Authors: John Carlin
They might have married, she might have gone into the law, and together they could have accomplished the dream of dragging her
parents out of penury that had driven her through her school and university years. Often she would tell them, ‘Don’t worry. Give me time. I will look after you.’
A misfortune while she was still in law school made them fear for a while that it would be they who would have to look after her. She fell while riding and broke her back. In what would have been the most perverse of twists, she might have been disabled for life. She lay in hospital for six weeks nursing two crushed vertebrae, with her doctors uncertain whether she would ever be able to walk again.
But she made a complete recovery, graduated and decided to change her life. She never rode again, split with the jockey Agrella – the relationship would be described later on in court as ‘emotionally abusive’ – decided to go into modeling full-time and moved to Johannesburg, as ambitious South African men and women from the provinces – among them Nelson Mandela in his day – had long done. Her parents, in particular her father, had their doubts about her renouncing the law, but she appeased them by telling them that they should be patient; she would return and take up legal practice in due course.
She arrived in the big city, had the word ‘Lioness’ tattooed on her ankle, and set out to conquer the world. Her success did not initially match her ambition. At five foot seven she was short for a career in the fashion world and, though she did manage to sign up with an agency called Ice Model and land a few early photographic jobs, it took her years to reach the point of being able to spare enough money to alleviate her parents’ growing financial distress. While the man she and all South Africans knew as the Blade Runner was already an international star on the way to making millions, she spent five largely anonymous years in the city in which he had been born experiencing as much frustration as joy.
She had a busy social life, with plenty of dancing in nightclubs; she did some live presenting for Fashion TV South Africa, but complained about the cattiness of her competitors in the modeling world; she struggled to get by and badly missed her parents. She found some salvation in the arms of a businessman called Warren Lahoud, with whom she began a relationship early in 2008 that lasted more than four years. But she had not yet made the yearned-for breakthrough in her career, and in October that year she endured an experience on a visit to Port Elizabeth that would offer an eerie portent of the tragedy that lay ahead. She was alone at home with her mother when thieves ripped the burglar bars from the outside walls and stormed in. As the thieves ransacked their home, the two of them hid for fifteen minutes inside a locked room, silent and frozen with fear. Mother and daughter were so shaken by the incident that they sought professional counseling.
The year 2009 showed little improvement in her fortunes but in 2010 things began to look up: she began appearing in advertisements for Toyota cars, Pin Pop lollipops, Cardinal beer and Hollywood chewing gum. Her dream, though, was to appear on the cover of a mainstream magazine. She took a step in that direction when she was flown to the island of Bazaruto in Mozambique to pose as a calendar girl for
FHM
magazine, a monthly publication for men of a type known in South Africa as a ‘lads’ mag’. At the end of 2011 she made her breakthrough. She was chosen for the cover of
FHM
, where she was described as the ‘December Summer Sizzler’. ‘I’m super honored to be on the cover, especially the December issue, and am excited to see what lies ahead,’ she told the Port Elizabeth
Herald
, which, echoing the city’s pride, described her as ‘a beauty with brains’.
Success at last followed success and in the middle of 2012 she was invited to fly to Jamaica to appear on a South African reality TV
show called
Tropika Island of Treasure
. Poignantly, and in questionable taste, the show was broadcast two days after her death. It ended with a set-piece address to the camera in which she said, ‘You fall in love with being in love . . . I don’t have any regrets, any bitterness . . . the way you go out and make your exit, it’s so important. You’ve either made an impact in a positive way or a negative way, but just maintain integrity and maintain class and just always be true to yourself.’
Being true to herself included breaking up with Warren Lahoud, in whose home she had been living. The news came as a blow to her parents, who regarded him as a decent companion and a ‘gentleman’, with whom she might have led a safe and contented existence. The better news was that she was now earning enough to send them money to buy food and pay their utility bills. Her parents had been struggling more than ever to get by on their own. Barry Steenkamp was no longer training horses and was making what money he could chopping wood in the bush, heaping the cuttings into little piles and selling them by the roadside to passers-by for lighting fires at barbecues. Her mother, June, baked cakes and made sandwiches which she sold to punters at a sparsely attended racecourse outside Port Elizabeth. (In one of their daughter’s last communications with her parents she told them she had made a money transfer equivalent to US$100 so that they could watch the pay TV channel on which
Tropika Island of Treasure
would be broadcast.)
But Reeva was still not making a lot of money. In the months preceding her death, she had been living not in her own apartment but in a room at the home of the parents of her best friend, a makeup artist called Gina Myers, in an unfashionable neighborhood of Johannesburg. But she was starting to aim higher. Her role model, she told her agent, was Cameron Diaz, the Hollywood actress with a
reputation for beauty, intelligence and mischievous wit. She started to move in more affluent circles, encouraging her to develop a taste for luxury cars and celebrity men. Rumors abounded of an affair with Francois Hougaard, a well-known professional rugby player with dashing good looks. Her postings on Twitter in the second half of 2012 suggested a flirtation with him.
But then she met the most famous young South African of them all, the rich and debonair Oscar Pistorius, and new vistas opened up. Feted as the country’s golden couple, photographs of Pistorius and Reeva appeared all over the newspapers and magazines. Public exposure was what she had wanted and now it was what she had, beyond all previous expectations, to the point that she struggled with being in the public eye. She was continually the subject of unwanted attention, which placed more stress on her than on Pistorius, who had long grown used to it. But it was a price she was willing to pay. He loved her and, as those photographs he cherished of the two of them together seemed to confirm, she loved him.
That thought offered Pistorius as much comfort as it did distress during the memorial he organized for her in the garden of his uncle’s home. Weeping most of the time, he was fulfilling what he felt to be his religious obligation, while carrying out his own attempt at catharsis. But while the memorial was a private affair, the public were alerted to the fact that it had taken place by a statement issued from a ‘reputation management’ firm working on Pistorius’s behalf.
Cynics, of whom there were many in South Africa, jumped on this, arguing that his chief purpose had been to convey to the world at large the message that he had loved Reeva and that he could not possibly have killed her deliberately, as the police claimed. Shashi Naidoo, a friend of Reeva’s who attended the Steenkamp family funeral in Port Elizabeth, said, ‘I think this is a sad attempt to alter
public perceptions.’ Columnists in the South African newspapers made much the same point.
Pistorius tried to shield himself from what people were saying. Trawling social media on his smartphone and roaming the internet on his laptop had been entrenched habits before the shooting. Not any more. Yet it was impossible for him to shut himself off entirely from the noise he was generating online. All it took was an unguarded remark by a visitor to his uncle’s home, or a snippet of overheard conversation, to offer him a glimpse of the outer circle to his private hell, where voices shrieked that he was a liar who should rot in jail.
Many members of the public that had once adored him now regarded him with contempt – precisely the outcome he and his mother had striven so hard to avoid ever since he first became conscious that he was different from other people. Here, at his uncle Arnold’s, he had found a hiding place from the world’s prying eyes, but the truth from which he could not fully avert his gaze was that many in South Africa and beyond refused to believe his version of what had happened that night – they saw him, in a country rife with criminal violence, as one murderer more.
A honed alertness to how people viewed him had come with his physical condition, but his vigilance had been sharpened by celebrity. Living his life in a mirror, ever attentive to the impression he made on others, he had cultivated a humble, understated persona in the years of triumph before he shot Reeva. Guided by professionals at Nike and other sponsors who fed off his success and had a vested interest in preventing him muffing his lines, he had learned to keep to a tight script. But that script had changed now. Before, he had grown accustomed to headlines like ‘Big-Hearted Blade Runner Wins Another Gold’. Now it was ‘Famous Athlete Kills Woman He Loved’. Before, he had been able to shape how the public viewed him; now
that was out of his hands. He was center-stage, the lights of the world still blazing upon him, in a classically beguiling drama no TV reality show could compete with, and bereft of all possibility of shielding his despair from the world.
But Pistorius had once before had a glimmer of the pillorying he was facing now. It had happened in London, when he was at the peak of his fame, five and a half months before the shooting.
His crime back then, a trifle now, had been to respond rather inelegantly to defeat by a Brazilian runner called Alan Oliveira in the 200 meters final at the Paralympic Games. It was as if he had forgotten for a moment how hard he had worked to portray himself as a measured, even-tempered champion – as if he had omitted to register that he was live on TV, not unloading his rage to sympathetic friends in the locker room. He regretted it at the time and he regretted it still more now, for it was ammunition his detractors were using to back the argument that he had been a fraud all along. ‘Oscar Is Not Such A Saint’ a headline at the time had read.
He knew he should have kept his mouth shut and congratulated the winner, but he never ceased to believe that his fury had been entirely justified. The runner who had beaten him to the line was a double amputee like himself, but it was true, he was convinced of it, that he had worn artificially long prosthetic blades, providing him with an artificially long stride. Nevertheless, he should have known, clever as he had become in the art of managing his brand, that telling the truth was not always a good idea. ‘We’re not running a fair race here,’ he had told the TV interviewer. ‘The guy’s legs are unbelievably long.’ On he had railed, noting that the last time he had seen Oliveira, a year earlier, he had looked a head shorter. ‘Absolutely ridiculous!’ he had cried, and stomped off.
Casting his mind back to that time, it had been dismaying to learn
later that when the TV had cut back to the studio, the panellists had not known how to react. They appeared not just shocked but embarrassed, in part at the ugliness of the outburst, but also because they, along with every other commentator, had always portrayed Pistorius the way he had portrayed himself, as not just ‘the fastest man with no legs’, but the nicest. Along with the no less bewildered millions watching on TV, the studio panellists had needed a few seconds to adjust to the evidence that Pistorius the hero had mortal flaws, that the portrait he had painted of himself as a softly spoken, wholesome young man did not correspond as fully as they had wanted to believe to Pistorius the flesh and blood man.
That lapse need not have left any lasting damage. He made amends. The following day, when his temper had eased, he apologized. He won the next race and when he spoke this time it was with his usual practiced grace. The sheen had faded for a day or two, but all was quickly forgotten. He remained the golden boy and when he flew back to Johannesburg adoring mobs were waiting for him at the airport, the episode with the Brazilian forgotten.
But when the news broke of what had happened on the morning of Valentine’s Day, the very same fans, in South Africa and beyond, recalled the episode in the rush to try and find a connection between the icon they thought they knew and the gunman who had shot the woman he said he loved.
They needed to make sense of what had happened and the first thing they clutched at was that outburst in London. Did that seemingly out-of-character rant in London reveal a dimension of his personality previously hidden from the world? Could the otherwise mild and gracious Pistorius really have done such a thing? Had he been seething with anger at his limbless condition all along? Who was the real Oscar Pistorius?
In the haste to pass judgment and to adjust to this new horror, that widely remembered outburst of egocentric rage was the one possible clue on offer.
Then, after the police had issued their version of what had happened, and he his, at the bail hearing, the public debate that would continue right up to the murder trial, and beyond, began. The details of his version had been set out in his affidavit in court but the substance of it had been leaked to the press on the very morning of the shooting.
There could be no dispute as to what had happened materially. The facts were that he had fired the bullets, that he and Reeva had been alone in the house, and that there had been no sign of forced entry. Making his case would be a tough sell in court and it was a tough sell to the public at large. He had his supporters, in all corners of the globe, but the prevailing response to his story was one of scepticism. Who but a madman could imagine that a burglar would choose to lock himself inside a toilet? If Pistorius were not mad, which apparently he was not, he had to be lying, so went the argument.