Your sick acts humiliated me: Roebuck's alleged victim speaks out
BY: HEDLEY THOMAS, IN CAPE TOWN From: The Australian November 18, 2011 12:00AM
IT is a poignant but scathing message. Its sender was Itai Gondo, a 26-year-old IT student. The recipient was celebrated cricket commentator Peter Roebuck, who Gondo accused of a sexual assault in a Cape Town hotel room.
Days later, Roebuck would be dead, having jumped from the hotel room in the minutes after police came to charge him.
For Mr Gondo, who wanted his complaint to end in court, the ordeal continues. Confused that the man he alleges tried to rape him has been eulogised in glowing terms -- and furious that his own motives have been questioned -- he has spoken out to put his side of the story.
"It's funny how you ask me how I am doing as if what you did to me you find that justifiable?" Gondo wrote to Roebuck on Facebook before the 55-year-old committed suicide.
"So that was your intention all along? To lure me and pretend you were interested in forming some father-like relationship, yet your intention was to do the sick, pervert disgusting things you did to me?
"Well Mr Roebuck, you can stuff whatever form of support you blatantly faked to be interested in. You have greatly humiliated me and I feel very violated, disgusted with myself, your acts were of the purest, sickest kind."
In the strange world of Peter Roebuck, young black Zimbabwean men -- most of them orphans -- pandered to his whims, doted on him as their "beloved dad", and remained dependent on him for food, shelter and funding for their education.
A window into the relationships and neediness he fostered has been opened with scrutiny of dozens of other online messages he exchanged with some of the 16 men who shared his distinctive blue house, Sunrise, in Pietermaritzburg.
However, the allegations of sexual assault surprised the 16 men who live in the five-bedroom house.
Integrity Maziwisa, 24, told The Australian yesterday: "Peter did that? That's terrible, that's really bad. I think it gives different character of the man that we knew.
"Nobody is perfect. I'm just surprised."
Others told of how Roebuck, who they lovingly referred to as "dad", was incredibly generous and that their involvement with him was platonic.
But his online messages to his housemates revealed an unusual relationship.
"Raining all day in Cape Town! Am missing pool table. Oh, and sons as well, of course!" Roebuck wrote.
As fresh details emerge about Roebuck's alleged sexual assault of Mr Gondo in the days before his suicide, the ties he developed with the other men he called his "sons" are under renewed suspicion.
"This man took advantage of me," Gondo, speaking after Roebuck's death, told a South African journalist.
"He preyed on the fact that I was reaching out to him and trusted him and he did this to me. I'm a very spiritual person and felt that God had abandoned me. I was feeling suicidal. I was hiding out in my room. I couldn't eat and was having nightmares."
Mr Gondo, who says he is receiving trauma counselling, is hesitant to go into detail about the night he visited Roebuck in room 623 of the Newlands Southern Sun on Monday, November 7, the same room that Roebuck jumped from five days later when the sex crimes police arrived to arrest him. But he has told police that Roebuck instructed him to sit on his bed for much of their conversation, which allegedly ended when the former professional cricketer tried to fondle him.
Mr Gondo claims that, when he resisted, Roebuck said, "No, no, no, don't be afraid".
"Then he pushed me onto the bed and before I knew it he had taken off his shorts and he wasn't wearing underwear," he said. "I was in shock and told myself that this couldn't be happening. But I was so dumbstruck that I couldn't do anything. I tried to push him away but he was on top of me."
Mr Gondo claims his ringing mobile phone halted the alleged attack. "The driver said he was outside and Mr Roebuck got up and said, 'I'm so sorry Itai, I don't normally do this'. He kept apologising and all I wanted to do was get the hell out of that place and go to work and forget about it.
"He has ruined my life. Now I don't know what my future holds. I wish I had never met him and that my life was the way it used to be."
Before they first met, Roebuck sent a message to Mr Gondo saying, "ok my boy, bring stick in case I need to beat you!"
"I thought it was a joke," Mr Gondo said. "I never thought for one minute that he was being sexual."
After the alleged assault, Roebuck wrote: "Worried bout u, hope u ok."
Soon after the alleged sexual assault, Roebuck wrote on his Facebook page at 12.06am on November 9: "Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future."
Not long after, Mr Gondo provided police with the online messages Roebuck sent to him.
It is believed the Fairfax writer and ABC cricket commentator decided to commit suicide by hurling himself from the window of his Cape Town hotel room on November 12 after police had raised the potentially incriminating evidence and had come to charge him.
