Court rejects Netanyahu request to block Toronto screening of film with leaked footage from corruption probe

The Jerusalem District Court rejects a request by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to block the screening of a film that uses leaked footage of him being questioned by police between 2016 and 2018.

The American documentary, called “The Bibi Files,” will debut at a film festival in Toronto tonight, with never-before-seen footage from the investigation.

The judge rules that Netanyahu had waited too long after the film was announced before filing his motion and declined to intervene. It was also not immediately clear how a court could stop an overseas screening.

According to Variety magazine, the recordings of the corruption investigation were leaked to renowned director Alex Gibney last year and feature interviews with Netanyahu, his wife Sara and his son Yair, along with friends, associates and household staff.

Netanyahu’s lawyers told the court that the footage was meant to harm him politically.

His lawyers claim that Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker, a long-time Netanyahu critic, was one of the directors, saying that Drucker “has declared himself in public to be a political opponent of the prime minister.”

“These recordings shed light on Netanyahu’s character in a way that is unprecedented and extraordinary,” Gibney was quoted as saying by Variety. “They are powerful evidence of his venal and corrupt character and how that led us to where we are at right now.”

The report added that the recordings, consisting of thousands of hours of interviews, have not been screened locally or abroad, due to Israel’s privacy laws.

Alex Gibney Doc Featuring Never-Before-Seen Police Interrogation Footage of Benjamin Netanyahu to Screen at TIFF (EXCLUSIVE) https://t.co/GVqbb1j0vY

— Variety (@Variety) September 2, 2024

Netanyahu was ultimately charged with fraud and breach of trust in three separate cases filed in 2019, and with bribery in one of them. The proceedings are ongoing and likely to take years to wrap up, especially given delays after the trial was suspended along with all other non-urgent cases due to Hamas’s shock October 7 incursion and the ensuing war in Gaza.

Netanyahu denies any wrongdoing in the cases against him and claims that the charges were fabricated in a witch hunt led by the police and state prosecution, and facilitated by a weak attorney general.