Excerpt from "Exposure - the woman who brought down the Tinder scammer"/Kashet 12
"You won't believe who this 'Madame from Jerusalem' is!", the Keshet 12 promos dramatically announced and I already started running names in my head. A former Knesset member? A reality show? A well-known actress who found supplementing income particularly sleazy? So many possibilities and only one way to find out (apparently) - to watch the episode of "The Impersonators" with Haim Etgar that aired last night on Beshet 12. Even before we talk about the story itself, about which there is much to say, we need to align: the promotion for the show "The Imposters" this week was itself a form of fraud. There are no shortage of reasons to criticize Etgar's programs, whether for the forceful style in which he confronts the subjects of his investigations or the over-dramatic editing devoid of self-awareness, but usually they live up to their main task - to bring hair-raising stories of impersonation and deception to the screen and on the way to reveal for the time who knows How helpless the Israeli police are. Well, the show that aired yesterday failed in that too.
"Madame from Jerusalem" is... they... he... Yitzhak Sharifi. Yes, so simple and does not require even a tenth of the teasing that Etgar did to the viewers. why? Because Sharifi's story was revealed several years ago. A simple Google search will turn up a large number of articles about the case in which a man in his fifties, a businessman and a family man, posed as a woman on social media, where he met young women from difficult backgrounds and persuaded them to sleep with him and his friends for money. Not that the money would have made his actions any less vile, but it is important to note that money was not given to them either. Sharifi is scum, there is no other word that can describe him and the sentence of eleven years in prison that the court sentenced him to is not enough in my opinion. Haim Etgar and the "impersonators" team knew that Sharifi's story was not new, and moreover - unlike other investigations in which Etgar takes an active part in exposing the criminals and even enters the police's place and tries to catch them, here he simply took a story that had already been investigated and treated and presented it to viewers as some sensational news.
Superman. Haim Etgar/screenshot, Keshet 12
What was here? Shadowed and voice-distorted interviews - among the hallmarks of the format - with two of Sharifi's victims. the truth? If the program was packaged like this and sought to use the prime time stage of Keshet 12 to give space to those whose lives were destroyed by a cynical and cruel man it would have been worthy enough. Especially when we live in a society where Eyal Golan, a singer who was involved in an affair not very different from Sharifi's story and was not prosecuted due to lack of evidence, has returned to being one of the most successful artists in Israel with a series of sold out shows this summer. Viewers should not be deceived into thinking that they are going to be exposed to a plot twist to make this story worthy of broadcast, the program could have been promoted as first interviews with some of Sharifi's victims and this was important and brave content that deserves to be broadcast on the Keshet 12 screen. But this is simply not Haim's style challenge.
No and no, it seems that Etgar is head over heels in love with Pony in the character of the tough researcher. The one who sits in front of the victims and the attackers and looks at them with the whites of his eyes as if he were Captain Ayoub in "Fauda" and not a director in a suit with a close-up make-up artist on the set. Etgar's style is his own and even if it disgusts me, in many cases it dwarfs the strong stories he manages to bring to the show. As mentioned yesterday, it was a show of ignorance and insanity. To add insult to injury (or to add meat to the promos), Etgar created a completely fabricated scene in which he accompanies two of the victims, who are elegantly nicknamed 'The Soldier' and 'The Divorcee', when they go to a complex of lodgings for rent by the hour and try to talk to the landlord to find out Does he know the people who were there with them? The hidden cameras that have become another hallmark of the show come into play and a challenger even 'jumps in' when the host is being rude to the women. After all, you have Superman from Herzliya Studios.
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filth. Sharifi/screenshot, Keshet 12
The story of Yitzhak Sharifi or the "Madame from Jerusalem" is actually among the rare cases in which the Israeli police and even the courts performed their duties in a reasonable manner, investigating, arresting and even prosecuting. This did not prevent the challenge and the team of the "impersonators" from presenting the case to the viewers as their own investigation, ensuring a shocking revelation that in the end was less surprising than Bibi saying the words "total victory" at a press conference and then even arriving at Sharifi's sentencing and confronting him in a clumsy and awkward way. Israelis and especially Israeli women deserve that people like Sharifi be removed from society and sit in prison for the rest of their lives and Israeli viewers deserve a show that respects their intelligence a little more than the "imposters".
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Chaim Etgar