Oscar: An Accident Waiting to Happen (5 page)

If I had known that Oscar was still involved with another woman when he started dating my daughter, I would never have given my blessing or encouraged their relationship the way I did. But that’s the thing with people – we usually only see the missing pieces, the gaping inner wounds and dysfunctional syndromes afterwards, when it’s too late.

By the time we started having suspicions that Oscar was seeing someone else – at times possibly more than one person – too many emotions were involved; he had already captured Sammy’s heart and things had gone too far. Plus it was hard to ever really know what Oscar was thinking or feeling. He was so adept at sidestepping issues. Whenever Sammy raised questions or voiced her suspicions that he might be being unfaithful… he would simply deny everything.

You never really knew where you stood with him. Or why he needed to tell some of the stories that came out of his mouth.

Like the time he told us he spent Christmas alone, eating service-station pies when he actually enjoyed a lovely Christmas feast with his Greek friend Alex and Alex’s family. Or like the time he told us he was going out for a quiet evening with his brother and sister. It was the night of his and Sammy’s shared birthday. It was very early on in their relationship, on 22 November 2011,
the day of their actual birthdays, when Sam was writing her final matric exam. Oscar didn’t pop in as one would have expected a doting boyfriend to do. He told us they would be going to a restaurant his mom always took him to on his birthday. Of course the mere mention of his mom tugged at our heart strings and we all collectively felt sorry for him. Sometime later friends of ours told us that they had been at the same restaurant and had seen Oscar having a big dinner party out on the town with a whole lot of old school friends and family. It appeared that he had taken his ex-girlfriend along with him as his date. The following day he celebrated his shared birthday with Sammy without giving any indication that his affections might have been elsewhere the night before. When we discovered his indiscretion later, Sammy confronted him and he denied it, promising he wasn’t seeing any other girls. (Eight months later he in fact admitted he had been unfaithful to Sam in a confessional email.)

Much later, just before Oscar got back from the Olympics, Sammy told me that his ex, Jenna, had contacted her on Facebook and told her that she and Oscar had been seeing each other on and off for the past five years and that Oscar wanted her back and that she was the woman of Oscar’s dreams. This was during July and August 2012, when he had been trying his darnedest to get Sammy back, declaring his undying love for her. It was hard to know what to believe, with all the contradictions and discrepancies that constantly kept emerging.

In the beginning, in the early days of their relationship we tended to take his word as total truth as he was so convincing. But there was an incident where I saw a part of him that I found really disturbing. It was in the early days, towards the end of 2011 – they had been dating for a few months and we were at a friend’s place, whose house we were renting in Dainfern. Oscar arrived in his super-fast white Nissan GTR and offered to take our friend for a spin. I just assumed that they went for a drive down the road, aware of the restrictions that came along with being in a built-up suburb, but when they came back one of the neighbours who had a young baby came storming into the house and shouted at our
friend for speeding in our area. She was really angry and went on about how there were always young kids playing on the streets, and how dangerous speeding in the area was. Being a gentleman our friend immediately took the blame and apologised profusely. During the whole showdown Oscar was crouching down behind the kitchen counter, with a huge grin on his face.

Oscar had been driving the car.

I felt really awful about this incident – Oscar was our guest and we were staying in someone else’s house and there was no reason why our friend should have been made to look like the villain in front of his neighbour. Of course Oscar should have owned up, but I assumed that he hadn’t in case the incident went into the papers and got published. It made me wonder whether Oscar ever took real responsibility for anything. Did he ever accept the blame for the things that he did wrong in his life? Instead, he thought it was funny. In fact, I think he was quite proud that he got away with it. That he had pulled the wool over the neighbour’s eyes. He didn’t appear to feel guilty about it at all.

I found it increasingly worrying, this blur between truth and fantasy. But at the time we almost always looked the other way, forgave him, or made up an excuse for him. Later his good-boy image would begin to wane. But I think that out of all of us, Sam was the one who began to see the cracks first and tended to believe him the least.

I think Oscar deeply feared the possibility of the unsuspecting public and his adoring fans seeing him in a bad light. I believe that’s one of the reasons Oscar resented the media so much, at least the ones he considered “unfriendly”, those who were critical of him or who published stories that questioned his carefully constructed good-boy image. Oscar knew that the media were capable of busting right through the public relations bubble surrounding him. All that control he tried to exert in most areas of his life became very tenuous when it came to journalists who had the power to rip the illusion into tiny pieces. As a result, he kept a little black book where he noted the names of any journalist or publication who told “untruths” about him or
anyone who contradicted his pristine image of himself. They were duly blacklisted. Requests by these journalists for interviews or comments from Oscar were ignored.

I can only imagine how the endless “bad-boy” and scandalous stories, along with galleries of pictures, now posted all over the Internet of all the women in his past, must infuriate him today.

When I look at those photographs of some of the women Oscar “dated”, fell in love with, or was seen around town with, from first girlfriend Vicky Miles to Jenna Edkins, to Melissa Rom, to Erin Stear, to Sammy and then of course Reeva, it’s almost eerie how similar they all look. All blonde women, mostly with long straight hair. Pretty. Petite and slim. All with perfect cover-girl looks. The “Oscar Type”.

It breaks my heart to see my sweet, beautiful Samantha lined up amongst them. I have often wondered about what lies behind all those women’s eyes, in their one-dimensional poses. Is there a common hurt, a shared trauma behind each of those perfect smiles? Were they all party somehow to protecting Oscar’s public image as a clean-living, well-rounded South African sports hero? Were they all linked by a shared fear of Oscar’s unpredictable behaviour? Or did his charming façade remain fixed in place with them?

On the other hand, I have often wondered what effect all these perfect women had on Oscar, given his disability. Maybe deep down all of them in some way made Oscar feel his own imperfections and his disability more acutely, which might in the end have driven him over the edge. Maybe all his desperate attempts to control his women and treat them almost like inanimate objects were all because somewhere their perfection reminded him too much of the imperfections within himself.

He has admitted that his penchant for blondes started off when he was seven or eight years old, back in primary school when he developed a crush on fair-haired, blue-eyed, tomboyish Faryn Martin. In
Blade Runner
he describes following her around like a love-struck puppy until finally he begins “dating” her – going to movies and ice skating, holding hands and falling in love.

In 2004, when Oscar was 17, still in high school, he met Vicky
Miles, who he says in his book was the “big love” of his life. Over the following two years there would be plenty of ups and downs, break-ups, make-ups, tears and lots of intensity. Signs of Oscar’s overly romantic side came creeping through – he once blew up 200 balloons on Valentine’s Day in 2005 that he hung up on the fence and in trees along the driveway at Vicky’s house. Then with a can of spray paint, he wrote I LOVE YOU TIGER on the road in front of the gate. Others might have labelled this obsessive behaviour.

Looking at the way he approached his relationships with women it was almost as though he had read some cheesy “how to date a girl” book and followed instructions step by step, or watched those American pseudo-romantic, date-night movies, and tried to emulate them: flowers, Valentine’s messages, great professions of love.

But there was something very disconnected in it all, almost as though he was imitating someone in love, rather than actually feeling or experiencing it himself: and as soon as his lover made any demands or showed signs of disinterest or disenchantment, he either backed away and disappeared or got hyper-obsessive.

After countless break-ups and make-ups, the two-year relationship with Vicky finally ended in December 2007, after what he describes as a bad fight on New Year’s Eve. Things had been building up over that year while Vicky had been studying at UCT and was not as available to Oscar as she had been previously. She had been growing up, making new friends and hanging out with people Oscar didn’t approve of.

Knowing what I know now about Oscar, it was probably a case of Oscar not being able to control Vicky in the way he would have liked that caused the relationship to end. He said they had not had any contact since their big fight. Who knows what actually happened. In my opinion, Vicky was definitely one of the lucky ones who got away relatively unscathed.

Although Oscar has repeatedly said how heartbroken and devastated he was by the ending of this relationship, it would seem that less than four weeks passed before he started seeing his next blonde, straight-haired girlfriend, Jenna Edkins, in early 2008.

I am always amazed by the way Oscar dealt with pain. It seemed like he believed that by blotting hurt out and ricocheting into a new relationship, he would somehow escape the heartbreak. Then he would never have to address or own up to the difficult and hurtful issues that needed to be dealt with. It was a pattern of denial that I believe Oscar was constantly trapped in.

So straight after Vicky, Oscar began dating pretty, blonde, straight-haired Jenna. Like Sam, she was 18 when they began seeing each other. In his book, Oscar described her as “delightful” and “sweet natured”. Of course she was postcard perfect. Just like all the others. It really was fascinating how strongly attracted Oscar was to a type.

It seems from what Oscar later told us in a letter, Jenna had first appeared in his life when his mom was still alive, although they only actually met in 2008, after his mom had been dead for a few years. Jenna’s mom and his mom Sheila were friends and on the weekends when Oscar and his siblings went to stay with their dad, Henke, the two women would take Jenna along with them to church. Knowing that Jenna had spent time with his beloved mother seemed to create some bond between the two of them that he said he found hard to ignore, even during the times when they were not seeing each other. He admitted to us later that this might have in fact kept them together “long after it should have ended”.

With Jenna, as with all his relationships, at the beginning, their romance was blissful. Then Oscar went off to compete at the Paralympic Games in Beijing and came back on a total high, having broken a world record in the 400 metres and won three highly coveted gold medals. He was the star of the Games. He later told us that this was when he started having problems with the relationship as he was struggling to come to terms with his new success and almost overnight fame. “Some of it went to my head,” he said in a letter to us. He complained of Jenna not understanding what he was going through. “I often found myself having to explain situations I was in – many highs and under a lot of pressure, many lows.” Who knows whether anyone would have been able to keep up with Oscar’s ever-changing demands.

With so much travelling, training and taking part in competitions overseas – in the past few years he would often spend as much as eight months out of the country – the relationship came under all the usual long-distance pressures. In
Blade Runner
he describes how, along the way he met someone else but soon realised she was not “the one”. Jenna and Oscar then got back together later that year. But soon problems re-emerged. Oscar met another woman, possibly Melissa Rom, with whom he started a relationship.

His pattern of moving from one girl to another and overlapping in between was becoming a permanent part of his behaviour. And whenever things didn’t seem to work out with the new relationship he would revert back to Jenna. This went on for over three years until, he claimed, he started getting serious about Sam, in mid-2011. Jenna began trying to live her own life and they broke up. To this day I am unsure what that actually meant and whether he was even telling us the truth. Possibly she was just exhausted by the on-and-off nature of the relationship. Or maybe she was so in love with Oscar that she was prepared to put up with anything. The one thing that was clear was that throughout all his “difficult” times, Jenna appeared to be the one who didn’t disappear, who was a presence in his life right through good and bad times. He definitely continued seeing her, on and off, during his relationship with Sammy. He later admitted as much. After Sam and Oscar broke up and he began seeing Reeva, there were pictures of Jenna and Oscar together on social media in December 2012 in Cape Town, that were later deleted, after Oscar and Reeva were already a couple.

After the death of Reeva, Jenna came out in strong support of Oscar and the Pistorius family on Twitter, offering them “love and support”. She tweeted: “I have dated Oscar on and off for 5 YEARS, NOT ONCE has he EVER lifted a finger to me or made me fear for my life.”

It appears that Jenna has continued to remain fiercely loyal to Oscar.

It breaks my heart when I think of all these beautiful young women who were enthralled by Oscar’s world, and the chaos and
the danger that my daughter and some of the others had to endure. Sam was so young and trusting when she met him. There was a time that she loved him so much she would have done anything for him. She was prepared to give him so much love and support, right through to the end of their relationship.