Pauw faces threat to best-seller
FORMER public service and administration minister Geraldine Fraser-moleketi, her mother and sisters are taking on journalist and author Jacques Pauw and Tafelberg Publishers.
The Saturday Star’s sister newspaper, the Weekend Argus, is in possession of two legal letters of demand requesting Pauw and Tafelberg Publishers to retract certain paragraphs from his best-selling book, The President’s Keepers, about the family, which the women claim are untruthful and defamatory.
Pauw said he was in the Czech Republic and had not seen the letter. “But it seems a bit silly to demand a retraction after 200 000 books have been sold,” he stated.
Tafelberg Publishers did not respond to requests for comment. The attorneys, Brink and Thomas, refused to comment.
The first letter of demand cites Mrs Cynthia F Fraser as the client and the second cites her daughters, Ms Erica Fraser, Ms Deborah Kay Fraser and Mrs Geraldine Fraser-moleketi as clients.
The legal notices, dated June 21, demand that Pauw and Tafelberg Publishers “remedy this egregious breach of our clients’ rights to their dignity and reputhat tation and you do so by retracting untruths and false statements and causretraction ing such a to be published in a prominent place in an issue of the Sunand day Times City Press no later than 30 days from the date of this letter”.
The letters further warn that failure on the part of Pauw and the publishers to deliver written confirmation of receipt of the letters of demand, within five days and to comply with the demand of the Fraser women, the clients will approach the high court for a remedy.
According to the letter, Pauw writes on page 35 of his book that “Ms C F Fraser, was also a PAN agent. Both Barry Fraser and Ms Fraser were board members of a community-based organisation that dealt with conflict resolution at schools. PAN contributed R10 million towards the organisation although it had nothing to do with national security.”
“Mrs Cynthia Fraser is a retired senior citizen with a long and distinguished history in the Struggle against apartheid. At no stage of her life was she a PAN (Principal Agent Network) agent. This statement is accordingly patently false.”
According to the the first letter, both Mrs Cynthia Fraser and Barry Frazer deny being board members of any community-based organisation which received R10m. “A cursory look at the financial statements of both the community-based organisations of which Mrs Fraser was a board member would have served to establish the falsity of this statement,” states the letter.
In the second letter, the daughters, Ms Erica Fraser, Ms Deborah Kay Fraser and Mrs Geraldine Fraser-moleketi have taken offence to an extract on page 56. “One of his first appointments was that of his right-hand man at PAN and his brother-in-law, Graham Engel, as his second in command… married to Fraser’s sister, he is in the all-powerful position as the national co-ordinator of all intelligence.”
The letter states “the claim that a Fraser sister was married to an all-powerful intelligence officer Graham Engel is simply not true.”