October 7 rape deniers need to see the truth, says Sheryl Sandberg: ‘Only one side to sexual violence’

Sheryl Sandberg’s new film, “Screams Before Silence” marks a return to public life for the former Facebook boss.

It’s a harrowing watch in which Israeli women testify about being raped and taken hostage by Hamas terrorists on October 7.

Witnesses tell Sandberg in graphic terms how they were forced to look on as women were assaulted, mutilated and murdered.

And she sees gruesome photos of the carnage taken by first responders on the scene. 

Sandberg, 54, stepped down from the board of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, in January less than two years after quitting as chief operating officer.

But the billionaire has returned to the spotlight simply because there are so many who refuse to believe that there was systematic sexual violence on Oct. 7 .

On that day, 1,145 people, both Israelis and non-Israelis, were killed, including 364 at the Nova music festival, and the rest on kibbutzim close to Gaza, according to the latest official tally.

It was the worst single loss of life since Israel’s founding in 1948. According to Israel, 252 hostages were taken during the attacks and a total of 128 hostages remain unaccounted for; at least 36 of them are presumed dead.

“This work feels like a responsibility,” Sandberg tells The Post. 

“I really feel like this is the most important work of my life, like everything I’ve done has led me here.”

Sandberg has a son and daughter with her late husband, Dave Goldberg, and now has a blended family with her third husband, Tom Bernthal, who has two daughters and a son of his own.

For her, creating this hour-long documentary is personal.

It’s the memory of meeting Ayelet Levy Sachar, the mother of 19-year-old Naama Levy, whose kidnapping from the Nahal Oz kibbutz military base was filmed by Hamas, that brings Sandberg to tears.

The sight of Naama’s pajama bottoms, drenched in blood at the back, was the first clear sign that Hamas was using sexual violence as a weapon of war.

“They’re grabbing her by the hair, and she’s all, like, messed up and like, and I’m thinking of her hair, and like, in my mind I’m stroking her hair, like I’m always doing,” Levy Sachar tells Sandberg in the film of her daughter’s kidnapping. Levy is presumed to still be Hamas hostage.

“We would like to think that this couldn’t be possible. That nobody would harm a young girl. But then you just see it there,” adds Levy Sachar.

“Sorry,” Sandberg tells The Post, crying.

“When I was talking to Ayelet … she really spent a lot of time talking about stroking her daughter’s hair. And I stroke my daughter’s hair.”

Nama’s mother lives in a numb no-man’s land with no information as to whether her daughter is still alive.

“I have three daughters,” says Sandberg. “And that girl, Nama, that young woman, she’s still there.”

There is, of course, an irony that Sandberg spent 14 years working with Mark Zuckerberg to turn Facebook into the most powerful social media platform — and that the denialism her documentary is made to challenge flourishes on social media.

Her documentary is available to watch free on YouTube — it was funded by New York-based philanthropists Carol and Joey Low — but at the same time social media is flooded with videos which claim the film, and all accounts of sexual violence, are untrue.

“Let’s be very clear what that is,” says Sandberg, “That is going after people who have spoken out on sexual violence.

“So that means that you’re saying that a woman who’s a hostage, who said she was sexually assaulted, is lying. Are you kidding me?”

She acknowledges that social media is a double-edged sword. 

“I mean, social media is why we can make this available for free,” she says. Indeed 20 million have watched the trailer, and more than a million have watched the full documentary.

“But yes, there are people who are saying the wrong thing. And that dialogue is what we have to have. 

“But what I think is also really important to remember is that the deniers are very, very, very small. They’re loud, but they’re small. 

“If you look, even people who have very strong views about what’s happening in Gaza… will speak out against sexual violence.”

Sandberg wants the documentary to be seen by students and other protesters who erected encampments at colleges across the country — and even those who claim the massacre was a legitimate action by an oppressed people.

They must see the reality of what was done to women, she says.

“I do not believe that October 7th was justified at all,” says Sandberg, “But there are people who think it was resistance. 

“You can believe that October 7th was resistance, but rape is never resistance. 

“If your narrative is this is pure resistance, rape doesn’t fit in. So you can either think, ‘wait a second, maybe my narrative is wrong’, or ‘the world is gray’, or you can just say, ‘It didn’t happen.’

“Rape should never happen and it clearly happened on October 7th. You saw it in the film.”

In the documentary, Sandberg talks to Raz Cohen, an Israeli special forces vet who was at the festival, who recounts watching a gang rape, and Elad Avraham, who worked security at Nova, and tells of seeing the corpse of a woman who had been bound and bent over a car’s bumper with her legs apart. 

He saw, he says, bodies with parts cut off.

She also talks to Tali Binner, who tells how she hid for seven hours in a trailer at the Nova festival and heard the agonizing cries of other women being raped.

A Nova survivor tells of watching as terrorists raped a woman and cut off her breast, threw it in the road and played with it.

Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, former vice-president of the United Nations Commission on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, tells Sandberg, “The bodies whose breasts were cut were found in different locations.

“It depicts a pattern that could not have been unless it was premeditated and preconceived by Hamas themselves.”

Dr Cochav Elkayam-Levy, head of Israel’s civil commission on war crimes against women and children on Oct. 7, adds that it was “sexual abuse in its worst form, it’s like they wanted to inflict pain in the cruelest manner possible.”

Sandberg herself spoke at the UN in December, to insist, “Rape should never be used as an act of war.”

“For a long time, all of history, women’s bodies are just part of the spoils of war,” she tells The Post.

“And it was only 70 years ago that we said, ‘No.’” 

It is the perception that women’s safety is second to anti-Israel politics that brought her back to public life.

“I would like to not be here,” she stresses, “I would like to have no war in Israel. I would like to have two states living peacefully, side by side, run by people that are committed to peace on the other side, because that’s what peace takes. 

“I would desperately like that. I would like to not be worried about my college-age kids getting yelled at, shamed, ‘Go back to Poland,’ on college campuses. This is a terrible place to be.

“But if all this was going to happen, I have a responsibility to do what I can.

“And again, it’s not just about, what I don’t understand is why people don’t see more clearly that this is not just a threat to Jews in Israel.

“They’re not subtle. They say, ‘Death to Israel. Death to America.’”

In fact she says, the willingness of the anti-Israeli lobby to ignore the use of rape as a weapon on Oct. 7 is an existential threat to civilization.

“This is a threat to everything we believe in our way of life, full stop. No question,” she says.

“Let’s be really clear. There are two sides of statehood. There are two sides of Gaza. There are multiple sides. 

“There’s no two sides of sexual violence. There’s one side. There’s one side.”