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POSTED BY KEN STONE ON NOVEMBER 20, 2015
The Kabbalah Centre International and one of its former co-directors should collectively pay more than $1.1 million to a former student who met the rabbi for a late-night meeting that turned into an attempted sexual assault, an attorney told a jury Friday.
In his final argument to a jury hearing trial of Jena Scaccetti’s lawsuit against the KCI and Rabbi Yehuda Berg, lawyer Alain Bonavida said his client was involuntarily touched on her leg and held by Berg in a tight embrace when she met with him at his mother’s New York City apartment the night of Oct. 25-26, 2012.
“That’s a sexual assault,” Bonavida said. “She didn’t consent to that.”
But Berg’s attorney, John Cline, said his client did not sexually abuse Scaccetti.
“This is not a case about rape, this is not a case about violence,” he told the Los Angeles Superior Court jury. “This was a human encounter between two people one night in their lives.”
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