“You know, I still bath in bleach,” she had said during the interview.
Hewitt had raped her when she was 12. She had recently turned 50.
“Even now?” I asked.
“Yes, even now. Sometimes a cupful, sometimes a capful and then I scrub and scrub.”
She smiled sadly. “But maybe one day I will just have to smell it.”
After the interview, she brought up the Parktown Boys’ case. “You should talk to some of the moms, get their stories.”
I shook my head.
“I’m not going to call up any mother and say, ‘Hi, sorry your son was molested, wanna do an interview?”
She frowned. “You’d never do that.”
“No, I’d never do that. But the case is over, isn’t it?”
This was August 2019. Rex had been sentenced in November 2018.
“The case is over, sure … but these moms are hurting, Sam. I was with some of them the other day. Their sons are still so broken. They’ve been forgotten and betrayed. And it’s far from over.”
I stopped and looked at her.
“What do you mean it’s far from over?”
“The initiation and everything … it’s all still going on.”
“But this wasn’t initiation.”
From what I had read, the abuse had taken place at the hands of the waterpolo coach and only in the hostel.
“It starts there. It gets normalised there.”
“What do you want me to do?” I really didn’t know.
“Speak to Luke Lamprecht. The system needs to be exposed.”
Luke is a tireless fighter in the war against child abuse. He had supported Olivia throughout the Hewitt trial and subsequent parole hearings. And he had been involved in the Rex case.
“Ask him to show you the video.”
“There was a video?”
How horrific, I thought. I didn’t want to see that. I didn’t even want to think about what was on that tape.
“Please speak to Luke, Sam. Please.”
I love Olivia, so I called Luke.
We met at Doppio Zero in Greenside a few weeks later. He arrived, a ball of energy. Intense. Even sitting down, Luke is never still.
“What do you know about the case?” he asked.
What I had read in the papers, I told him. The case had been very well covered and I now knew a lot more about it. I would later hear that Rex had had more charges against him than anyone else in South African history. I wasn’t sure how true that was, but he faced 327 – a number I battled to grasp. Even the judge, Peet Johnson, was thrown. At the sentencing, he stated that he’d never before come across a case in which a person was found guilty of so many sexual assault counts. “From the facts, you cannot be described in any other way but a serial sexual offender and sexual bully,” he had pronounced.
Rex sounded like a monster.
Luke nodded. “He’s where he should be.”
“Tell me about the tape,” I asked.
He raised an eyebrow.
“Olivia says that if I want to understand the true horror of it, I need to see the tape.”
There was a pause.
“Is it very brutal?” I asked. “Is that what it is?”
He shook his head.
“No, not … brutal.”
“Then what?”
“You can’t unsee something like that.”
I was impatient.
“Look, I’m not going to see it at all. I just want to know why it’s so terrible.”
Luke took a sip of his drink and then looked me full in the face.
“Because of the normality of it … There are a few boys in the room and while Rex is molesting one, others are coming in and out and laughing and joking. And then he molests another one and so it continues.”
“Is he doing it behind a door or something?” I asked, still not getting it.
“No. It’s in the open. He had been doing it for so long that they just accepted it as normal.”
That’s terrible, I thought.
“Let’s meet when I get back from New York,” Luke said. Later he sent me the numbers of people he thought might talk to me. One of those showed me the tape.
It begins with what I suppose is a typical scene in the common area of a boys’ school. One boy lies on a couch off to the right of the screen, engaged with something on his smartphone. Collan Rex is sprawled across an L-shaped sofa in the middle of the room, watching something on his phone. The CCTV camera has him in the centre of the frame. After a few minutes, another boy enters the room. Rex says something to him and the boy starts to take off his clothes. When he is down to his underpants, he comes and sits on the long side of the L, his legs over Rex’s lap. For a few minutes, nothing happens, all three on their phones. Then Rex’s hand starts moving up and down the boy’s leg. Up and down. Up and down. Creeping closer and closer to the edge of his boxer briefs. It seems almost a natural progression when his hand eventually slips inside and stays there. His hand is still moving when another two boys enter the room to talk to him. He doesn’t pull his hand away immediately. No one raises an alarm, or even seems shocked or surprised at what is happening. The second boy on the couch to the right hasn’t moved. Finally, Rex pulls his hand out from under the briefs, rests it gently on the boy’s legs for a moment and then starts fondling his nipples. The whole scene seems so frighteningly ‘normal’: boys continue to move in and out of the camera frame, no one points or shouts or appears in any way concerned. I would hear later that this was the Rex way.
I managed about five minutes, maybe 10. It felt like a lifetime.
Luke was right. I would never, ever be able to unsee it. I drove away from that knowing that I would never be the same again.
What seeing it did do, however, was fuel a mighty rage, a rage at a monster who preyed on young boys. Rage at a school system that allowed it to happen, and rage that these boys who had come forward so bravely were now broken and suicidal and sad and shamed. At that point I thought I would be writing a book about a group of heroes and a villain. Before I was halfway through, I realised that most of the monsters still walked free. Their victims less so.
Chapter 2
The Archivist
*Ben’s father
For a long while I relied only on what Luke had told me, my own fleeting glance at the footage, and a paper trail of parents’ and newspaper reports. It was very difficult to pin down details I could trust. Someone told me Collan had been beaten to a pulp in jail, with others backing up the story. Then I discovered it was all just a rumour. I was told one of the boys had committed suicide, and, yes, there had been suicides, but years earlier and nothing to do with the current issue or school management team. It was extremely frustrating. And worrying.
Enter the Archivist. I had been wanting to talk to him for some time. He was Ben’s father. Ben the whistleblower, the boy who had alerted the Bosserts about the CCTV footage of Rex groping Jonah and other boys in the common area. He had only been in Grade 10 at