Rami Beracha, a Managing General Partner at venture capital firm Pitango, has temporarily suspended himself from the fund following an exposé by the "Uvda" ("Fact") television program broadcast yesterday evening, which presented testimony on acts of sexual harassment that he had allegedly committed. Beracha continues to deny that he forced himself on women, but he has suspended himself from the fund, and Pitango said in a statement that he was taking a break in order to clear his name.
According to the program, Beracha hired a firm of private investigators to follow women he had harassed, most of them technology entrepreneurs who tried to raise money from Pitango, which was founded in 1993 by Chemi Peres and Rami Kalish. Journalists and an entrepreneur who had received information about Beracha's alleged conduct were also kept under surveillance.
One woman entrepreneur related how after a successful initial meeting, a further meeting was arranged for her with Beracha at a restaurant in North Tel Aviv. "It sounded odd to me, but I said 'Go for it, you can't say no." She said the first hour of the meeting consisted of a professional conversation, until Beracha started to talk about how he was wounded in the First Lebanon War, leading to the amputation of an arm and a leg.
"While he told his story, he put his hand on my leg. It wasn't a gesture of 'I want to tell you something'. I didn't know what to do, and after a few seconds I changed position. I couldn't remove his hand, and then it happened again, and again I changed position. And then I think he put his hand on my back. His hand was touching me. I didn't manage to say to myself 'Get out of here'. It took me time to absorb the situation - I came to close a deal, I didn't hear the background noise."
Beracha then kissed the woman, and at that point she managed to push him away and leave the restaurant. "He said 'Don't be heavy, what are you making a scene about?'," she said.
According to Uvda presenter Ilana Dayan, several other women described a similar pattern of behavior: a meeting that starts on a professional basis and turns into harassment.
Beracha later hired a private investigations company, Yaad Investigations, to track tech entrepreneur Shahar Kaminitz, who had received testimony from women alleging they had been harassed by Beracha. According to the program, the company gave Beracha sensitive information about Kaminitz. Beracha then asked the company to monitor journalists Inbal Orpaz, Hadas Steiff and Sharon Shporer, fearing that they would obtain information about his behavior.
Beracha then went a step further, and instructed the investigators to monitor a list of women on the Internet, to find out whether they had disclosed information about him. He told the investigators to use a false identity as a woman in the tech industry, and thereby gain access to closed forums of women entrepreneurs.
Beracha stated in response to the program: "For months, I have been subject to a campaign of smears and persecution behind which is someone in the tech industry who, for motives unknown to me, decided to ruin my good name and harm my family and my livelihood to the point of complete destruction.
"In the past few months several friends have told me that this person has been distributing, orally and in writing!, libelous allegations of sexual attacks I allegedly made, hired a private investigator who has been trying to gather evidence, and even more seriously has been trying to spread rumors on the market, sending out messages of which the worst was a WhatsApp message that included the sentence, 'Let's take this bastard down.' A statement like that would leave no-one indifferent; it amounts to a real threat and is taken from the terminology of the criminal world.
"When I finally understood that someone had set their sights on 'taking me down' and would stop at nothing to do so, I decided it was my right and even my obligation to my family to find out who I was dealing with, and so I approached investigations company BICI and my only instruction to them was to monitor the social networks.
"It is important to me to stress in the most forthright way possible that I have never forced myself on anyone in such a way as could be interpreted as sexual harassment. Certainly no such thing has ever been made known to me…
"Despite this, I see fit to apologize from the depth of my heart if someone felt injured by my behavior; I had no such intention.
"I have also decided to freeze all my activity at Pitango, to take time away from work to deal with the campaign against me with the aim of clearing my name."
Pitango said in a statement: "Rami Beracha is an esteemed partner, a friend, and an inspirational person with a fine record as a person, a combat soldier in the IDF, a personal example to generations of soldiers with severe wounds who were rehabilitated, and one of the pillars of the venture capital industry in Israel. These merits cannot be taken away from him, certainly when not one of the claims made against him has been proved.
"We stress that no complaints or claims concerning insulting conduct by Rami towards women have ever reached us. Had we received such claims, they would have been dealt with with zero tolerance, in accordance with the law, in a determined, sharp and clear way."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on March 15, 2018
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