Oscar: An Accident Waiting to Happen (17 page)

The Sports Awards

After that call Oscar largely disappeared from our world. In the days that followed, a calm, deep sense of relief swept over our home. It was as though something restless and chaotic had been exorcised from our lives.

I have no idea what was going through his mind after our last conversation, but I suspect he might have felt a growing anger, even outrage, in response to what I’d said. Knowing him, I believe he felt outraged and he probably soon channelled any feelings of hurt and rejection into hatred of me. He must have been aware of how much of his real self, his darker side, had been exposed to us over the year and a half that he spent with our family, which would have made him feel very vulnerable.

It occurred to me, too, that when I told him never to contact us again that he may have felt like he had lost a second mother, indeed, his whole adopted family. In many ways I had lost a fifth child. But I couldn’t indulge in any worry about him or how he felt. I had wasted too much time on that already. I needed to focus on my family, especially on Sammy who appeared to have been deeply traumatised by the past year and a half. But I also needed to focus
on my other kids and my husband, who had all in varying degrees been adversely affected by Oscar’s unruly presence in our lives.

When Ke and Sammy arrived back home from their day in Cape Town, soon after my phone call ended with Oscar, I told them bits and pieces about what had just transpired – that Oscar had called and that we had had a long conversation that had not gone too well but at this stage I thought I would wait a bit before I told Sammy the intricate details.

Very slowly, over the next few days, details of the Sun City nightmare weekend began to emerge. Sam told me about the fight between Quinton and Oscar at Kyalami racetrack, about how Oscar had lost it in front of a whole lot of people, threatening Quinton, how he’d come back, enraged, to pick her up where she’d been waiting all day, and reenacted the whole fight with Quinton, terrifying her. She told me how scared she had been driving in the rain to Sun City, and how the car skidded and how the whole weekend had been awful, with Oscar unable to see beyond the fight with Quinton. After hearing all these frightening details, any tiny bit of doubt that I had been too harsh on Oscar was now totally erased.

He could have killed my daughter.

The week went by. Peace had been restored to our home, even though Sam was still withdrawn and quiet, as she always tended to be when she was under stress. I think one of the many things affecting her mood was uncertainty about whether Oscar was still expecting her to join him at the Sports Awards scheduled for Sunday, 4 November. Weeks earlier, before all the Sun City weekend drama, Oscar had invited Sam to attend the event, which was being held at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg. Oscar and I had had our last phone call on the Tuesday before the awards. Although I think by this stage Sam wanted the relationship with him to be over, she was still uncertain about whether he meant to keep the date. As messed up as things were, at this stage, they had not officially broken up.

But in the end, he just left her hanging, not calling to cancel or to confirm. I know she now really regretted having opened her
heart to him. As messed up as things were at this stage, in reality, they had not broken up and were still officially a couple. One of the things she said over and over again after her relationship ended was: I really wish I hadn’t given him a second chance.

That Sunday night I was working in my study when I heard the most terrible screaming. I ran downstairs to see what was wrong. Sammy was in the TV room crying like a wounded animal: “No, no, no! Not her, not her!” She just kept sobbing, “No, no, no!” over and over again. I turned to the TV to see what was upsetting her. The Sports Awards were on. And there was Oscar, smiling as he stood on the red carpet. On his arm was a beautiful blonde woman in a pink tasselled dress.

“That’s her, Mom, that’s Reeva,” Sammy sobbed. “She’s the one who’s been following me on Instagram… on Twitter… it’s her, it’s her, it’s her…”

Sammy was inconsolable, sobbing over and over again. She had literally just seen herself replaced on national television. And there Oscar stood grinning. All smooth and well turned out in a great black Armani suit – with not a flicker of emotion or remorse in his eyes. At that moment, I was so angry, I just said: “Good! Now hopefully you can just get rid of him, forget about the bastard and move on.”

Kerri-Lee, who was watching the awards with Sammy, told me how Oscar’s date, Reeva Steenkamp, had been following Sammy for months already on social media. She knew all about Sammy, what Sammy was up to, and where she had been. How during the Olympics Reeva had regularly popped up on Oscar’s timeline. “She’s been after him for a while, she never leaves him alone, commenting on everything, flirting with him and now she’s got her date with him. Good luck to her,” said Kerri.

Apparently, Sammy had had her suspicions for a while, even writing Oscar a letter three days before the Awards, asking him if anything was going on between him and this blonde model, Reeva. When she had voiced her fears, Oscar in his usual “deny everything” stance, got really angry and irritated with her and accused her of being “a psycho”, emphasising that there was
absolutely nothing between him and Reeva, who, he claimed, was dating his “best friend”, rugby player Francois Hougaard.

The Sports Awards was the swan song for Sammy and Oscar’s relationship. As hard as it must have been to see her boyfriend betraying her so publicly like that, I think, looking back at everything, that event really saved Samantha’s life. Experiencing it head on, feeling the pain of the end of her relationship in all its entirety, in such a public way, finally made Sammy realise that she and Oscar were over forever… Any man who could do something so cruel, so hurtful, didn’t deserve her love.

For Reeva, this was her “coming out” event, the official announcement of her relationship with Oscar.

Their pictures appeared everywhere in the newspapers, on the social pages, on the celebrity gossip sites. Reeva seamlessly assumed the space that Sammy had very recently occupied. The replacement was literally overnight. I couldn’t help but think that Oscar did this with careful deliberation. What better way to send a triumphant message to Sam and our family that he had moved on? It was a calculated, cruel, and direct hit, but it helped us all to let him go.

I still find it truly creepy to see how quickly Oscar could transfer his affections from one beautiful blonde to another.

And while my daughter’s heart was in pieces, in a home somewhere in Port Elizabeth, the coastal town where Reeva came from, there was probably a celebration that another mother’s daughter had found love with this wealthy, dashing, inspirational sports hero.

How quickly and tragically that would all change.

Two weeks after the Sports Awards, on 20 November, Oscar, Quinton and their respective legal representatives met to iron matters out after the fight. After Oscar attacked Quinton at the racetrack, Quinton had approached his lawyer to begin legal proceedings against Oscar, charging him with acts of intimidation. The animosity escalated.

In the media there were reports that members of the Hawks – a special police crime unit – were also present, as well as Quinton’s
friend ex-soccer player, Marc Batchelor. Marc had got involved in the drama when, on hearing what had happened at Kyalami, he had contacted Oscar’s friends to tell them to tell Oscar to back off. Things had escalated, a whole lot of
SMS
es went back and forth, in which Oscar allegedly threatened to break Marc’s legs.

We later heard that at the meeting Oscar told Quinton that he was still dating Sam when she began cheating on him by going out on dates with Quinton.

Without her there to tell her side of the story, Sam was blamed for causing all the problems between the two men. She was accused of lying to Oscar and two-timing him. At the meeting, Oscar assumed the role of good guy and peacemaker. He apologised for losing his temper. But, he told Quinton, Sam’s lies had driven him mad. Oscar played the victim, a role at which he was so adept.

The meeting ended amicably with the two men shaking hands and averting a legal showdown. Sam knew nothing of the meeting until she got a call from a friend of Oscar. The phone call was highly abusive – though I was metres away, I could hear a man screaming on the line to Sammy. After the one-sided conversation, Sam put the phone down in a flood of tears and told me, “That was Darren Fresco.” Between sobs she relayed how he’d told her that the “whole of Johannesburg” was at the meeting and everyone now knew “what a slut” she was. He seemed to relish telling Sammy details of how, at the meeting, both Quinton and Oscar had realised that it was Sam who had caused all the trouble, that she was the one who had lied to both men, and now Oscar and Quinton were friends. He ended the call to Sammy, saying neither she nor I must ever make contact with Oscar again, and that our entire family had all better “watch our backs” if we came to Johannesburg again.

Sam was in a total state after that call. She was hysterical, inconsolable. I was furious.

Seeing my daughter so maligned, I decided I needed to do something about the situation. I was so angry that they had met up with lawyers, without my daughter being given the opportunity to defend herself or offer her side of the story. Her rights and dignity
had been completely compromised by these two men. The fact that she had been torn apart and her reputation had been tarnished in the meeting was beyond any kind of common decency. So, sensing that I would get the truth from him, I called Quinton to find out what had really happened…

First I found out, contrary to what Darren Fresco had said, not the “whole of Johannesburg” had been at the meeting – just the two men involved and their legal representatives. Apparently in the meeting Oscar and Quinton had agreed to keep confidential everything that was said. Oscar had already broken this agreement, judging by the call his friend made to Sammy.

This incident and what transpired afterwards showed me how cruel people can be, especially in groups. In ancient Rome people would gather in huge arenas and watch lions tearing people apart for entertainment, today they do it on the Internet, on Facebook and Twitter. Although these days the slings and arrows are virtual, the poison of words can be just as lethal.

In the last two years, I have witnessed this cruelty first-hand, especially after Oscar and Sammy ended their relationship. I like to call the kind of people who indulge in this nasty behaviour the Twitter Trolls. They are mostly young women and I saw how they operated first hand as they went on an all-out attack against my daughter Sammy. Perhaps hiding behind the vast virtual walls of the Internet gives people a false sense of anonymity and courage, but I was shocked at how vicious their comments were about Sam.

It got so bad that I eventually decided to break my vow never to contact Oscar again and sent him this email on 12 December 2012.

But little did I know then that cruel, ugly tweets would fade into oblivion, compared to the horror that would soon be unleashed.

Slowly, Sam began to pick up the pieces after Oscar disappeared. She had lost so much weight that by the time they finally ended, she was almost skeletal. Of course, out of all of us, she was the one worst affected because she had experienced him most intensely; but in fact each one of us in the family felt the effects of the damage Oscar left behind.

It felt like some kind of tornado had swept through our lives. On some days I woke up with that heavy feeling you get just after a car accident, where one minute everything is okay and the next there’s a thunderous crash, leaving shards of glass and metal lying all over the bloody tarmac. But in this case, it was the debris of lives destroyed.

Oscar, in true Oscar survivor fashion, had seemed to glide seamlessly into his new relationship with Reeva Steenkamp. The media have said that they met on Sunday 4 November at a Daytona race day at Kyalami and he took her to the Sports Awards that evening. But they had definitely crossed paths months before, on Twitter.

Any relationship expert will invariably warn against embarking on a new relationship when on the rebound. A person who has just come out of a relationship usually has issues like emotional availability and unresolved or wounded feelings. Having hardly
taken a second to breathe between Reeva and Sammy, who was replaced in less than a week, I don’t think Oscar spent much, if any, time at all going over his mistakes from the year and a half spent with my daughter. No pause was taken for healing the hurt he must have felt, or for learning from his experience with Sam. But this wasn’t the first time he had hurtled from one relationship to another. He had been doing it ever since he was a teenager, after his mom died so suddenly.

Any distress he might have felt about Sammy and Quinton, residual trauma from the Olympics or anger about the brutal conversation I had had with him, just a few days before the Sports Awards – I don’t think he took the time to address any of these feelings in any way. Instead he went out clubbing, raced cars and threw himself head first into the next relationship.

For some people the high of a new relationship can be almost addictive: that heady heart-stopping excitement, and those all-encompassing feelings of early love, when everything is perfect and neither party can do any wrong. The “rose-tinted glasses” phase, they call it. I think this was the case with Oscar.

After the awards he probably spent the next few days with Reeva, basking in the early-morning glow of new love. But within the week, Oscar headed off to Amsterdam on 11 November for work, then spent two days in Scotland receiving an Honorary Doctorate degree from Strathclyde University, on 12 November. On 13 November he flew to Paris to work with Thierry Mugler. While he was there, it was reported that he took part in an event with the well-known singer and composer, Alicia Keys.

Soon after Oscar left South Africa, Reeva headed off to Jamaica to shoot the reality series
Tropika Island of Treasure
, working flat out until she returned to South Africa on 25 November.

When Oscar returned from Paris, around 16 November, he went to the Vaal River with a group of friends.

On 18 November, a friend of ours who was working in PR took the British magician Dynamo to meet Oscar at his Silver Woods home, as Oscar had agreed to appear in one of the
Magic Impossible
, Season 3 episodes. Apparently Oscar had a very angry-looking
black eye and what looked like a plaster on the back of his head. He told my friend and everyone on set that he had been in a jet-skiing accident the day before at the Vaal but we had already heard from various sources that his injuries had resulted from being in some ugly altercation. When I saw pictures of him later with his black eye, I felt a great sense of relief once again, knowing we would no longer ever have to deal with all that drama. (The Oscar Dynamo episode, which was meant to be broadcast in July 2013 on the Discovery Channel, was eventually canned as the producers felt it would be in bad taste after Reeva’s death just a few months earlier.)

Reeva returned from the
Tropika Island
shoot and spent a few days in the same country as Oscar, before he left for Europe on 29 November to attend the Olympic Ball, which was held on 30 November, and only returned to South Africa on 4 December. So all in all the new couple had literally seen each other for less than seven days in the first four weeks of their relationship.

What immediately struck me about Reeva was, despite her blonde hair and beautiful looks, which were in the tradition of all of Oscar’s other women, there was something very different about her. First she was somewhat older, aged 29 when she met Oscar, who had just turned 26 that November. She also seemed a lot more worldly than his previous attachments who had all been much younger “innocent” types, dating him in their late teens and early twenties. She had had a number of previous relationships and a successful career. On her Twitter page she described herself as: “SA Model, Cover Girl,
Tropika Island of Treasure
Celeb Contestant, Law Graduate, Child of God.”

Born a natural brunette on 19 August 1982, in Cape Town, under the outgoing, sunny fire sign of Leo, she grew up in the seaside town of Port Elizabeth. First established in 1820 as a town to house British settlers along the Eastern coast of South Africa, it remains a bit of an outpost, isolated from the rest of the world, despite being one of the larger cities in South Africa. Port Elizabeth is primarily blue collar, and many of its inhabitants work at the Volkswagen and Goodyear factories in a neighbouring industrial town, Uitenhage.

According to various interviews and newspapers reports, cash was in short supply in the Steenkamp home, but wanting the best for their daughter, Reeva’s parents June and Barry, a horse trainer, sent her to a good school, St Dominic’s Priory. By all accounts, Reeva was loved by both teachers and pupils alike, all of whom described her as a “ray of sunshine”, “bright and clever” and “always smiling”. At 15 she entered a local model-search competition, Face of the Future. The photos published in the local newspaper reveal an attractive but somewhat mousy brown-haired and serious girl, who wore a white dress in the pictures, affecting a classic, innocent pose.

The sexy blonde pin-up girl look would come later when she swapped her brown hair for blonde and the white dress for a bikini and lingerie.

On completing school, her grades were good enough to get her into law school. She graduated from the university of Port Elizabeth, known as the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, with a Bachelor of Law in 2005.

According to those who knew and loved her, Reeva had an ability to transcend life’s obstacles and challenges. When she fell off a racehorse in mid-2000, badly injuring her back, she spent six weeks in traction. Doctors were worried she would never walk again, but with fierce determination she made a full recovery, coming out of the experience with what she described as a “massive new mindset”. Instead of going off to apply for her articles, she decided to reinvent herself by dying her hair blonde and trying to make a go of it in the tough world of modelling. At just 5-foot-7 she was never match alongside 6-foot-something gazelles on the runways, but she photographed really well and had an impressive portfolio.

She ended a relationship with a boyfriend who she described as emotionally abusive, packed up her belongings and headed off to Johannesburg in the hope of finding a career as a cover girl.

She was soon scouted and chosen as the face of Avon South Africa. This break led to gigs with Pin Pop Lollipops, Land Cruiser, Toyota, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Cardinal Beer, and Hollywood Chewing Gum. With a keen mind for strategising, she saw an
opportunity to get into the modelling world by working as the receptionist at Ice modelling agency. It was a clever move. In that job, she would be first to know about castings, rub shoulders with the right people and get a foot in the door.

What Reeva may have lacked in height, she made up for in ambition; she wanted to make money. One of her big dreams was to make it onto the cover of the bikini guys’ magazine,
FHM
, to showcase her assets. She must have been heartened by the fact that she could use a connection from home; like her, the editor of the magazine, Hagen Engler was also “a homey from the Bay”, a native of Port Elizabeth.

In fact they had met a few times before. The first was way back when he judged the Port Elizabeth local leg of the Faces of the Future model search, recalling Reeva as “a fresh-faced, pretty teenager”. The next time they crossed paths was in a casting for an
FHM
calendar assignment. “We weren’t able to cast her that time,” said Engler in a story he wrote paying homage to Reeva, after 14 February. “Though her personality sparkled like the night sky, she was carrying a bit of extra weight. [She was] still sexy, though. She was a contender, but we didn’t choose her for that particular calendar.”

Not one to be deterred by a closed door, the following year she was back at an
FHM
calendar casting, having shed between 10 and 15 kilograms. “I don’t think she made that calendar either,” recalls Engler. “Something about too many blondes, or too pale.”

Back to the treadmill she went, working long hours, honing her body into a tanned and taut machine.

Finally, the following year, through sheer determination, she made it onto the calendar shoot. The models and crew were taken in September/October 2010 to the beautiful island of Bazaruto off the coast of Mozambique. She had literally been working on this dream for years, and when the January 2011 issue of
FHM
hit the streets with Reeva in the calendar, according to Hagen the response to her was incredible.

“What always set Reeva apart was her attitude, and she had the power combo of brains and looks,” recalls Engler. “She knew what
this game was all about, and she was willing to play it. To train up, be flirtatious on video, bring that indefinable sexiness in the eyes, strike the awkward poses… she was amazing. Charismatic, vivacious, intelligent, hilarious as well as beautiful, with a deep, masculine voice, permanent smile lines round the corners of her lips and a naughty sparkle in her eye.”

Having graced the inside, the next prize Reeva pursued was the chance to be on the much-sought-after cover of
FHM
.

A year later, her hard work and gritty determination paid off when she finally got her
FHM
cover, gracing the December 2011 issue of the magazine. Clad in a lurid pink bikini, epitomising the petite, sexy blonde bombshell look, again she was a massive hit with the readers. It had taken three years and countless hours of persistence to make it happen.

Instead of the usual saccharine “I like vanilla ice cream and fluffy toys” copy, in the
FHM
interview she showed her serious side when she said, “I’m passionate about standing up in defence of those who do not realise their own rights.” Reeva had become an outspoken activist championing women’s rights.

Shoots with other magazines soon followed. She became a regular around town at parties and clubs – always glamorous and oozing sex appeal – and appearing on the social pages of all the magazines.

She had a long-term boyfriend, businessman Warren Lahoud, but the relationship reportedly ended in July 2012.

She entered a whole new league when she started dating heartthrob Francois Hougaard, one of the biggest names in South African rugby. She now belonged to that exclusive, tight little group of women, wives and girlfriends of South Africa’s most successful sports stars, South Africa’s answer to the UK’s Wags. But unlike the often empty-headed and vacuous women who hung on the arms of the beefy sports stars, she was intelligent, had a tertiary education, was outspoken and confrontational, and fearless in terms of speaking her mind. At some point during the time she dated Francois she may have rubbed shoulders with Oscar, since they moved in similar social circles. At the time she began going out with Oscar, it seemed as if the world was Reeva’s
oyster. She was invited to all the right parties and had become professionally successful – enough to send money home to her cash-strapped parents.

After the Sports Awards, Reeva reportedly told her best friend, make-up artist Gina Myers, how smitten she was with Oscar. Reeva and Gina were living at the time in Gina’s parents’ house in Sandringham, where Reeva had a small upstairs bedroom. It seems that many in their circle of friends were initially enthusiastic about the new relationship, describing it as “perfect” and as “a match made in heaven”.

Gina’s dad, Cecil Myers, a commercial printer by profession, was not convinced. In various interviews he said that Oscar had initially come across as, “very nice and charming to us when they started dating. Then he always came in to say hello. But when they began to date steadily, he just dropped her and picked her up. That’s not right. I call it respect. If you’re in a relationship and you pick up the ‘daughter’ in the house, at least come in and say hello.”

In her witness statement Gina mentioned Reeva complaining about the way Oscar spoke to her and sometimes screamed at her. When I heard this I experienced a deep feeling of nausea as I remembered those calls to Sam.