Because there is no jury in South African courts, it’s legit for people; witnesses, court officials, press, whoever, to say what they like about the case. This means that it’s technically OK that Oscar Pistorius’s ex girlfriend – the one he was seeing before Reeva Steenkamp, who died after being shot four times through a bathroom door by the Blade Runner – tweeted about him.
But what she said wasn't without controversy. ‘Last lies you get to tell… You better make it worth your while,’ Samantha Taylor, 20, tweeted to her 3,500 followers while he was giving evidence. From The Sydney Morning Herald's live blog of the events, it seems he has just been talking about how he had reluctantly let her go to a 'sexiest man' event.
The tweet has since been deleted, but it's not exactly as if she hadn't made her view on Pistorius clear when she herself gave evidence in court yesterday. When asked why her and the paralympian athlete split up, she replied, tearfully: ‘Because he cheated on me with Reeva.’
She also explained that Oscar, who she dated when she was 17, had cheated on her with ‘a lady from New York called Anastassia’, reports The Mirror. The court hearing had to be stalled at various moments as Samantha broke down in tears as she gave evidence, and she told that Oscar had frequently lost his temper with her and her family: ‘He has screamed at me, my sister, my best friend, another friend and his best friend.’
The prosecutor explained to Samantha that part of Pistorius’s defence is that the screams heard by neighbours in the small hours of Valentine’s Day, 2013, were in fact his. They were – according to his lawyers – high-pitched and in reaction to discovering he had shot Reeva and not, in fact, the intruder he claims he thought was in the bathroom. Upon hearing this, Samantha smiled and replied: ‘That is not true – he sounds like a man.’
She also spoke about the time, she says, he shot a gun through a shot roof and laughed after being stopped by police, and how Oscar was frequently afraid of intruders in his home in gated community Silverwoods Estate in Pretoria: ‘There was one occasion when something hit the bathroom window and Oscar woke me up and asked If I heard it.'
‘He got up with his gun. There were probably one or two occasions when he woke me up to ask me if I heard something.’
And again, she spoke of a time when he potentially overreacted to a car that seemed to be following them: ‘We were driving down the road when he noticed that there was a car behind following him,’ she said. ‘When we arrived at his estate, he jumped out of the car with his gun and held it to their window – they then drove away.’ When asked by the prosecution if Oscar had done this to protect her, Samantha rolled her eyes and said, simply: ‘No.’
We recently interviewed the #Pistorians rooting for Oscar to be proven innocent. You can read about them here.
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Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.