Three sisters, Nicole Meyer, Dassi Erlich and Elly Sapper, walk hand in hand into a Melbourne courtroom for the first day of the trial of Malka Leifer, their former school principal and abuser.
Nicole, who will give evidence first, is smiling but anxious. She’s spent days holed up in a serviced apartment near Melbourne’s county court with her sisters, poring over her witness statement. Even in the car on the way to court, she’s re-reading it.
“Don’t read it now,” Dassi tells her, gently yet firmly. “You’re not going to know every single detail. That’s impossible. Our memory doesn’t work like that.”
But they soon discover the court expects exactly that. Within days, all three sisters will have taken the stand, enduring cross-examinations they each describe as deeply traumatic.
“We were on trial,” Elly tells Guardian Australia. “That’s what we all felt being on the stand – that we were the ones on trial.”
This is one of the key reasons the sisters allowed a documentary crew to follow them over the course of five years, through one of the most high-profile sexual abuse trials in Australian history: to “lift the lid” on the criminal justice system and what it asks of victims. The result is Surviving Malka Leifer, which premieres on Stan on Sunday.
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“We thought we knew everything, because we had been through the whole legal processes in Israel for so long,” Nicole says. “We thought we knew more than other victims.”
By the time the trial began in February 2023, the sisters had already spent more than a decade navigating legal systems across two countries.
In 2008, Dassi was the first to disclose being sexually abused by Leifer, then principal of the girls campus at the Adass Israel school, to a social worker in Israel. The social worker contacted Nicole, who told her: “it’s true because she also did it to me”.
At the time of the abuse, the sisters lived in complete isolation within the ultra-Orthodox Adass Israel Jewish sect, a community of about 250 people in Melbourne’s south-east suburbs. They had no internet, no television, no newspapers and “absolutely no sex education”, Dassi says. They didn’t even know the names for breasts.
In court documents, the sisters’ childhood is described as difficult due to the “cruel and unpredictable way their mother behaved towards them”, which included physical beatings, being locked in a dark cupboard “for lengthy periods of time” and being deprived of food. As a result, they were “starved of love and affection and left in a perpetual state of fear and confusion”.In the documentary, Dassi says their father was also “not a safe person”.
Leifer – considered a leader in the community – preyed on this, the sisters say. For each, it began as what they thought was a kind, small touch but escalated into sexual assault. In the documentary, these memories are recreated using a dollhouse, with Leifer portrayed as a spider, crawling through each room.
But when the sisters came forward, the school rallied behind Leifer. A 2015 supreme court judgement found that when presented with the allegations, the board didn’t notify police. Instead, they helped Leifer flee to Israel.
Dassi, Nicole and Elly gave statements to Victoria police in 2011, who then filed charges against Leifer in 2012. A formal extradition request followed in 2014, kicking off a years-long legal battle involving more than 70 extradition hearings.
The first half of the documentary focuses on this period – and the political interference that occurred, including by Israel’s then deputy health minister, Yaakov Litzman, who repeatedly intervened to alter psychiatric evaluations that had deemed Leifer fit for extradition. As part of a plea deal in 2022, he admitted to breach of trust, to avoid charges of obstruction of justice and moral turpitude, and paid a fine.
Separately, in 2014, the sisters’ older sibling, Dalia, then a principal at an ultra-Orthodox school in Manchester, was approached by two “fixers”, sent from Israel to pressure her into convincing her sisters to withdraw their allegations. Dalia refused.
At the time, she began suffering chest pains. Two weeks later she died.
‘Disempowering’ court process
The second half of the documentary follows the sisters through the criminal trial in Melbourne, during which they waived their right to anonymity.
While they praise the police and prosecution, Dassi says “nothing” could have prepared them for the “disempowering” experience of taking the stand and having their medical records and personal communications subpoenaed and scrutinised in court.
Dassi says during her cross examination, she was grilled “not about the incident” but other details – what class she had that morning, what she ate for lunch, the names of her teachers. But she couldn’t remember.
“Those details weren’t traumatic, so they didn’t ‘save’ in my memory like that,” she says.
It was a calculated strategy to “make it look like we were lying”, Dassi says.
Nicole says it was a blow to learn how restricted victims were in the court process – and how little the jury were told, with Leifer’s flight to Israel, extradition and Litzman’s interference all kept from the jury and suppressed from media reporting.
Of the 74 charges, 29 were taken to trial.
Despite six and a half years of “sustained abuse” Nicole says only five charges related to her. Abuse that she says occurred for a year and a half after she was married and pregnant was also withheld from the jury.
Nicole believes the way her testimony was limited shaped the verdict and “did not give any scope to a jury to understand the magnitude of her abuse”. Leifer was found guilty on 18 charges of sexual abusing Dassi and Elly but found not guilty of the five charges related to her.
The sisters are seen in the documentary trying to process the complicated emotions the verdict brought. The audience learns Dassi checked into a mental health facility for some time during the trial, while Elly suffered a miscarriage.
For Nicole, the most “heart wrenching day” was not being able to stand beside her sisters to read a victim impact statement in court at sentencing.
Silent survivors
A year later, Nicole recorded her victim impact statement and posted it on TikTok. She’s since grown a following that focuses on “silent survivors” – those who haven’t gone to police, haven’t disclosed or have been failed by the justice system.
The trial also “awoke” her passion for the law, which she is now studying. Dassi has written a book, while Elly fell pregnant with her second child a month after the verdict.
The sisters are calling for reforms to the justice system, including the right to legal representation for victims in court, greater protection of their medical and therapy records and earlier directions from the judge to jurors on how trauma affects memory.
They’re also seeking more consistent support for victims during trial. Many of their suggestions mirror those made by the Australian Law Reform Commission’s review into justice responses to sexual violence.
The documentary also highlights the role of former Victorian premier Ted Baillieu, who stood beside the sisters at press conferences and once accompanied Dassi to a meeting with Adass to negotiate an apology.
Never-before-heard audio recordings made by Baillieu reveal how Adass used legal advice from its insurer as an excuse not to apologise. It still hasn’t.
Adass did not respond to the allegations in the documentary but it was noted the make up of its board has changed.
Nicole says abuse and harassment from within the Adass community continue. One man recently accused her of lying on social media.
“That’s the mentality, not of all the people, but a large cohort of people,” she says.
The documentary ends with a quote from another inquiry – the 2017 royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse. It reads that “countless thousands” of children have been sexually abused, many by perpetrators in organisations that “professed to care for children” and that “we must each resolve do to what we can do protect them”.
Asked if that has happened, they all respond at the same time.
Nicole and Dassi with a short no. Elly is more circumspect, pointing to progress in school education, growing awareness of consent and children’s boundaries and survivors speaking out, but she adds: “We’re definitely not there yet.”
• Surviving Malka Leifer premieres on Stan on Sunday 5 October
• Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
