Deputy Knesset speaker swears pimping, meth use ‘never happened’

Likud’s Oren Hazan lashes out over report he hired prostitutes for friends, used hard drugs while managing a Bulgaria casino

Times of Israel

Deputy Knesset Speaker Oren Hazan on Tuesday denied claims made in a news report that he procured prostitutes for his friends and used hard drugs while managing a casino in Bulgaria, and even threatened Channel 2 with a libel suit for its coverage .

In a Monday evening report titled “Prostitutes, drugs and the deputy speaker of the Knesset,” reporter Amit Segal presented recordings of former associates of Hazan who alleged that the freshman Likud Knesset member would hire prostitutes for his guests, and that he bought and smoked crystal meth.

“It never happened,” Hazan, 33, said in back-to-back radio interviews Tuesday morning, expressing willingness to take a lie detector test to prove his innocence.

“No prostitution, no pimping, no drugs,” he told Israel Radio. “It’s funny — there are Knesset members who testify to having used drugs. They’re the junkies. I’m opposed to legalization.”

Hazan called Segal a “yellow journalist,” saying he had asked the witnesses shown in the report questions “straight out of some imaginary movie he saw.”

Segal reaffirmed the veracity of his report Tuesday, telling Army Radio, “We have two testimonies from Israelis about the crystal meth use, including his buying it from a dealer.”

The exposé quoted two Israeli tourists and a casino employee who confirmed that Hazan would provide prostitutes for his guests in the Burgas casino, where he held a stake. Both prostitution and hard-drug use are illegal in Bulgaria.

On Monday night, Hazan’s attorney Avraham Keren sent a letter to Channel 2 and Segal, accusing them of libel and demanding that they retract the story and apologize.

“Your intention was to injure — with no other practical reason — the standing of my client and his good name,” the letter read.

Keren also took the network to task for its use of anonymous sources in the article. “Of course the vast majority of the segment was done by distorting voices in a way that made it impossible to identify who is talking and who they are talking about,” he wrote.

“I don’t know them — not their faces, not their names,” Hazan said Tuesday.

Earlier, he denied the claims in a Facebook post, writing, “This time I won’t be quiet about the loathsome and baseless lies.”

Some commenters on his post attached photographs of Hazan drinking alcohol, dancing with scantily clad women and giving the middle finger to the camera. Others posted photographs of Bob Odenkirk, who played the attorney of a crystal meth dealer on the popular TV show “Breaking Bad,” and of Benicio del Toro, who played the drug-addled attorney of Hunter S. Thompson in the film “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”