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The Archivist

*Ben’s father

For a long while I relied only on what Luke had told me, my own fleeting glance at the footage, and a paper trail of parents’ and newspaper reports. It was very difficult to pin down details I could trust. Someone told me Collan had been beaten to a pulp in jail, with others backing up the story. Then I discovered it was all just a rumour. I was told one of the boys had committed suicide, and, yes, there had been suicides, but years earlier and nothing to do with the current issue or school management team. It was extremely frustrating. And worrying.

Enter the Archivist. I had been wanting to talk to him for some time. He was Ben’s father. Ben the whistleblower, the boy who had alerted the Bosserts about the CCTV footage of Rex groping Jonah and other boys in the common area. He had only been in Grade 10 at the time, and I was stunned at the bravery of this 16-year-old in bringing it into the open. Father and son had been on some podcasts and radio shows, talking about what had happened to Ben at school at the hands of Collan Rex. Listening to him and his dad, I was struck by two things: the closeness they shared and the openness with which Ben was prepared to talk about the details of the case, and himself in particular. I wanted to speak to both of them.

What I didn’t know when I first messaged Ben’s father was that he was the unofficial archivist of the entire case. Over months of conversations and debates about what to include and what not, he was the one I went to again and again, when I needed to check what someone had said or claimed, or when dates seemed wrong. He had kept records of everything – from documents to videos to audio recordings. There was nothing this man did not know or could not find out, and he became, for me, a person of trust.

“Do you think Ben would speak to me?” I asked him.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “One of the things I’ve tried to do – and I think it’s helped – is get him to talk about it. It’s part of his healing, part of his recovery.”

Ben was away at the time and the Archivist wanted to see me to clarify things before he would allow me to meet his son.

“I would like to meet with you and have a conversation. Partly about what you’re doing and being a part of it, but also because I would like to … explain Ben to you.”

“Is he okay?”

Every time I asked that of someone, I was struck with the stupidity of the question. How could anyone be okay after something like that?

I’d been in contact with Sasha-Lee Olivier that month; she’d been crowned First Princess in Miss South Africa that year and had eventually taken over the title after the winner had won Miss Universe. In a bid to help raise awareness for childhood victims, she was starting to talk about her own abuse as a child, and when I asked her when she’d become okay to talk about it, she was quiet for a while.

“I became okay about talking about it when I realised I would never be okay about talking about it,” had been her response.

I told that story to all those I interviewed. It was an icebreaker. And it really worked.

“Yeah, he’s okay,” said the Archivist. “But I want to talk to you first and tell you some stuff you may or may not know and after that, you can meet him.”

So, on a very hot afternoon towards the end of 2019, I sat down with Ben’s father and his wife at their home and he told me “some stuff”. Actually, he told me “lots of stuff”.

The Archivist is a big man and fairly intimidating in person. At that point, I was still quite nervous of this gatekeeper of the information. I told him what I knew and how it made me feel. I told him about looking at the first few minutes of the video and what had horrified me – and he stopped me right there.

“I actually chose not to see the footage,” he said. “I’ve been offered it several times, and told that I need to see it, and I don’t want to see it. I’ve heard more or less what it’s about. And, yes, what stopped Rex – or, rather, Ben revealing it in the way he did was what stopped Rex. But, from my perspective, it’s also something that I feel I don’t need to see and that I don’t want to see. I feel for these kids when I see them and I know them, but I don’t want to have them know that I’ve seen it and have them have to deal with the worry that this guy knows what happened. So that’s the reason I chose not to see it, and it also keeps me level-headed. I get upset quite easily, lose my temper about that kind of thing.”

So does Ben – Ben gets it from him, he says.

“I sat right behind Rex in court and I was, to be honest, looking for a confrontation, if he wanted that. And I suppose also I just wanted to stand up to him, but not really to fight him, just to show him that ‘I’m not afraid of you.’”

“But you didn’t.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Did you ever suspect anything? Did Ben ever say anything to you before the video?”

This was the watershed moment for many. Before and after the video.

“So, Ben came to me and he said that during training they would play no-rules waterpolo where they rough each other up and push each other down, just to toughen them up and get them not to panic while it’s happening in a real game kind of thing. And he said that Rex had grabbed his balls. I think it was as simple as that.”

“And were you worried?” I asked.

“I told him that that kind of thing happens in sport, like when playing soccer. So that’s what I dismissed it as.”

He looked sad for a minute.

“I guess I have to live with that.”

“You could never have known,” I said.

“Yeah, but then Ben changed a bit. Although he kept it quiet, he started getting a little more aggressive and harder because he was becoming a harder boy.”

“I’ve heard Collan was very rough with the boys, and wrestled with them a lot, as well as the other stuff,” I said.

“Ben had many incidents in the hostel, fighting and obviously making a noise … The ones that stand out, I suppose, involved wrestling. Ben said that Collan would frequently come into the room and fight with him. And Collan would also lift Ben’s legs up above the head and dry hump him – that was something he did regularly, while in a wrestling match. So he’d come in looking for wrestling and end up doing something like that. He’d put their legs over his shoulder, so that he’d … I suppose get a better angle, I guess, I don’t know. But he had that habit of doing that to the boys. In one instance, Ben went on tour to Durban with Rex, and there were a few incidents that took place there. One was when Ben came into a room where another boy was being dry humped, so Ben kicked Rex off this kid, and Rex got up and chased him down. He grabbed him and put him into some sort of a leg-lock, where he had Ben between his legs and choked him until Ben passed out. And there were other kids around – in fact, I heard one kid filmed it. But his parents didn’t want him getting involved so they apparently deleted it.”

“So it was more in fun than an actual desire to hurt them?” I asked, “because I’ve heard this from a few of the boys and even their parents and so I wondered why the prosecutor charged him with so many counts of attempted murder. And then the judge pretty much dismissed them anyway.”

He nodded.

“Ja, rightfully so – it wasn’t attempted murder. He never intentionally tried to kill them. The prosecution would have had more success if they had just made it common assault and made a few that were more severe, with grievous bodily harm. But the wrestling and stuff was fairly common … very common. Ben, in this case when he got knocked out. Also later on that tour … I don’t know how far apart the incidents were … but on the same tour, he shared a shower, not the same actual shower, but within the location there were two shower heads, and he was sharing that with Rex. Rex tried to grab his bum, but Ben told him to fuck off and leave him alone. Rex’s response was to urinate on Ben, and Ben then retaliated by urinating on Rex. And this is the thing … for Ben and a lot of the boys, it became a way of bantering, of having a fight. I think the reason it felt all right, in my opinion, was that they were invited to do the same, if you know what I mean. So when he grabbed them, he poked them, then it would be okay, like Ben would occasionally get an advantage over him and choke him, and grab his balls and squeeze his whatever. So it became like a banter thing, where eventually the boys started doing it to each other because it appeared as though it was fine to do. I don’t know if Rex intended for things to go as far as they did eventually, but this type of banter may even be how he got involved in the whole thing in the first place; it may have happened to him, so that whole back-and-forth became more of an accepted behaviour.”

“When did that acceptance of it ‘being normal’ stop for Ben?” I really wanted to know.

“When Ben started realising it was a problem, was when the new boys came in and they were very upset by it happening to them. Ben started noticing that. He became more concerned about his fellow students, particularly the younger boys. Ben had a very strong sense of brotherhood when it came to Parktown Boys, and he still has that. He feels responsible, he takes blame, he was the kind of kid that if somebody did something wrong, he would own up to it to protect them. And I think that had a lot to do with him coming forward to try to stop what was happening.”

“Your son is very brave,” I said. “He put a monster behind bars.”

The Archivist smiled ruefully.

“You know, Ben didn’t want that. He just wanted to get Rex fired, that’s what he said. He wanted it to stop. It was after that Durban tour that Ben decided that he needed to do something about it. I think it was either the first or second game they played, after returning from that tour, that Ben decided. Apparently, Rex was busy with a couple of boys at the back of the bus, where he was doing stupid things, grabbing them and their genitals and stuff, and Ben obviously heard what was going on. So when they all got off the bus, he saw that Rex was going to the common area with a few boys, and Ben knew what usually happened there and that he would be able to get footage, because a camera had been installed there. He wasn’t there when it actually happened; I’d actually fetched him that day, but in his mind he was busy dealing with it. He thought of a way to do it … to report the waterpolo caps missing. They weren’t actually missing – he knew where they were. So I think that was his thought process; he would report the caps missing and then the Bosserts would watch the footage of what was going on between Rex and the boys in that common area.”

And that’s exactly what happened.

Ben took the footage to the matron and her husband. He made a loud noise to draw their attention to the part where Rex was molesting a boy. And Rex was arrested. Parents of victim boys were called. But not all of them were on board to take any action.

“Were there repercussions afterwards?”

“We had numerous meetings with parents. The parents would sit and debate whether or not they should continue, because they were concerned about dragging their kids through this. My point of view was: actually, it’s quite simple, right now your kid might not be going through what he needs to go through, but I’d rather be in a position 10 years from now, having my son know that I’ve done everything I possibly could to fight for him, as opposed to my son realising that I didn’t do anything to fight for him, when I had the opportunity. So I tried desperately to get parents to back their kids on everything, but there were those parents who pulled out. Like the one kid who had filmed the footage – his parents said, ‘Don’t get involved.’ He’d actually put together a statement of stuff that had happened to him but he had to withdraw. So he was a victim, but they completely pulled him out. Then several other victims withdrew from the whole process.”

I wondered what the long-term impact of that would be. The Archivist read my mind.

“What could come back to bite them is when they start to resent their parents for not having acted. But the good thing about their recovery is that the success of the case will give them some sort of relief to know that it was wrong and that Rex has been punished. But the long and the short of it, though, is that the school, I feel, is responsible not for what he did, but for creating an environment where this behaviour was possible. And that’s what needs to change.”

“So already Ben was up against something he probably didn’t expect,” I said, “because you’d think parents would want the man who molested their kids to go to jail for a long time. I would. And for every child who testified, that could mean another year.”

The Archivist nodded.

“I believe Rex was arrested on 3 November and after that all the kids involved had to write a statement. There was a meeting at the school with the kids, parents, teachers and people on the committee. But the kids weren’t speaking, because they were mostly younger, mostly in Grade 8. They were denying that anything had happened. They said, ‘No, no, nothing happened, nothing.’ So Ben asked the adults, the parents and teachers to leave the room so he could encourage the kids to open up about what had happened to them.

“They all left the room but stood outside listening at the window. Ben started talking to the boys; he said, ‘Okay, this has happened to me,’ and he started explaining what had happened to him. And then he started pointing at certain boys and said, ‘I know this happened to you, I know this happened to you, I know this happened to you.’ And he started going through everybody and he said, ‘We have to do something about this.’ So he basically got all of them to start talking. Once they – I think, because they were mostly younger than him – once they saw this whole respect thing and that one of their older brothers was making a stand, they started to open up more about it.”

“That’s incredible,” I said. I meant it.

The Archivist sighed.

“Problem is that they got the boys into some kind of group therapy with a so-called counsellor or therapist, and she told them stuff that I don’t think was told to them the right way. The advice that she gave was quite simply that, ‘you deserve respect and if you don’t get it, you should fight for it,’ – which was stupid advice because it wasn’t delivered properly.

“Soon afterwards we started having a very hard time with Ben. Any sort of confrontation, any sort of disagreement, or when he felt that he was being treated badly, turned into ‘But why don’t you respect me?’ I said, ‘But, Ben, you need to respect us – we’re your parents, my boy.’ And he would say, ‘Ja, but you need to respect me.’

“Ben was a tough kid; he was strong, he was not scared – he could take you on physically. And I think his aggression and his spiral could have been prevented if [the therapist] wasn’t around. It certainly put Ben in a bad space. As a result, because his brotherhood was important to him, he started fighting for everyone because he felt that they couldn’t fight for themselves.

“In class once there were three boys who were told to stand because they were sitting in the wrong place, and the teacher basically told them to stand for the whole lesson. The boys were black students. Ben lost his shit and actually confronted the teacher and gave him a lecture; he said that the teacher was at fault because he had moved one of the desks in the class and that had made it unclear as to where they were meant to be sitting. The teacher reported Ben’s outburst to the grade head and later returned to the class. The lesson ended and Ben went to speak to the teacher; he was still adamant that the teacher was at fault. The teacher started pushing Ben and Ben told him not to touch him. The teacher pushed him again and Ben reacted instinctively and threw him onto a table … Obviously, that didn’t turn out well. The teacher reported him again. I had a meeting with Mr Derek Bradley, the principal at the time, and I said that Ben had been standing up for his brothers, and that I had felt that it may have been a race issue, and Ben had dealt with it. I said to the principal that I tried to explain to Ben that this could have been dealt with very differently, and that he should have taken his concerns to the principal or asked me to take this to the principal. Eventually that teacher apologised to Ben for his actions and Ben apologised to him, and there were no further repercussions. But it did form part of future encounters when that incident was brought up and people would say, ‘Ben’s got no respect.’ that kind of thing.”

Ben’s mother had come into the room during our conversation.

“We didn’t know everything that had happened to him at that point, so it was quite difficult because we had to get him to write down dates and details: when it started, which camps, trying to get everything in order. He sat with my husband for a long time writing that out. We didn’t know, for example, all of what had happened from Grade 8. And the more he told us, the more things we found out. And it just got worse and worse. His anger every weekend just got worse and worse. His friendships almost immediately changed; he started hanging out with the wrong boys – well, some of them anyway. When he exposed Rex, a lot of kids turned against him, many of whom were his peers, in the sense that they were the waterpolo players and rugby players; he lost friendships with a lot of the boys, because he had been the source of the information. So he became the scapegoat and the snitch. And they have this thing at Parktown: ‘You snitch, you die’ and ‘Snitches get stitches’.”

The Archivist joined in.

“The problem is that Ben’s fairly honest – even if it’s not immediately, he tells us the truth. He told us that he and a few other boys had been caught with drugs by Mariolette and that they’d begged her and Chris not to say anything. In the hostel, he and a couple of kids would get out the school, walk to Braamfontein and buy all kinds of drugs. They smoked a lot of weed; I think 11pm was lights out and they would all smoke in their room, open the window. And then Mariolette and Chris started realising what was going on – the victim kids were doing drugs. She took them to some sort of drug rehab in town, and they all had to have urine tests. Ben spat on his test. But the drugs just kept getting worse and worse.”

The Archivist’s wife was nodding.

“I really struggled. I had been in a clinic for three weeks because of the stress and when I came back, things were worse. Ben was drinking, taking drugs; he would go to clubs in the middle of town, but in like, really dodgy areas and his aggression was out of hand. Once his dad had to go and fetch him from the hostel because he was so drunk. He woke up here the next morning and had no idea how he had got here.”

Dad was nodding.

“The fact that he walked – because I’m not going to carry anybody – to the car and then up the stairs, got into bed, and he had no recollection of it … that was worrying.”

His wife continued.

“Ben punched doors, punched walls, screamed, like really screamed at us, I actually got scared.”

The Archivist added: “He’d also sit there, trying to get me to fight him. He would say, “Hit me, why don’t you hit me? Hit me.’ And I wouldn’t. I just wouldn’t.”

“Then he would say he loves fighting,” said Ben’s mom. “He absolutely loves it. And it all got too much for me. I felt responsible to a certain degree, so did my husband, because he’s at this school and we never knew what was going on. But then he tried to commit suicide and we had to focus on that.”

“What?” I was stunned.

The Archivist nodded his head.

“One night Ben tried to jump off a bridge near Ontdekkers and Gordon Road onto the highway … I don’t actually remember what led to it, but he got out of the car in frustration and I wasn’t going to say, ‘Well, sorry, get back in the car.’ His twin brother wanted to calm him down, but I said to him, ‘Just leave him. Let him walk home – he knows where he lives.’ It was bloody far away from there, but he knew where we lived. His brother insisted. He got out of the car and chased Ben while I stayed in the car, following as they went around corners, close enough, but keeping my distance so that Ben would stop running away. Eventually his twin called me and shouted, ‘Ben’s going to jump off the bridge!’ So I said, ‘Whatever you do, do not tell him not to jump.’ Ben is not scared – he has no fear, nothing – so if he said to Ben, ‘You’re not going to jump off that bridge,’ he would have jumped. I said, ‘Ask him what he wants to do … What does he want me to do?’ His twin said Ben wanted to go to his girlfriend’s house. I said, ‘Cool, I’ll drop him there.’ But that broke his brother – he was in tears. We decided then to send Ben to Beethoven Clinic near Hartbeespoort Dam, which is where my wife had been earlier in the year.”

“How did you manage,” I asked, “with your wife in hospital and your son on the absolute edge?”

“In a way, it was easier to manage because my wife was really affected by it. It was also about trying to manage her expectations and also trying to keep her in a good space, so having her there was a comfort in a sense that I felt like she was in a good space.”

I could understand that. It’s hard enough watching one person you love, suffer. Two must have been agony.

His wife interjected.

“So Ben went to Beethoven – and it was just before his matric exams, which was another concern. I spent hours, and I mean hours, trying to get Ben to write his matric at Hartbeespoort Hoërskool. I tried to get them firstly to go to Beethoven and just have somebody watch him. They agreed to that and then said no. We eventually got permission for him to write his exams at Hartbeespoort Hoërskool. But it was such a mission, and we were so worried about how we were going to get him there in the morning. Eventually my husband spoke to a teacher who fetched him and dropped him off. But, I mean, the days he would write, I would phone him in the morning, and ask him, ‘Are you okay?’ But he was so drugged up. I don’t know what they gave him there. He was on 14 different medications; he was taking 26 tablets a day. He sounded drunk from morning to night.”

In a way, he was.

“He was supposed to go for 21 days. So they did the drug rehab for 21 days, they did psych for another 21 days and he then stayed longer, so he was there for 52 days all in all. He wrote all of his exams there. He very nearly failed matric. When the results first came out, it looked as though Ben had failed Maths by one per cent and he failed, I think, Business by three per cent. So we asked for a remark on both subjects and fortunately he ended up passing his Maths. So that was matric – he passed … but only just.”

“How did he manage in court?”

Ben is the only boy who was required to testify as an adult. By the time the case came to trial, he was 18 so, even though he had been molested as a minor, he was now considered an adult and had to face his attacker in the courtroom. He wasn’t in a separate room like the others. He had to face Collan head-on.

“He coped very well,” The Archivist replied, “especially in the face of how the judge behaved with regards to the assault charges. Ben took the stand and he was interrogated by the defence attorney about how he had come to the total of 20 incidents of common assault. The defence asked him things like: ‘How do you know it was 20 times? How do you know this was happening? And do you have the exact dates? And what did he do? Weren’t you just fighting with each other?’

“Then the judge got involved and said, ‘But how do you get to 20?’ So Ben said, ‘It was more than 20 times.’ The judge then said, ‘Do you know the dates it took place?’ Ben said no. The judge continued, ‘But how do you know it was 20?’ Ben started trying to explain how he had come to that figure, but the judge said to him that he had to know the dates when the incidences happened. Then I interrupted the judge and said, ‘Just listen!’ He then said to me, ‘You keep quiet!’ So I said, ‘No, just give him a chance to explain. You asked him – now let him explain!’

“The judge then said he would have me removed from court, but after that, he didn’t give me any more shit. So he asked Ben again and Ben said that it had happened over a period of time and that it had been more than 20, but 20 would have been a safe estimate. He said he didn’t want to say it was 50 because that might have been too much. The judge then said, ‘You can’t do that.’ But when they questioned Rex, and they asked him if he disputed what Ben had said, Rex said, ‘No’. However, the judge then decided he’d take those 20 charges and make them into one. He did this with all the boys, made all their assaults just one. I felt this was ridiculous because Rex had not disputed the numbers. If the accused says, ‘I agree with you, there you go, tick, tick, tick, done,’ you don’t have to sit and play around with it any more.”

“What was the worst part of the case for you?” I asked.

Both the Archivist and his wife were at one with their answers: when the charges were read out in court.

Ben’s dad explained: “We weren’t prepared. The prosecution didn’t give us any indication of what was going to happen. We had assumed from what she had said and also what we understood from Ben, that she was going to say 20 or around 20 charges, just because there weren’t exact dates. But when she read out the charges, some of which involved Ben, we sat through 20 and then it went on to 30 and then 40 and 50 and eventually there were 144 counts of sexual assault to which Rex pleaded guilty and 57 of them were related to my son. Fifty-seven! And even then I thought to myself, well, if it’s 57, it’s probably more, because I know how he’d worked out the assault charges, which got condensed from 20 (definitely more) down to one.”

The Archivist gave his wife a weak smile.

“I don’t know why Rex pleaded guilty to so many. The judge initially looked as though he was siding with the defence, so when Rex pleaded guilty or acknowledged his actions for the 144 charges, I thought he was looking for favour with the judge in that if he acknowledged some wrong, then he wouldn’t be found guilty of the stuff that he hadn’t acknowledged. I basically thought it was a defence tactic … Then the judge said to him, ‘You doing this is essentially pleading guilty to all those charges.’ And Rex said he understood that.”

“How do you feel now,” I asked, “a year on from the verdict?”

The Archivist shrugged.

“My biggest concern is obviously Ben, but besides that, my problem is that it’s something that could have been prevented. At the moment there’s a lot of people who don’t seem to want to address that. I’m not involved at all in the school any more, but apparently nothing’s changed – it’s still carrying on. And, for me, that’s just stupid. It doesn’t make any sense at all. That’s what I battle with – the stupidity of it. But the long and the short of it, is that I feel the school is responsible, not just for what Rex did, but for creating an environment where it was possible. And that’s what needs to change. But apparently now it’s just exploding.

“Ben is now in Somalia working on a rig. He went down to Cape Town and did a rope access course and he’s also done water rescue and emergency stuff. He’s done a few courses. He loves it. He’s very physical and it’s hard work and it keeps him busy. He’s finally, only now, doing what he wants to do.”

I thanked the Archivist and his wife.

But before I left he asked, “Do you need documents or recordings? I have pretty much everything. I record everything, phone calls, a lot of what happened in court. The sentencing, even the report summaries.”

He was a gold mine. He still is.