Durban - Explicit videos of a sexual nature were played in court yesterday as the State cross-examined a Verulam man accused of keeping his stepdaughter as a sex slave and grooming her to perform sexual acts for his pleasure and others’.
The man, who cannot be named to protect the identity of the stepdaughter, faces 56 counts relating to child pornography, sexual exploitation of a child, sexual grooming of a child, and rape. The girl was 11 at the time of his arrest in 2018.
The State alleges he raped his stepdaughter since her mother died in 2013, and had captured pornographic material of the girl on his phone, which he distributed to other men.
The man denies making sex videos and that a cellphone confiscated by the police at the time of his arrest, which contains pornographic images and sex videos, belonged to him. He said it belonged to his stepdaughter.
Under cross-examination by senior State advocate Cheryl Naidu, he first insisted he never took the sex videos of him and a woman he said was his girlfriend.
His girlfriend had insisted that they switch on the camera on the laptop so they could see themselves, but there was no conscious effort to film the sexual act, he said.
“There is a feature that allows you to turn the camera on to see the act on the screen, but without recording it.”
Naidu asked why he looks directly at the camera if the intention was not to film. “If the intention was not to film what you and your girlfriend were doing and you were using the laptop as a mirror to watch yourselves, why didn’t you use a mirror instead?” she asked.
He is also heard in the video saying: “Turn, I am filming this,” and later “Let’s make a small-time movie”.
Naidu put it to him that there is a difference between watching and making a movie.
“In that situation a person might say and do things that are not in your mind,” he said. “It does not mean that I had an entire production team there making a movie. This was a private moment. Playing this now does not make it right; it was not supposed to be shown in court. These were intimate moments between two people.”
Pressed for answers, he gave in and admitted that both he and his girlfriend had filmed themselves. “It was not just me who filmed the video, we both did, and I clearly remember deleting the video after watching it,” he said.
Naidu then asked how the videos, pictures and voice notes of a sexual nature ended up on his “stepdaughter’s phone”.
Naidu said his explanation that he had transferred the contents of his stepdaughter’s tablet hard drive to the phone he bought her in February, 2018, did not make sense, as evidence heard earlier in the trial suggested that the video was filmed on the phone, as were voice notes that were clearly meant for him, and not his stepdaughter.
The trial continues.
Daily News