Former advertising copy writer Deon Wiggett spent a substantial part of 2019 tracking down and finally getting apprehended the man he alleged raped him at 17. Since Deon’s expose of former media executive Willem Breytenbach another 40 men claimed he sexually abused them. The youngest victim was reportedly 12 at the time of his ordeal (News24, 3 February 2020).
MyOnlyStory.org chronicles Deon’s brave campaign which is narrated in four podcasts. The website also gives access to pertinent interviews. According to news reports Deon is currently working on a book which will be published towards the end of this year.
Deon’s exposure of Willem Breytenbach, who will make a court appearance again on 26 June this year (News24, 30 March 2020), is comparable to that of Harvey Weinstein in America by the #MeToo movement (TimesLive, 5 December 2019). On 11 March this year, Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years for sex crimes (New Yorker, 12 March 2020) and he started his prison sentence soon after.
While Weinstein was accused of sex crimes against scores of actresses and women working in the American movie industry, Breytenbach apparently preyed on boys and young men working on school and other newspapers. When News24 published the first podcasts, Breytenbach closed down the media agency he was running for some time (3 February 2020). At these online businesses, called Lumico and Lightspeed Digital Media, Breytenbach stands accused of allegedly abusing nine employees. Breytenbach’s former businesses ran publicity campaigns for well-known South African singers, amongst other things.
In his podcasts Deon relates how he encountered Breytenbach at a time when he was involved in a school newspaper and Breytenbach ran the school newspaper project for Media24. Breytenbach not only taught Deon the school newspaper business, but also Adriaan Basson, now the editor-in-chief of News24, and Waldimar Pelser, now the editor-in-chief of Rapport. It is to the credit of these scribes and Deon – and Deon insists his psychologist, Craig Traub – that Breytenbach was stopped in his tracks (see the coverage in News24 end of 2019).
Deon generously gave us permission to use the logo for his website here. “Go right ahead – the podcast was created to help people,” he wrote in his email to me.
I am highlighting Deon’s bravery and the bravery of the journalists and Deon’s psychologist here because we need to applaud a new generation of men who don’t close their eyes to the sexual abuse of boys and young men. The exposure of Harvey Weinstein in America was big. The exposure of Willem Breytenbach in South Africa is big.
Recently I wrote an opinion piece which was published in Psychoanalytic Voice, the Facebook page of the South African Psychoanalytic Confederation (SAPC). In it I said that the almost primordial initiation practices at schools like Parktown Boys High and the botched circumcisions in the Eastern Cape and other areas in our country which leave scores of boys dead, mutilated and psychologically affected need to be highlighted and changed. Across all our communities we need the men of today to stand up against abusive practices which beget further abuse.
We cannot keep sacrificing boys and young men in a kind of lawless Greek tragedy that never ends.
We need more people like Deon Wiggett and the team who supported him to turn the tide of violence in our country. I salute them. I encourage all of us to salute them. Their sacrifice is generative and creative and it builds rather than destroys.
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*First published in the South African Psychoanalytical Initiative Newsletter, Issue 1.