What I didn’t know when I first messaged Ben’s father was that he was the unofficial archivist of the entire case. Over months of conversations and debates about what to include and what not, he was the one I went to again and again, when I needed to check what someone had said or claimed, or when dates seemed wrong. He had kept records of everything – from documents to videos to audio recordings. There was nothing this man did not know or could not find out, and he became, for me, a person of trust.
“Do you think Ben would speak to me?” I asked him.
“Yes, I do,” he said. “One of the things I’ve tried to do – and I think it’s helped – is get him to talk about it. It’s part of his healing, part of his recovery.”
Ben was away at the time and the Archivist wanted to see me to clarify things before he would allow me to meet his son.
“I would like to meet with you and have a conversation. Partly about what you’re doing and being a part of it, but also because I would like to … explain Ben to you.”
“Is he okay?”
Every time I asked that of someone, I was struck with the stupidity of the question. How could anyone be okay after something like that?
I’d been in contact with Sasha-Lee Olivier that month; she’d been crowned First Princess in Miss South Africa that year and had eventually taken over the title after the winner had won Miss Universe. In a bid to help raise awareness for childhood victims, she was starting to talk about her own abuse as a child, and when I asked her when she’d become okay to talk about it, she was quiet for a while.
“I became okay about talking about it when I realised I would never be okay about talking about it,” had been her response.
I told that story to all those I interviewed. It was an icebreaker. And it really worked.
“Yeah, he’s okay,” said the Archivist. “But I want to talk to you first and tell you some stuff you may or may not know and after that, you can meet him.”
So, on a very hot afternoon towards the end of 2019, I sat down with Ben’s father and his wife at their home and he told me “some stuff”. Actually, he told me “lots of stuff”.
The Archivist is a big man and fairly intimidating in person. At that point, I was still quite nervous of this gatekeeper of the information. I told him what I knew and how it made me feel. I told him about looking at the first few minutes of the video and what had horrified me – and he stopped me right there.
“I actually chose not to see the footage,” he said. “I’ve been offered it several times, and told that I need to see it, and I don’t want to see it. I’ve heard more or less what it’s about. And, yes, what stopped Rex – or, rather, Ben revealing it in the way he did was what stopped Rex. But, from my perspective, it’s also something that I feel I don’t need to see and that I don’t want to see. I feel for these kids when I see them and I know them, but I don’t want to have them know that I’ve seen it and have them have to deal with the worry that this guy knows what happened. So that’s the reason I chose not to see it, and it also keeps me level-headed. I get upset quite easily, lose my temper about that kind of thing.”
So does Ben – Ben gets it from him, he says.
“I sat right behind Rex in court and I was, to be honest, looking for a confrontation, if he wanted that. And I suppose also I just wanted to stand up to him, but not really to fight him, just to show him that ‘I’m not afraid of you.’”
“But you didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Did you ever suspect anything? Did Ben ever say anything to you before the video?”
This was the watershed moment for many. Before and after the video.
“So, Ben came to me and he said that during training they would play no-rules waterpolo where they rough each other up and push each other down, just to toughen them up and get them not to panic while it’s happening in a real game kind of thing. And he said that Rex had grabbed his balls. I think it was as simple as that.”
“And were you worried?” I asked.
“I told him that that kind of thing happens in sport, like when playing soccer. So that’s what I dismissed it as.”
He looked sad for a minute.
“I guess I have to live with that.”
“You could never have known,” I said.
“Yeah, but then Ben changed a bit. Although he kept it quiet, he started getting a little more aggressive and harder because he was becoming a harder boy.”
“I’ve heard Collan was very rough with the boys, and wrestled with them a lot, as well as the other stuff,” I said.
“Ben had many incidents in the hostel, fighting and obviously making a noise … The ones that stand out, I suppose, involved wrestling. Ben said that Collan would frequently come into the room and fight with him. And Collan would also lift Ben’s legs up above the head and dry hump him – that was something he did regularly, while in a wrestling match. So he’d come in looking for wrestling and end up doing something like that. He’d put their legs over his shoulder, so that he’d … I suppose get a better angle, I guess, I don’t know. But he had that habit of doing that to the boys. In one instance, Ben went on tour to Durban with Rex, and there were a few incidents that took place there. One was when Ben came into a room where another boy was being dry humped, so Ben kicked Rex off this kid, and Rex got up and chased him down. He grabbed him and put him into some sort of a leg-lock, where he had Ben between his legs and choked him until Ben passed out. And there were other kids around – in fact, I heard one kid filmed it. But his parents didn’t want him getting involved so they apparently deleted it.”
“So it was more in fun than an actual desire to hurt them?” I asked, “because I’ve heard this from a few of the boys and even their parents and so I wondered why the prosecutor charged him with so many counts of attempted murder. And then the judge pretty much dismissed them anyway.”
He nodded.
“Ja, rightfully so – it wasn’t attempted murder. He never intentionally tried to kill them. The prosecution would have had more success if they had just made it common assault and made a few that were more severe, with grievous bodily harm. But the wrestling and stuff was fairly common … very common. Ben, in this case when he got knocked out. Also later on that tour … I don’t know how far apart the incidents were … but on the same tour, he shared a shower, not the same actual shower, but within the location there were two shower heads, and he was sharing that with Rex. Rex tried to grab his bum, but Ben told him to fuck off and leave him alone. Rex’s response was to urinate on Ben, and Ben then retaliated by urinating on Rex. And this is the thing … for Ben and a lot of the boys, it became a way of bantering, of having a fight. I think the reason it felt all right, in my opinion, was that they were invited to do the same, if you know what I mean. So when he grabbed them, he poked them, then it would be okay, like Ben would occasionally get an advantage over him and choke him, and grab his balls and squeeze his whatever. So it became like a banter thing, where eventually the boys started doing it to each other because it appeared as though it was fine to do. I don’t know if Rex intended for things to go as far as they did eventually, but this type of banter may even be how he got involved in the whole thing in the first place; it may have happened to him, so that whole back-and-forth became more of an accepted behaviour.”
“When did that acceptance of it ‘being normal’ stop for Ben?” I really wanted to know.
“When Ben started realising it was a problem, was when the new boys came in and they were very upset by it happening to them. Ben started noticing that. He became more concerned about his fellow students, particularly