by John Carlin
The lawyer and his wife were in bed at night when they heard a noise coming from a window downstairs. He looked out and saw two men trying to get in, whereupon he grabbed a gun he had by his bedside, moved towards to his bedroom window and prepared to fire. His terrified wife cried, ‘Shoot them! Shoot them!’ For a moment he debated whether to act on her words, but then, he said, his legal mind kicked in. He realized that if he killed one of the intruders he might well be charged with murder and, quite possibly unable to prove that he had acted out of a legitimate fear for their lives, be found guilty. Wisely, he limited himself to firing a shot in the air, which was enough to persuade the two men to run away.
‘Pistorius’s problem,’ the lawyer said, ‘is that even if his victim had been a burglar and not Reeva Steenkamp, even if the victim had been carrying an axe and had run into the bathroom and locked himself in, under South African law, unless it could be proven that he faced an imminent threat to his life, he would still be facing trial, he would still be looking at a possible guilty verdict for murder.’ As the law saw it, he explained, ‘a reasonable person – this is the key – would not have reacted to the perceived threat in such a gross and lethally disproportionate manner’.
Some white media commentators suggested that another possible difficulty for Pistorius could be that the judge might regard the accused as racist. The reason for this was subtle, but, at first sight, not unconvincing. His version of what happened at his home that night did fit into a familiar South African crime narrative, where the aggressor was always black. As the judge would not have failed to register, if his story were true – and even if it were not – the faceless intruder of his imagination had to have had a black face, because the fact was that for white people crime mostly did have a black face. The point she might have understood just as well, however, was that this did not necessarily have to reflect a racist perspective. The face of crime in South Africa was overwhelmingly black for black people, too. Jesse Jackson, the black American civil-rights leader, had once said, ‘There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps . . . then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved.’ It took courage for Jackson to say that. The average black South African, less squeamish about race matters than most Americans, would have volunteered that observation more readily. Judge Masipa would have been no exception. Contrary to what some might have imagined, race was highly unlikely to be a factor in her calculations.
The nub of the matter for Roux, rather, was how to persuade the judge that his client’s state of mind at the time of the shooting was such that he might reasonably have been expected to respond the way he said he did. In the likely absence, as he chose to see it, of compelling evidence either way, he believed that much rested on ‘softening the judge’s heart’, as he would put it to his colleagues, by persuading her to redefine her notion of what constituted the legal figment known as ‘a reasonable person’.
Barry Roux saw an opportunity in seeking to persuade her to determine that as a disabled person his client should be granted more leeway than an able-bodied person, in terms of what constituted a reasonable response to the threat he said he had perceived. The way Roux would have to do this would be by presenting the famous Blade Runner as a far more vulnerable, stressed and fear-ridden individual than the public had been allowed to see. In other words, the defense case rested on exposing as a lie, or at least as a giant act of self-delusion, the entire premise on which Pistorius had constructed his public persona.
Roux would seek to persuade the court that Pistorius’s private endeavour to deny his disability had shaped his public persona. Shunning compassion, detesting the idea that people might feel sorry for him, Pistorius had portrayed himself as a man with no limits to his physical achievements, succeeding to spectacular effect by qualifying to compete against the world’s fastest runners in the Olympic Games. In order now to win the toughest contest of his life, he had to reveal himself as a weak, twitchy, nervous wreck, a man psychologically burdened and physically constricted by the absence of his legs. He had to obliterate the wall of pride that had preserved his fragile self-esteem since childhood, turn his entire personality inside out, and persuade the court to take pity on him.
The worst of it was that he would have to do so before a worldwide audience of millions. Against his objections, and those of his defense team, the Judge President of the Gauteng High Court, Dunstan Mlambo, the man who had appointed Judge Masipa to the case, ruled that for the first time in South African history the entirety of the trial could be televised live. Barry Roux believed that having cameras in court would undermine his client’s right to a fair trial, but Mlambo overruled him. Mlambo’s reason for doing so had its origins in the apparently scant regard he had for journalists’ ability to report on the case adequately. He wrote that journalists’ ‘summarized versions’ were ‘liable to be inaccurate’, and that it would be better to let the public follow the proceedings as they happened without the dubious filter of the news media. The Judge President’s one provision was that while the testimony of witnesses would be carried on audio, each would have the right to choose whether he or she appeared on camera, except the state experts and police witnesses who had no choice.
The prosecution’s support for the motion helped carry the day, encouraging the suspicion harbored by the defence lawyers that Gerrie Nel’s zeal was fueled in part by vanity. It would also lead to the creation of a new South African pay-TV channel whose sole mission would be to provide live coverage of the trial, broadcasting repetitions and expert opinion twenty-four hours a day. ESPN in the United States and Sky Television in the United Kingdom ran live feeds from the courtroom throughout. Reporters for the BBC, the big American news networks and the world’s biggest newspapers flocked to South Africa, drawn by the knowledge that there was only one thing the public found more appealing than the story of the hero, and that was the story of the fallen hero.
The upshot was that as many spectators would witness Pistorius’s shame in Pretoria as had celebrated his glory in London – but one thing would not change: they would be following the courtroom drama as if it were a sports contest.
Most viewers had made up their minds beforehand which side they wanted to win; once the game got under way, one camp would cheer and the other grimace when Gerrie Nel landed a blow for the prosecution, then do the opposite when Barry Roux struck back for the defense. On the ‘Oscar Channel’, as it became known, experts would provide blow-by-blow commentary, complete with edited reruns of the liveliest court action. Foreign channels would do much the same, inviting guests to be interviewed during breaks in the trial in one of a number of tented studios erected by the big American and British networks specially for the event, on a terrace overlooking the court building on Madiba Street. Newspaper and broadcast journalists inside the courtroom would provide up-to-the-minute commentary for their employers’ internet blogs or on social media, providing subscribers to both Twitter and pay-TV with the opportunity continually to switch between screens as the drama unfolded. The chatter, the indignation, the jokes, the spoofs, the wise and witty pronouncements would then migrate to other virtual meeting venues and thence to bars, restaurants and living rooms where individuals would debate the case face to face in New York, London, Paris, Barcelona, Rome, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Berlin, Amsterdam and, with varying degrees of fascination, all corners of the globe.
In South Africa there was a general election coming up two months after the start of the trial and all parties were furiously campaigning, but it was a measure both of the country’s political stability, with the ANC certain to win, and the pull of celebrity, that there was only one subject people wanted to talk about. On the morning the trial began the deputy editor of The Sowetan, the newspaper for which Judge Masipa had once worked, went on the radio to say that, never mind the election, for her overwhelmingly black audience the Pistorius trial was the story of the year.
Pistorius was among thos
e who used to believe that there was only one thing worse than being talked about, and that was not being talked about. He had changed his mind. He looked on with helplessness and dismay as he found that he would be facing trial not only before a legally appointed judge, but in the court of public opinion. Inside the courtroom he would be subject to the solemn rituals of the criminal justice system; out in the internet ether, mob justice would rule.
Aware of the sound and fury he was generating, he fought the temptation to enter the conversation. A busy Twitter participant until the shooting, he had remained silent since then, on the advice of his legal team. Except once, two and a half weeks before the trial, on the anniversary of the day he shot Reeva, when he had issued a statement to the media that read: ‘No words can adequately capture my feelings about the devastating accident that has caused such heartache for everyone who truly loved – and continues to love – Reeva. The pain and sadness – especially for Reeva’s parents, family and friends consumes me with sorrow. The loss of Reeva and the complete trauma of that day, I will carry with me for the rest of my life.’
He could no longer restrain restrain himself from telling the world how much he had loved Reeva, nor could he resist the opportunity to make an appeal to public opinion – one that might reach the ears of the judge – to try and believe him when he said that he had killed Reeva by accident.
Alert as he had been since childhood to the impression that he made, he knew full well that the prevailing view of him in the South African media was unsympathetic. Pistorius was aware, too, that in order to amplify the horrendousness of the crime and to embroider his newly minted image as a monster, Reeva had not only to be a beauty to his beast, but to be portrayed as a woman who embodied all the virtues and had had a triumphant career cruelly cut short. Not only in South Africa but far beyond, newspapers and broadcasters gathered testimony from friends and loved ones variously describing her as ‘angelic’, ‘intelligent’, ‘diligent’, ‘vivacious’, ‘classy’, ‘generous’, ‘kind’, ‘funny’, ‘witty’, ‘humble’, ‘self-deprecating’, ‘selfless’, ‘caring’, ‘gentle’, ‘loyal’, ‘strong-willed’, ‘consistent’, ‘amazing’, ‘socially engaged’ and ‘a child of God’. As was to be expected, no dissenting voices emerged during the year leading up to the start of the trial.
Pistorius himself would have been the last to dissent. He idealized Reeva in death more than any journalist could ever have done. What he had wanted to show in that statement he put out – as he would later, when he testified in the trial – was how much he had loved her and, despite the quarrels between them which the prosecution would inevitably bring to light, how much she had loved him.
She certainly regarded him as more than a passing flame, investing in the relationship. She would accompany him to training, taking tips from his coach, Ampie Louw, on how to keep her legs trim, and when Pistorius finished his sessions he would lie down exhausted on a bench with his head on her lap, while she stroked his hair. She prayed with him, knowing how important his Christianity was to him, and she went out of her way to take an interest in the things that interested him, to the point that on at least one occasion she accompanied him to a shooting range and fired a gun at a target under his fond and approving eye. Their appetite to preserve intimate photographic records of their relationship was not dulled by their continual exposure to the flash of cameras in public. It was those pictures of the two of them in affectionately unguarded poses that he would pore over at his uncle Arnold’s cottage during the year before the trial, gazing with special wistfulness at the one where she lay cradled asleep in his arms.
She was loyal to him, too, her commitment having been put to the test soon after she told her mother of the seriousness of her intentions towards him. One night in December, Pistorius was assaulted in a Johannesburg nightclub and, though he had to go to hospital for stitches to the back of his head, he never revealed who the assailant was. The background to the attack preceded Reeva’s appearance in his life, lying in the last days of his relationship with Samantha Taylor. At the Kyalami race track, the very same place where he would meet Reeva, he had had a furious altercation with Quinton van der Burgh, the man who had taken Samantha on a trip to Dubai while he was away in London for the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The trip had been the reason for the heartache and all the frantic phone calls his roommate, Arnu Fourie, had had no choice but to overhear. Van der Burgh, a wealthy businessman, saw nothing wrong in having taken Samantha to Dubai, as he had understood that her relationship with Pistorius was over. At that encounter in Kyalami he realized that Pistorius did not see things that way. He screamed at Van der Burgh and, as was amply reported later, called an acquaintance who intervened on Van der Burgh’s behalf, a former professional soccer player called Marc Batchelor, who alleged that Pistorius threatened to break his legs if he did not back off.
Pistorius took the nightclub assault on him two months later to be a delayed reaction to that bust-up over Samantha. He had hoped to keep the incident quiet. Even though he was the victim, he did not want it to be spread about that he moved in the kind of social circles where such altercations took place. But a news reporter from the Johannesburg Sunday Times got wind of what had happened and phoned up Pistorius. ‘It’s the first time I have heard of this,’ Pistorius said. ‘I am not that type of person . . . Please don’t write this. It could ruin me.’
Sensing that the reporter was not entirely convinced, Pistorius asked Reeva to back him up. When the reporter phoned her, she played a properly supportive role, explaining how worried her boyfriend was that the publication of such a story would undermine his public image. ‘Please don’t write this,’ she said. ‘Oscar is worried this will ruin his reputation.’
Pistorius’s vanity was in play, but also, she understood, his sponsorship deals. Nike, for example, already damaged by their association with Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong, might begin to ponder the wisdom of extending their association with him if the public began to see their brand icon as a quick-tempered brawler. As it was, the story was not published until a year after Pistorius had shot Reeva dead.
While she lived, the image the public saw of the couple was the one they themselves wanted to see, and that friends saw too. A couple they had dinner with in January 2013 would report after Reeva died that they had seemed ‘extraordinarily happy’ and ‘awesome together’. By that third month into their relationship, even his jealous fits appeared to be under control. Wayne Lahoud, Reeva’s previous boyfriend, spent time with the two of them at social events and reported no discomfort in their presence, nor any visible ill feeling towards him.
At a party in a fashionable Johannesburg shopping mall on January 26, a few days after the tetchy WhatsApp exchanges in which Reeva had said he scared her sometimes, they were the center of attention. The party was held at Tasha’s, a restaurant whose owners’ delight at having him among their clients had not been tempered by the incident in which, only a few days earlier, he had accidentally fired a bullet under a table, and for which he would face a charge of criminal negligence. Everybody at the party was dressed in white – with dubious humor, the party was billed as a ‘Whites Only’ event – and the chatter among the guests was all along the lines of ‘Oh, they look so in love’ and ‘What a great couple they make’ and ‘This looks like the real thing’. The editor of Heat spent the night badgering them to pose together for the cover of the magazine, but they told him, ‘It’s still new. Give us some time to enjoy each other’s company before we jump into the celebrity circus.’
Now, on March 3, 2014 – one year, one month and one week after that happy event at Tasha’s – the celebrity circus had reappeared with a vengeance.
Pistorius had spent weeks going over the case with his lawyers, applying the rational part of his mind to the task at hand, quieting his demons in a way the haunted wreck he had been a year earlier could not have done. He had come prepared. He knew more or less what to expect. Barry Roux and the rest of his legal team h
ad explained to him, and he had understood, the possible outcomes of the case and the elements on which the judge’s verdict would turn. They had also explained that he had always to address the judge as ‘My lady’, that he should bow deeply when she bowed, that he should adopt a serious and contrite demeanor, and that, while he should entertain no illusions as to how pitiless an adversary Gerrie Nel would be, he should retain a poker-face when the prosecutor spoke and reveal no glimmer of the animosity he felt towards him.
Now the day Pistorius had been dreading had arrived; the judge sat before him in her blood-red robes, ready to initiate proceedings. He tried to convince himself that he felt some relief that the ordeal was finally under way. If the public saw it as a sports contest, it would serve him to try and see it that way, too. For them, it was an optional entertainment, in which they could invest or withdraw their passions at will; for him, it was a race for his life, and now that it was about to begin he experienced a familiar pang, the mix of high-strung tension, hope and fear that he used to feel when he took his place on the starting blocks in that earlier life he had destroyed. It was at this point on the running track that he had always bowed his head and said a prayer, and he repeated the ritual now. It really did have the feeling of a big race, because his family was there on the sidelines supporting him, as they had been at the London Games – and while his large, genial coach, Ampie Louw, was not present today, in his place he had Barry Roux, who looked in his element in his black advocate’s robes, calm and smiling.
It was Gerrie Nel who spoke first, rising to his feet at a nod from the judge and starting the proceedings with a recital of the first of the four charges of which the state hoped to find Oscar Leonard Carl Pistorius guilty.
Pistorius stood up, too, facing the judge as protocol demanded, with his hands clasped before him at waist height, his shoulders hunched and his body bent slightly forward. The judge, her left elbow on the desktop in front of her, scrutinized Nel through a pair of round, grey-rimmed glasses. Count one, Nel read, was that on February 14, 2013 the accused ‘did unlawfully and intentionally kill a person, to wit, Reeva Steenkamp, a twenty-nine-year-old female’. The judge turned to him. ‘Do you understand the charge?’ Her eyes did not seem unkind; her voice was soft and low-pitched. He noticed the tight corn-row plaits of her black hair. ‘Yes, my lady’, he replied. ‘How do you plead?’ ‘Not guilty, my lady.’