The seven missing years draw to a close when a bullfrog plague hits global media titan Naspers – and me too.
TRIGGER WARNING. If anything comes up for you while listening to this episode, there are plenty of resources at MyOnlyStory.org. Please, please talk to someone. If you're in South Africa, you can always, always phone SADAG on 0800 456 789. You deserve to be heard.
My Only Story is written & narrated by Deon Wiggett and produced by Alison Pope.
2019–2022 ©My Only Story NPC. All Rights Reserved.
The seven missing years draw to a close when a bullfrog plague hits global media titan Naspers – and me too.
TRIGGER WARNING. If anything comes up for you while listening to this episode, there are plenty of resources at MyOnlyStory.org. Please, please talk to someone. If you're in South Africa, you can always, always phone SADAG on 0800 456 789. You deserve to be heard.
My Only Story is written & narrated by Deon Wiggett and produced by Alison Pope.
2019–2022 ©My Only Story NPC. All Rights Reserved.
MY ONLY STORY – EPISODE 4
“THE DEPARTURES”
My Only Story is a serial. And this is episode 4, Please go back to episode 1. We’ll wait for you here.
This is Episode 4 of My Only Story.
Before we get started, meet my super-producer Alison Pope, without whom none of this would have happened. She reluctantly has to talk about something so horrifying I can’t even bring myself to say it.
[Ad with Al asking for funding]
My name is Alison Pope. And it has been my enormous privilege to be the producer on the My Only story Podcast. When Deon first decided to create a podcast as a way of telling his story and seeking justice we could not have imagined the overwhelming support we would receive from the listeners. We are extremely humbled by the reception of the podcast and the number of messages and tipoffs that have been shared with us over the last few weeks. For 11 months and countless hours we have researched, investigated, planned, written and rewritten to bring together all the information required to give a truthful an honest account of the experiences of so many young boys whose lives were forever changed, by a bullfrog.
We drew on the expertise of the people we know from our professional lives and specifically chose to work with small business owners and creative leaders to help us to create a world class production to get the story heard. While all of these people have participated for free and out of kindness, we recognise that the number of hours that they were working on this podcast, were hours where they turned away other paying work. We would sincerely like to do right by them and in some way compensate them for the enormous gift that they have given us.
If you have enjoyed this podcast, and the level of professionalism in the storytelling, Please would you consider donating to our crowd funding page. We would use these funds to pay for all the third party costs like music licences, equipment, studio time and research that has gone into bringing you season 1 as well as the coffee, sandwiches, therapy sessions needed to compense work on season 2. This may be Deon’s only story, but there is still a lot more of it to be told. You could find information on how to donate at myonlystory.org.
[TAPE: EDIT OF EPISODE 3]
I’m Deon Wiggett and this is My Only Story, a podcast and a live investigation.
[THEME MUSIC AND OPENING MONTAGE]
ACT 1
SCENE DW closes in on the seven years
Three months ago, I was in Johannesburg. It was August 2019 and spring had arrived a
month too early. It’s supposed to be the dead of winter, but, on the other side of the
windows in my loft, the trees are getting leaves and weaver birds are weaving their nests. I can see them from my desk and I spend hours staring at weaver birds while
psyching myself up to phone people I don’t want to talk to.
And so The days go by as I wheel my office chair to-and-fro from my desk to the surface
sometimes appalling a cat in the process, while rummaging and plucking out this index card and then that one, as gradually they accumulate again on my desk and other surfaces of the loft. As I search around for an index card from maybe last week, I become annoyed that I didn’t put them back in the plastic container that Riaan has bought got me. If Riaan was just an ordinary person, I would have driven him insane by now. He is one of my life’s great fortunes.
So there I am, three months ago, August, in Johannesburg, in the early climate-change
spring of 2019. I’ve been working full-time on the case against b since summer, and now it’s spring and summer is coming and soon b will be spreading his wares on the beaches of Hartenbos, the Afrikaans family resort town that Willem Breytenbach would say has it all – naïve high-school boys from across the country who don’t know a bullfrog when they see one. I mean, why would they? Nothing in their lives would have prepared them for w’s cunning. But let me not get ahead of myself.
South Africa’s beautiful Garden Route stretches for hundreds of kilometres along National Highway 2, which follows the Indian Ocean coast from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth and beyond. All along the lush Garden Route, you’ll find the whole gambit of holiday destinations, from large towns like Mossel Bay and George, to resort towns like Hartenbos, to Afrikaner enclaves like Reebok, where w has been holed up in his mother’s house after fleeing his own home in Three Anchor Bay. For the past two weeks, w has been using a very ill woman, his own mother, as a human shield between the media and him. But again, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Rather, we must tear ourselves away from the picturesque Garden Route on the Indian
Ocean to a place not that far away, but far from picturesque. I’m talking about Willowmore, where we went after he was fired by Grey College, after the point where he should have left teaching forever, but four years and two schools before he would.
Willowmore is the second place I can permanently report that Willem Breytenbach did what Willem Breytenbach does.
SCENE Willem Breytenbach arrives in Willowmore
It is January 1991 and we are in Willowmore. If you were hoping to find a podcast that
directs you to Google Earth, boy oh boy you have come to the right place.
I have not been to Willowmore yet. It is far from Johannesburg and also far from Cape
Town, where I don’t live anyway. So just like you, I have to rely on Google Earth to show me what’s cooking.
Type in Willowmore – like a willow tree that there is more of – in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. It’s a little bit hard giving you a landmark to focus on – the large dusty patch? The small highway to the left? What pretty much catches the eye is the main road that diagonally runs through town. It is called Knysna Street – which is the name of a town on the Garden Route and three hours’ drive from Willowmore.
Most of Willowmore’s businesses are on Knysna Street. There’s a converted house called Willowmore Cash Galore; a guesthouse called Kapoet; and a coffee shop called Sophie’s Choice. According to the website the proprietor’s name is Sophia, and her coffee shop seems eclectic and hearty.
Here’s what you won’t find anywhere in Willowmore: Willowmore High School. Willem Breytenbach taught there in 1991 and 1992 – two of the seven missing years – and the high school closed forever in 1995. I honestly don’t know if it closed because Willem Breytenbach broke its spirit. After everything I’ve learnt about him, I would say it’s definitely possible.
When Willem Breytenbach hit the town of Willowmore, he moved into the high school’s dormitory straight away and started helping himself to the children of the region.
They had no way of knowing what their little town was in for. That’s what I hear from a guy I’ll call Robert. Robert says to me, “The sneakiest thing we knew in Willowmore, were wildcats and jackals”.
Robert is in his 40s and we have been talking on and off for six months. Finally, two weeks ago, the morning that Episode 2 came out, Robert phones me. ‘I am ready,’ he says. ‘Let me tell you what happened.’ Finally, after six months, Robert is able to tell me what he saw.
Which is this: w was living in the high school’s dormitory; he used a trick to get Robert alone that night; and then w helped himself to the young penis of Robert, for no other reason than the fact that Willem Breytenbach does what Willem Breytenbach does.
I am not going to permanently rush through the chain of tragedies that Willem Breytenbach unleashed in Willowmore; everything he did there, deserves close attention and disinfection in bright light. We will return to the town of Willowmore, and the circumstances around Willem’s hasty departure in 1992. But first, two years more, the last two of the seven missing years, which Willem spent somewhere else. Because three hours away, in somewhat richer Riversdale, a high school and its dormitory was ripe for a plague of bullfrogs.
SCENE Willem Breytenbach goes to Riversdale
It is January 1993, the start of a new school year. Hundreds of pupils are filing into the
school hall for the first assembly of the school year. There’s an excitement to the first school day after the summer holidays. This year’s new intake are looking nervous and shiny; the new seniors are walking around, with puffy chests. It’s hot in Summer at Riversdale even at 8am: the girls wear light summer’s dresses; the boys are in little shorts. Everyone is exchanging holiday stories.
‘How was Knysna?’
‘It was incredible! How was Hartenbos?’
‘It was okay.’
At Langenhoven High in Riversdale, the students settle in. A boy I’ll call Ivor is 14 years
old, in his second year at Langenhoven. He is a smart and curious guy. I know him now, We talk a lot. As the teaching faculty shuffle into their chairs on the stage, Ivor would have been studying the new teachers among them. Actually, knowing Ivor like I know him now, he would without a doubt, have been looking at the new female teachers, desperately hoping one of them is hot.
He can’t remember specifically, but he doesn’t think he paid attention to a tall new teacher with slight bullfrog features.
The principal, Mr Gerrit Visser, opens the school year with scripture and prayer. The
children sing a patriotic song, as white school children did back then. Then, Mr Visser
welcomes everyone to a new school year, and introduces some new teachers. ‘Mr Willem Breytenbach will teach Afrikaans,’ he says. ‘He joins us from Willowmore High School. Mr b will also be living in the boys’ dormitory, and he has a passion for school newspapers.
If Ivor paid much attention to Mr b that already hot summer’s morning, he couldn’t have
known how well they would get to know the new teacher. Nothing in his life would have prepared him for Mr Breytenbach’s cunning. By the time the teacher left the school two years later, he had assaulted Ivor many times – including in the house of Willem’s own mother, near Hartenbos, where he’s holed up today, and to where we’ll soon return.
But how do you just rape a heterosexual 14-year-old boy? The answer is you don’t. First, you groom him. You turn yourself into the boy’s hero. You teach the boy to trust you. You teach his parents to trust you. You take the boy somewhere for an educational weekend.
The boy is in a strange place and relies on you entirely. And that’s when you pounce.
When the kid has nowhere to turn. You know that most boys children would dissociate when you touch them there and that’s precisely what you want.
Ivor, you’re a survivor and a brother. And so is your classmate, Redge, who was also
assaulted by Breytenbach. Both of these men have signed affidavits and laid charges with the police. They are affidavits numbers three and four.
In addition, a further four men from Riversdale confirmed their abuse to me at the hands of Breytenbach. They are at various stages of their healing process and I think of them all as brothers. I strongly believe that these six men represent a fraction of what b did wrong in Riversdale.
Earlier in my investigation, I had phoned up the school principal, Mr Visser, to find out how Breytenbach arrived in Riversdale, and also how he left. I heard that Mr Visser had moved to the Garden Route and I luck out – at the first place I phone, they know exactly where I can find him.
He answers the phone and he’s friendly enough, until I tell him why I’m calling.
He says to me, “Willem Breytenbach is one of the best teachers I’ve ever seen and I have nothing else to say to you”.
I say, “Can I give you my phone number in case you remember anything later?”
“No,” he says, “I won’t remember anything later” and he hangs up.
I don’t bother Mr Visser again. He is retired now. He lives in Hartenbos.
SCENE Willem Breytenbach moves to Die Burger
Like with the children of Willowmore, the story of Riversdale deserves to be told. But once again I must drag you further along w’s timeline, because by 1995 the seven missing years are over and Willem Breytenbach is settling nicely into his new job at Die Burger, the then-still-powerful Cape Town daily that made b its education reporter.
His editor had good reason to be happy with him. The new education reporter really knows his beat – knows his way around schools, knows how to talk to children, and, what do you know, he knows how to teach them too. About school newspapers, in particular.
Wherever w taught, he supervised the school newspaper. w likes smart and sensitive boys, and in the 1990s, before the internet, there was no better place to find them than at a school newspaper. At all three schools, b used school newspapers as a conveyor belt of targets. But by the time that I met him, w had started thinking bigger. Much bigger. As a journalist, w toils away to bring back from the dead the National School Newspaper Project.
It was his new trick to get high-school boys alone – by using school newspapers as an
industrial-size supply chain. For years, w spent his weekends driving to schools throughout the Western and Eastern Cape to teach children about newspapers. His plan worked for many years, because it’s a brilliant plan. From his desk in the newsroom of Die Burger, Willem Breytenbach used Naspers and Die Burger to spin his web around schoolboys who don’t know a bullfrog when they see one.
SCENE DW meets Willem Breytenbach
That’s how it was for me. Our story moves forward and now we are in the summer of 1996.
I am 16 years old and it is the day that I meet Willem Breytenbach.
I am in Stellenbosch, and in the Cape winelands, summer has turned to high. If you’re quite a sweaty individual, it’s an awkward time for you and those who can smell you. Willem, remember, sweats like an inflatable swimming pool freshly installed on a bed of thorns.
It is the scorching summer’s day that w says to me, ‘I’m the education reporter of Die
Burger’ and also, a few sentences later, ‘I used to be a teacher though at Grey College, but then I moved down to Cape Town to be the education reporter of Die Burger’.
Here is me, and all I’ve ever wanted was to be a journalist. I am the editor of Semper, the school newspaper of the Paul Roos Gymnasium. And so I couldn’t believe my luck.
Here is this real journalist. He is attentive and smart and lets me in on newspaper secrets and takes me under his wing. Willem Breytenbach became my hero.
I had no way to understand what was happening to me: I was being sexually groomed by Willem Breytenbach. He always, always, planned on getting his small and ugly penis in my mouth and getting my teenage penis in his. His plan didn’t go wrong; not for a second; and he helped himself to all he wanted from me.
Not for a second did his plan with me go wrong. Until 22 years later. Until three weeks ago.
Until I laid a trap, and in fell Willem Breytenbach.
END OF ACT 1
ACT 2
SCENE Willem Breytenbach hears the news
It is Thursday 7 November 2019, and the working day starts at Lightspeed Digital Media on Pepper Street in central Cape Town. Willem Breytenbach is the co-owner of Lightspeed Digital; the other half of the company belongs to his life partner since the 90s, Danie van Rooyen, originally from Port Elizabeth.
Willem Breytenbach ruled Lightspeed Digital with an iron fist, insisting on controlling the smallest aspects of employees’ waking hours. For instance, someone shows me a WhatsApp group called ‘Lightspeed Team’. Here are the rules that are posted.
Every morning you switch on your PC and start working, you should post "On" in this group.
And every afternoon when you have agreed with your team leaders or me and Willem that your work is done, you must post "Off".
This is regardless if you're in the office or not.
If there's any confusion, you can discuss it with Willem.
If you are on before 8am, you have passed the first test of the day. If you log on after 8am, and even by a minute, if you’re not on a WhatsApp group that time, writing ‘On’, well then you have failed the first test of the day, and you can expect your day
to get worse. Much worse, if you’re lucky.
But it’s particularly bad on the Thursday morning of November 7 2019. News24 is reporting about a new podcast from a certain Deon Wiggett. It claims that a man called Jimmy had raped him when he was a schoolboy.
And even though Willem’s name is nowhere close to any story, it sounds to people like maybe it’s him, because that’s the kind of thing he does. On that Thursday, at Lightspeed Digital Media, Willem explodes at the slightest provocation. When he talks loudly, which is often, there is spit that collects in the corners of his mouth. Whenever Willem screams at you – which he always does, at some point in the day – the drops of spit land on you, and the rest collect in the two corners of his mouth, ready and waiting to spurt at any point that it suits Willem.
I ask a source inside Lightspeed Digital what that Thursday was like – did anyone hear the podcast? ‘At first nobody knew why he’s in such a bad mood,’ says my source. ‘Nobody wanted to be the one who forwards the story; most of us only heard the podcast after work.’
As always, b’s employees spend the day walking on egg shells, not knowing what tiny things will set w off all over again.
I know something his employees didn’t: w was in shock. Media24, his former employer, is publishing claims from this Deon Wiggett. He knew I’d been asking around about him, and, but as far as I can establish, b had no warning of the scale of the
investigation.
On that Thursday morning, b froze. He was shocked and he was afraid and, like all the boys he pounced on, he could do nothing, because he was paralysed.
That’s the only way to explain his impotence, and his failure to close his LinkedIn account.
Under defamation law, I couldn’t identify him even indirectly. But loads of people have
seven missing years on LinkedIn – it’s just that, if a podcast made you curious about Willem Breytenbach’s LinkedIn page, seven missing years are what you would have found.
By midday Thursday, Willem had fallen into a trap. If he removes his LinkedIn page, he looks guilty. If he keeps it, the seven missing years are there for all to see. He does nothing.
Nothing but just sit there, impotent, as his LinkedIn traffic spikes.
The next morning, Friday, he doesn’t go to his office on Pepper Street – he goes straight to his lawyers to see what can be done. One by one, his social-media profiles start to disappear.
Instagram – gone. Facebook – gone. Twitter – gone. Then finally, Friday afternoon, LinkedIn.
Gone.
Over the weekend, things move rapidly. On Monday morning, almost 30 people arrive for a work at a digital marketing agency on Pepper Street, It is their final week, under the boss from hell.
As the morning stretches on, the atmosphere grows even tenser. One by one, the
employees are called into w’s office. Everyone is told the same thing: the company is
struggling, you have to resign.
If you know South African labour law, you’ll know it doesn’t work like that. But you don’t
know that if you’re young and naïve and scared, like almost everyone who worked at
Lightspeed Digital. Most People did not get retrenchment packages, because they weren’t retrenched. On his last day at his own company, Willem Breytenbach bullied almost everyone into resigning.
It was the last day Willem Breytenbach would ever step foot inside his own company.
By Tuesday, News24 was looking for him at Lightspeed Digital, and everyone was instructed to clear out the premises.
By Wednesday morning, it was like there never was a company in those offices on Pepper Street. I ask a source inside the company where my bullfrog has gone. Here’s the response: ‘Willem has become unreachable. Our company website has been taken down and all of our social-media platforms as well. It’s as if Lightspeed Digital Media never existed.’
SCENE Willem Breytenbach flees Cape Town
On that same Wednesday, less than ten minutes’ drive away in Three Anchor Bay, a lone and bulky figure gets ready to flee his house. ‘The media know where I live now,’ the former media luminary says to an ex-employee. ‘I can’t have them all come here.’
So, instead, Willem Breytenbach gets in his large white VW bakkie, or pick-up truck, and drives four hours or so down the N2 from Cape Town to Reebok and the arms of his extremely ill mother. She is 83 and is recovering from her second operation this in a year.
Willem Breytenbach knew the media would try to find him at his own house, or his mother’s house, or wherever they think that he is. He chose to hide out at his mother’s house, and not anywhere else, because she is extremely ill, and because he can use her as a kind and human shield, just like he always has.
A bullfrog parks his bakkie at the Reebok house of his very ill mother.
Riaan: My name is Riaan Grobler, I live in Johannesburg, I am a journalist with News 24.
Deon: News24 has been my publishing partner and the journalists have been on the road, looking for Willem Breytenbach.
Riaan: We spent two and a half hours in the plane before it even starts moving and I kind of start to think that this might be a premonition of what is to come. Delays, not being able to find what we are after.
Riaan: I land in George, at around 7 in the evening. It is still light outside, the sun is shining, completely different from Johannesburg.
Deon: The team from News 24 drives from George Airport to Willem’s Mother’s house.
Riaan: We decide to knock on the door and to see who opens. The street is deserted, the curtains are drawn. There are no sounds, but we try our luck anyway. After a few loud knocks, eventually we hear movement inside the house. We think, this is it, we have found him, But the door is instead opened by his mother, Breytenbach’s mother is a frail woman, wearing a night gown, supporting herself with a stroller, Quite friendly with a loud, confident voice. And she says that Willem is not there,
I ask her but when last did you see him. A very long time ago. She can’t remember when. I ask her Do you know that Willem closed his business last week. Yes, I know about it. Why do you think he did it? And she says she doesn’t know.I don’t meddle in my children’s affairs she says, that is their business. She then proceeds to inform me that uh she had two operations, she needs to take her pills and go to bed, and we should to be on our way. Which we then do. We get a tip that W might be staying with friends in Port Elizabeth, so we take the N2 to PE, along the garden route, quite a scenic drive past some iconic towns such as Knysna and Plettenberg bay arriving in PE about 4 hours later.
We get a bite to eat, just preparing to go and do our stake-out to try and find Willem Breytenbach at an address that we had, when a whatsapp comes through from News24 editing chief Adriaan Basson saying, ‘Sorry guys, we found Breytenbach, you need to turn back and go back to George’.
So we load our rented, suzuki swift, with our yet unpacked luggage and make our way back again in the opposite direction of the garden route driving through the same towns, speeding off to Reebok to go and try find Willem at his mother’s house.
We arrive at the same house that we been, having driven for four hours receiving a tip-off that Willem might be at the house. We walk up to the front door, we knock and to the left of the door in a dark room the curtains move slightly. And we realise that something might be on.
The door opens a few moments later and there stands Breytenbach in his full glory, wearing a black T-shirt, rugby shorts, no shoes , no glasses. He cuts quite a large figure, he is much taller than what I expected and literally fills the doorway.
Willem stretches his hand out through the security gate and shakes both our hands. I say, hello Willem, Riaan, he says Riaan.
Deon: This is the point where you would normally hear the person’s voice in the background, but not now. I am not having Willem’s voice in my podcast. But you can watch the whole sorry scene at My only story.org
Riaan: Riaan he says, Riaan, with great humility and with the greatest respect, I cannot talk to you. I then try my luck and ask Breytenbach if I can ask him a few questions to which he replies, no, not at all,I then ask him if I can present him with a set of written questions that I had prepared. A total of 23 in fact, asking him all sort of things about his alleged activities, to which he again replies. No, not at all. At that point he retires, into the hallway and prepares to close the door. He wishes us again a good evening. He ends our conversation with I respect you, please respect me, but at this point I cannot talk to you any longer. He closes the door, and off we go.
Scene Willem Breytenbach takes an overdose
It is a beautiful early-summer’s afternoon – Friday 15 November 2019 – and the coastal resorts of Reebok and Great Brakriver and Hartenbos are getting primed for summer.
But something much darker must have been is on Willem Breytenbach’s mind.
Fuming to the end, he gets in his large white bakkie with a prescription-full of sleeping pills and a squeezy bottle full of booze.
He drives to the beach just down the road from his ill dying mother’s house. He parks. He crushes the sleeping pills and swallows them all with great big gulps of alcohol. He knows his problems are not going away; he knows he’s raped too many men, destroyed too many boys, and all of us are coming for him.
Melodramatically, he tries to wade out into the water like Virginia Woolf or Ingrid Jonker.
But by luck or by design, he never gets that far. The crushed sleeping pills distribute rapidly through his body; the alcohol slows down his reflexes; and before he can drag his body into the ocean, the life starts to leave his body it as w collapses into the sand.
END OF ACT 2
ACT 3
SCENE Willem Breytenbach rapes Jake
I shouldn’t get surprised, but still I do. Willem Breytenbach was always a coward, and in the end, he decided to go out like one. He knew that I knew too much, and he knew the beaches and boys of Hartenbos will never lie under his giant body again. What kind of a life would that be for a bullfrog? If he can’t rape boys, Willem Breytenbach decided, he doesn’t want to live at all.
Wait a moment, you might say. He’s come all of this way to Mother; that must show at least he loves her and wants to be there for her in her hour of need. But that isn’t something I buy. See if you agree. Rightfully or wrongfully, somebody accuses you of heinous crimes. Of course you deny everything, because who wouldn’t deny raping children? Of course you flee your house where the media know where to find you. But then, do you go to the house of your own mother, your own very ill mother, and wait until the journalists you know descend upon her house because of course they would know you’ve come to Reebok, would know you’ve gone to your mother, as you’ve always done the very moment that accountability hangs in the air.
SCENE DW meets Jake
The last time I was in Cape Town was ten days ago. I’ve come here for a bunch of reasons – and the most important of them all is meeting Jake.
Jake is a creative Cape Town type, and he’s unrealistically beautiful – smart and sweet with a certain look. He used to work for w until things got out of hand.
I ask, ‘How many times did w help himself to your penis?’
Jake says, ‘Not that many times. Six times at the most.’
Jake was raped at least six times while employed by Willem Breytenbach, in 2017 and 2018. Jake had just turned 20. He has made an affidavit and laid charges with the police and is one of the most recent men recalling a night where Willem Breytenbach did what he does. Jake is my brother and he’s affidavit number five and I’ve never been prouder of someone. Jake, dude, big up.
SCENE Willem Breytenbach is rescued
It isn’t often that there’s justice in the world, but there was a tiny bit at a beach just minutes from the house of w’s ailing and kind-hearted mother.
[Tape: journo talks through rescue of Willem Breytenbach on beach]
The paramedics find B on the beach, next to his vehicle, unconscious. They start to administer first aid. He is out cold and they need to try and revive him. So in order to do this they phone his mother to find out what medication he was taking when last the prescription had been filled this helps them to determine how many tablets he may have taken. All of this in an attempt to administer the right kind of treatment to bring him by, which they manage to do. A very confused Breytenbach is admitted to a Hospital in Mossel Bay that same evening.
SCENE DW moves on
As much as we all dislike Willem Breytenbach, this is the point of our story where we somewhat leave him behind. This morning, 27 November 2019, he’s still holed up there with his frail and exhausted human shield. Willem Breytenbach doesn’t care. Willem Breytenbach is fine with anything that doesn’t lay any responsibility at his feet. If you ask Willem Breytenbach, nothing has ever been his fault, least of all these allegations of teenage boys allegedly raped by him. These allegations are not his fault, Willem Breytenbach will tell you.
Here’s what I can tell you. Wherever Willem Breytenbach goes, the media will follow at this point of the scandal. He was a media executive; he knows the media will come for him. If he’s at his house in Three Anchor Bay, that’s where they will go. If he stays with his friends in Port Elizabeth, that’s where they will go. But he has chosen to make them come to his mother’s house, because everybody knows that is where he is.
As a kind woman withers, her son Willem continues making his demands, just like he always has.
There is a knock at the door and it is a television crew looking for Willem Breytenbach. If you are Willem Breytenbach, you drag your desperately ill mother out of bed. You make her put on her dressing gown. While you hide in her room, she walks to the front door with her walking frame. She opens the door. There is a journalist and he has a microphone, and, like w knew the journalist would, a microphone gets shoved in the face of a lady in her eighties.
The journalist says, ‘I’m sorry, but we’re looking for Willem.’
His mother says, ‘I don’t know where Willem is,’ but he’s in the room just behind her, and everybody knows that he’s there.
SCENE DW questions the departures
If Willem successfully commits suicide, it would be a great pity, but only to a degree. I want Willem to pay for his deeds, but it’s not as if he can. There is no way he could adequately pay – no way that a human body could atone for what he has done.
If he does commit suicide, it would be entirely consistent with his character. I hope he
Doesn’t though, but whether he survives or not.
Willem isn’t particularly interesting. What is particularly interesting are the reasons why he has survived until now.
Willem Breytenbach would always do that thing he does, because it’s easy when you have no empathy or conscience. But that’s not an excuse available to those around him. Any Jimmy will do what any Jimmy does, but they only get to do it because they face no consequences. Good people, honourable people, sometimes decide to let something slide, to let a teacher get away, and the consequences of that decision reverberate through decades and generations.
This year, 2019, has been quite the year for me, but until the other day, I wasn’t terribly
exceptional to Willem Breytenbach. Over the years, now and again he’d be caught with his hand on a teenage cock, but avoiding a scandal matters more than saving children, so every time w got caught doing what he does – and boy oh boy has been caught– but every single time, he was allowed a hushed departure.
Before he fled Lightspeed Digital, Willem Breytenbach fled Lumico, the company he started with his former employee Daniël Malherbe – a good-looking guy who once hiked with w along Table Mountain.
Before that, w left Media24 and Huisgenoot and You magazine under circumstances that remain unclear. Even before then, Willem was hastily moved in 2004, from Naspers in Cape Town to Naspers in New Delhi in India. I have terrible and predictable news about what w did in his three years in India – exactly what men like him do.
There are all these departures and plenty more too. Why did b leave the National School Newspaper Project? Why did he leave Langenhoven High in Riversdale? Why did he leave Willowmore?
If you look toward the first quarter-century of w’s regrettable life, you’ll find your fair share of departures too – from schools and dormitories and universities where w did what he does, and got caught, and was released.
Willem Breytenbach has no conscience, but his enablers do. If it ever comes to that split-second-decision moment, I respectfully pray that one of those enablers won’t be you.
Willem Breytenbach departed many places, but as far as I’ve been able to tell, there was one year where his trajectory may have been stopped. It is 1990. It is Willem Breytenbach’s second year at Grey College. Far away from Bloemfontein, I am ten years old and there’s no way I could know that a series of decisions at faraway Grey College meant that w lived another day that would lead him to help himself to Me Too.
[Tape: Anton Visser]
Willem Breytenbach left Grey College suddenly one evening in 1990. After helping himself to many boys there – the exact figure is a topic for another day – but after helping himself to all those Grey boys, Willem would find his way to teenagers from Willowmore to Stellenbosch. Me. Too.
SCENE Willem Breytenbach leaves Grey College
I’m at the back of Table Mountain, on the side where Table Mountain doesn’t look flat at all, but like two dramatic mountain peaks that surely can never look like a table I’m in a noisy public park, and I’m here to meet one of b’s pupils from Grey College.
My name is Anton Visser, I am 46, I live in Cape Town and I shoot commercials, I am a commercial director.
It is ten o’clock Thursday and unpleasantly gusty, but Cape Town’s dog owners are
made of stern stuff. Anton and I find a park bench that’s out of the wind, but it’s also next to a pathway that’s a paradise for walkies in these parts.
TAPE: Anton with stranger’s dog
The parade of dogs turns out to be a welcome distraction from the heavy things Anton and I are here to discuss.
TAPE: Anton tells of WILLEM BREYTENBACH’s departure
Anton: I am a peripheral character in all of this, and it is interesting you know because nothing happened to me. But you want me to paint a picture of the time and I can see it all play out now in retrospect.
Deon: As boys were you told eh Ms B has left the school and no correspondence would be entered into or was it kind of organically at the end of the year
Anton: Not even that, and maybe there’s a clue in that you know it wasn’t announced it just kind of filtered through Oh did you hear he’s gone, he is going somewhere else there’s a clue in that it was never announced it was never explained to anybody, it was just one week. It was definitely very low-key the way that he was let go.
SCENE DW builds a binder
It is yesterday, 27 November 2019, and I am in Johannesburg, in my loft, in the home I share with my husband and four cats. I’m sitting at my desk, I survey the remains of the loft.
When I started this investigation eleven months ago, something strange started to happen. Soon after I started asking around about Breytenbach, I was receiving answers to a different question.
For instance: in my loft one evening, I get a call from a boy from Grey College. A few days ago, I sent him a sensitive message, and he is eager to tell me what he saw.
I tell him I’m investigating a certain Mr Breytenbach.
‘Oh,’ he says, after a long silence. ‘I didn’t realise it was Mr Breytenbach that you wanted to know about.’
I say, ‘Who did you think I was talking about?’
He says, ‘Well ... can I trust you?’
I say yes and he says, ‘Okay’ and he tells me about someone else entirely; some other
person who helped themselves to him; who once left a school under a cloud and then
popped back up at another exclusive school where he still teaches today.
I put the phone down. This other teacher seems like a person worth probing. I find a fresh index card and I write down a name that means nothing to me, but now it sounds like maybe he could be like Jimmy.
It happens over and over. I ask questions, and people say ‘No, no I wasn’t raped by Willem Breytenbach,’ and then they tell me by whom. After eleven months, I have a binder full of information I will share with the police. But I will also try to think if there’s a different way of catching these bullfrogs who hide among us. I think maybe I have caught my Jimmy. If you have your own Jimmy, maybe someone should catch him too.
Well, I say have a binder full of paedophiles; what I have are too many index cards of
paedophiles who teach at schools and often live there too. What these index cards need, is a binder. I will get a professional-looking binder, like a real detective. I will file all of my index cards, and as I page through my shiny binder, suddenly I would notice a pattern. A pattern that would, as they say in detective shows, ‘blow this case wide open’.
SCENE DW arrives in Cape Town
It is Sunday 17 November 2019 and I land in Cape Town. I am here to meet two more
survivors of w, and to lay charges against w for offences in 1997. Under South African law, sexual offences never proscribe, which means you can lay historical charges when you are good and ready, not when other people think you should be.
It is early evening as I touch down in the Mother City. The three weeks since Episode 1 came out have been the most intense of my life, and certainly the most meaningful too.
Ever since I acknowledged my abuse, I have been consciously hung up with Willem Breytenbach and the sexual grooming and raping he does in plain sight. An evil teacher who became an untouchable publisher. There was nothing secret or subtle about the way that Breytenbach ruled the roost in the 26- storey Media24 building on Cape Town’s foreshore. He was the general manager of Huisgenoot and You magazines – red-top weekly tabloids that are ferocious in their pursuit of rugby players’ most minors indiscretions. But these magazines did nothing to report on the monster in their midst.
From the beginning, from my very first conversations around this podcast, people have
asked me why. Why do it like this, why not go to the police? My explanation has been the same every time. I have three aims, in descending order of importance: justice, activism and art. Justice, so that Willem Breytenbach can be kept far away from any children or young men or sane members of society – an organisation like a jail comes to mind.
My second purpose has been activism, because I wanted to expose not only Willem Breytenbach, but the layers of complicity that’s enabled his decades-long reign. And my third purpose has been art. I can never get back what Willem Breytenbach took from me, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make something beautiful out of it.
That is what this podcast has been to me. I have taken everything that’s happened to me and turned it into a flower. I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but I am proud of myself. I am proud of what I have done here, which is an admission that would delight my therapist, Craig Traub, so much he’s bound to bring it up every time he sees me, which is twice a week. If you’re a survivor of sexual abuse, therapy will make you stronger and help you to heal. I would never have been able to do any of this without the support and kindness of Craig. If there’s something in your past you don’t want to talk about, I strongly recommend that you get your own Craig and talk about it.. Only by learning to grieve what we’ve lost, can we learn how to move on.
In the past three weeks, I’ve realised something else and it’s made me uncomfortable –
don’t worry, Craig and I have been talking through it, and I’m okay with it now, I think. I’ve had a fourth motive that I didn’t admit to myself. The fourth motive was revenge.
Tailormade revenge. Willem Breytenbach has never been liked in his life, but he has often been respected and has always been feared. At school newspapers and real newspapers and at websites and social pages, w always preached the powers of new media. At school newspaper courses, he taught me to keep finding new ways of telling stories, all the while teaching me something much easier: how to teach a boy how to hate himself.
Willem Breytenbach’s whole life is a tale of humiliation and destruction. Willem has no empathy, so he can’t understand how anybody else feels. He can only understand what he feels. That’s why Willem Breytenbach had to get a taste of his own medicine.
Today, hiding behind his expiring mother, Willem Breytenbach can not believe that three weeks and one day ago, he owned a company and employed 30 in Cape Town. He lived with his life partner Danie in a picture-pretty Cape Town neighbourhood called Three Anchor Bay in a house tucked in among Table Mountain and the Atlantic Ocean.
As always, he was scheming and plotting and raping boys and young men. It was nice. He was happy, even though he seldom looked it. All of that was just three weeks and one day ago. Now everything is destroyed and w is humiliated. Willem, I know you’ve had to listen to every episode, would have had to listen and relisten to everything I’ve said about you. Willem, here is the second and the last thing I’ll ever say to you: you’re welcome.
So there I am two Sundays ago. I am walking through Cape Town International Airport;
down the long passage between the luggage carousels and the sliding doors between
passengers and the landside public.
I feel a strange emotion; I feel soothed and safe. I walk out of the main terminal building,
towards the rental-car companies, but I look up and I stop. In front of me is Table Mountain, just like it has always been, but for the first time I can remember, the sight of the mountain doesn’t scare me. In fact, it is beautiful. w isn’t in Cape Town and I know why I’ve always been afraid when I arrive here. Two Sundays ago, I realised at Cape Town airport that I have found some peace. w isn’t destroying boys in Cape Town anymore – the Ground Zero of his criminal empire. Not anymore. I wanted to warn people’s sons, and I have. And I was still scared of Willem Breytenbach, even though I’m way too old for him now.
I turn 40 next month; a brand-new Deon for the 2020s.
None of the boys and the men he destroyed can ever regain the boys that they were. But it brings me peace to know where he is, to know where he’s hiding and spending his days just waiting for a knock at the door.
He won’t be bothering us anymore, and I find peace in that. If w bothered you, I hope it can bring some peace to you too.
END OF ACT 3
EPILOGUE
Under defamation law, all subjects get the right to reply. Willem hasn’t denied anything, and you can read all about his and other parties’ responses at News24.com.
It took an army of people to tell My Only Story, and there is no way I can adequately thank them for helping me. This year has been hard on the people who love me, and because I’ve had no money to pay anyone, I could only ask people who love me. But the emotional toll on them all has been phenomenal.
I get time to process things, to write and rewrite exactly what I want to say, and I still have to talk to Craig about it twice a week. By the time it’s an episode and I walk into the sound booth to do the recording, it’s become an entirely creative pursuit for me. But I’ve underestimated the impact it would have.
The episodes are written in three acts, so normally I’d take a break in the voicing between act 1 and 2. I bounce out of studio all excited, and I find producer Alison Pope and sound engineer Sean Jefferis looking thoroughly gloomy. ‘What’s wrong?’ I’d say, ‘Is the read bad?
Don’t you like the act climax?’ and Sean would say, ‘Duuude, it’s really heavy stuff; it’s
working, just give us a moment.’ Then I’d say ‘Act 2 is much lighter than Act 1’ but they
never look like they believe me.
The story has also had a big impact on composer Charl-Johan Lingenfelder. The scoring has to match the episode’s clips and breaks and climaxes, so Charl-Johan can’t do a thing before everything else is done.
For Episode 4, he has had less than 24 hours to process the episode emotionally, and then compose all the music instantly to something that sits so tightly between the words that you can’t imagine the two ever existed apart from each other.
I want to say baie dankie, liefie – thank you, Riaan Wolmarans, my husband, who has helped me with MyOnlyStory.org, as well as Facebook and Twitter, while still working full-time at a media organisation that’s a rival to News24. Riaan loves me and the content has been hard for him to listen to, but he has supported me through all of it.
And so have the love of my mother, my sister, my aunt and my whole family. People ask how my family has taken my crusade, and then I tell them the story of my aunt.
About a year ago, we sit on my stoep in Johannesburg. I am telling her about my rape and I say ‘the perpetrator is still alive and active in Cape Town’. My aunt says immediately, ‘But you must expose him!’ ‘That is the plan,’ I say to her.
The combined love of my family, my husband, my friends and my creative contributors,
have made it all possible.
My script editor is Annel Pieterse, who won’t allow me at this point to add a further
sentence to this immensely long list. If this was an awards ceremony, the orchestra would be deafening by now. But please allow me a few quick more: our incredible artwork is by Carla Kreuser; our publishing partner was News24, and thank you to Adriaan Basson, our editorial advisor, and to Pieter du Toit.
Our lawyering is by Willem de Klerk and Charl du Plessis; and thank you for News 24 for paying for them and my publicist is Jenny Griesel.
Also special thanks to Anneke Villet, Retief Tromp, Hennie van Deventer, Chris ‘the Skedel’ and Theresa Nightingale; and to Nina, who was our emotional-support puppy.
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This has been a production of Fairly Famous.