A former vice-principal of Hoërskool Waterkloof became extremely emotional on Thursday as he told the Pretoria High Court how three pupils manipulated a picture of two naked gay men - sitting snug together on a couch while masturbating - by substituting their faces with those of the school's principal and vice-principal.
A colour print-out of the doctored picture bearing the faces of Dr Louis Dey and Dr Christoff Becker was put up on the school's notice board for everybody to see. The private parts of the men on the original picture were obscured with the school's emblem.
On Thursday Dey said it was humiliating but, to make matters worse, he later heard that the picture was also sent via cellphone to hundreds of pupils at the school and had "spread through the school like wildfire".
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A tearful Dey told Judge Ben du Plessis that he was so humiliated and belittled by this that he could not bear facing the pupils.
'I wanted to crawl into a hole' "I honestly felt like just sitting in my office and not coming out. I wanted to crawl into a hole."
He said every time he passed pupils on the school's playground or in the corridors and heard them giggle he would imagine it was because of the image they had in their heads of him and the headmaster masturbating.
Things eventually became too much for Dey and, after devoting himself to the school for more than 12 years, he eventually left at the end of 2007. He is now headmaster of a new school near Silverlakes.
Dey is claiming R600 000 in damages from the three pupils for defamation. One of the pupils is under 18, still in school and cannot be identified. The other two, who were 17 in 2006 when the incident occurred, are Christian Gildenhuys and Reinhard Janse van Rensburg.
All three boys acknowledged that they were behind the offending picture but said they thought the manipulated picture was "a huge joke".
'I was humiliated'
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