Regarding the lack of a victim, because there is no minor – naturally, there will be less severe punishment, but it will be unequivocal. I have a client who sent sexual content, including pictures of himself, to police agents who pretended to be a 12-year-old. He was under arrest for two months and then a year and two months under house arrest with an electronic handcuff, and every week he went to group therapy. Then they transferred him to another year in a hostel that treats sex offenders.”
What about citizens who catch pedophiles?
If they act by the rules that the police outline and try as little as possible to be impeached agents if all their recordings are reliable and show that they did not impeach him – it can be just like the case of a police agent, and they will be praised for good citizenship. On the other hand, some issues were born due to possible civil activity. It is easy to see in them how the impersonator leads it to a sexual place, even when the adult himself disapproves and says, ‘not appropriate.’ In such cases, the case will be closed. This unequivocally harms the possibility of catching the person.”
It is not known where N is now. We cannot warn the public about him by revealing his name, picture, or residence details; He is not arrested or accused. His story is a straightforward consequence of the digital age, where everything is conducted in the court of the social network. Still, a story about a pedophile suspect should have an end. For the time being, N.’s story does not have any.
Comments: "Aggressive act of removal by a person who fails people with their language."
Lawyer Suzi Ozsini Arnia, N.’s attorney, responded: “My client is a disabled person recognized by the Ministry of Defense and has volunteered in the Civil Guard for years. From the recycled photographs that have already been published in the past, it can be learned that this is an attempt to set a trap for my client by officials who have taken the law into their own hands. My client gave his full version of the investigation. He never had any meetings with any de facto minor. He does not deny the correspondence in a technical conversation with that person who pretended to be a young woman. Still, he indeed denies that he believed it was a minor but believed that it was a woman pretending to be a girl as part of a game and a joke.
“The correspondence, which was not carried out in a chat intended for minors but for adults, is part of an aggressive extortion operation by a person, who, from his place of hiding, set himself the goal of tripping people up with their language, deceiving and deceiving them, by any means and in any way, while committing crimes of impersonation, forgery, and invasion of privacy. It’s not for nothing that the police and the prosecutor’s office treat the ‘hunting products’ of that impostor with limited liability. This is why it did not grant them any degree of reliability and legality in other cases.”
In response, the Israel Police stated: “We take sex crimes, especially pedophilia crimes, thoughtfully, and therefore they are dealt with by the police resolutely and with all the tools at our disposal by the law, and this is what was done in this case as well. Upon receiving the report about the case, a suspect was arrested, and after being questioned by the police, it was decided that he should be detained house for several days. Regardless, the case investigation is being conducted these days thoroughly while carrying out all the necessary actions to arrive at the inquiry of the truth.
We emphasize that alongside the initiated police investigations, the police also handle complaints received on the subject from citizens (such as the one who calls himself a “pedophile hunter”). These are handled professionally in the relevant units, but this is the place to emphasize that a distinction must be made between activities permitted to a citizen and an investigation that the police are authorized and competent to carry out only. For example, a private civil initiative that tries to conduct an “investigation” in the field without the right tools, without appropriate training and a constitutional anchor, is unfortunately of limited evidentiary value, bordering on criminal and worse, may sabotage a police investigation and damage the evidence required to bring the suspects to justice, thus indirectly they may cause for pedophiles to escape punishment instead of paying the price for their actions.
The police encourage anyone affected by a crime through the Internet and outside it or are exposed to information on the matter to complain so that the offenders are brought to justice, and the necessary assistance is provided to the victims of the crime.”
