Linor’s Story A Victim’s Journey from Rape to Redemption
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By Jaq Greenspon
e all have defining moments in our lives. Often they’re in retrospect, when we can look back and say, “There! There is where our world changed.” For Linor Abargil, the demarcation was sudden and brutal. In October 1998, on a deserted road outside Milan, travel agent Uri Shlomo Nur raped and stabbed the 18-year-old, forever bifurcating her life into Before and After. Linor, recently crowned Miss Israel, was in Italy’s fashion capital to work as a model. She’d only been there a few weeks, but already was homesick for her family and friends, wanting to see them once more before departing again – this time for the Seychelles Islands and the upcoming Miss World competition. She’d been introduced to Nur through her agency, and he had taken care of all the arrangements. He even offered her a lift. It was during that ride, while supposedly taking a “shortcut” to avoid traffic, that he attacked. He tied Linor’s hands and bound her mouth with duct tape. When he was finished, he drove her to the train station and asked her to call him when she arrived in Rome, as he “would worry.” For the most part, this is where Nur leaves our story as a real person. Yes, we’ll see him again upon his arrest, trial and conviction. We’ll hear about him when he comes up for (and is denied) parole. We’ll even find out about other victims and his cycle of violence. But as a human being, we’re pretty much done with him. As a figure, though, as a symbol and a concept, “Shlomo Nur” and those like him will be part of this story forever. For Linor, though, the story continues in a blur. Even before leaving Milan, she called her mother to let her know what had happened. Upon arriving in Rome she was met by a friend of her then-boyfriend, who immediately took her to the hospital, then to the police to report the rape. Afterward, she headed back to Israel. Six weeks later, in November 1998, she was crowned Miss World in the Seychelles. The reality of what had happened, and where it would lead, hadn’t quite sunk in for the beauty queen. “I had to go to compete. It’s part of the deal,” she explained. “I wasn’t in therapy by that time yet. I thought (the mental trauma) was going to go away by itself. I didn’t really understand what happened to me.” At the time, Linor thought that going away, far from home, would help. “And it really did” — for a while, she says. Over the next 10 years, Linor Abargil lived a celebrity lifestyle. She was a top fashion model, jet-setting all over the world. She married the top basketball star in the country, a native Lithuanian, becoming half of THE power couple of the decade. But something was missing.
“This part of my life is not even interesting,” she says now. “It’s a dark part of my life that I don’t want to talk about. It’s like it never happened. This is how I feel.” In 2008, she was going through a legal — if not religious — “divorce.” “When you’re Jewish, you’re not married when you’re married to a goy,” she says. So it was “not a divorce. I wasn’t even married by the Jewish point of view. I didn’t even feel married. It was like I had a boyfriend. That’s it.” But she did feel a powerful calling: a desire to expose the bogeyman, to share her story and strength with women unable to summon up their own. She decided to make a documentary about her life and her journey. “I went to a therapy, which was very, very important,” she says. “Then the thought of making the film came really strong. It was like I had to do it. It was strong in my soul. I realized I cannot continue my life without going through with this film.” Wanting to make a film and getting one made are two different things. Linor enlisted the aid of her good friend Motty Reif. Introductions were made to Cecilia Peck, daughter of Gregory Peck and director of the Dixie Chicks documentary Shut Up and Sing. Linor also met Inbal B. Lessner, producer of I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life & Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal. The three met in early 2008, and the documentarians found the beauty queen captivating. “We felt she could carry a film like that,” says Lessner. “It’s a difficult issue, and maybe people wouldn’t want to watch but she could make them.” They decided to move forward in December 2008— roughly 10 years after Linor won the Miss World crown. The start was auspicious. Financing was lined up and the filmmakers headed off to Tel Aviv to begin work — with Peck at the helm, Lessner handling the editing and the two of them, with Reif, co-producing. They anticipated finishing the project within a year, with the film focusing on Linor and her recently launched website aimed at collecting survivor stories. Unfortunately, the 2008 economic meltdown was not the best time to invest in a documentary about rape. The promised funding dried up. “We had this incredible material and we couldn’t just let it go,” Lessner says. “So we edited a little bit and presented it to some potential grant funders and investors, and we’d get a little more money.” Then a couple of interesting things started to happen. Linor www.davidlv.com | JANUARY 2014
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12/19/13 3:30 PM