ALIENS AMONG US
Jason Rohde’s twisted reality
‘As a general rule,” the French physician Auguste Fabre wrote in 1883, “all women are hysterical. And every women carries with her the seeds of hysteria.” Listening to proceedings in the High Court in Cape Town this week, one got the sense that Fabre and murder accused Jason Rohde might find a lot of common ground over a beer.
Over the course of four days on the stand, Rohde and his defence team invoked the spectre of a deranged woman to explain why — in their version of events — Rohde’s wife, Susan, might have chosen to hang herself with the cord of a hair straightener from a hotel door after becoming aware of her husband’s affair with a colleague.
Furious. Aggressive. Volatile. Irrational. These were all adjectives used by Rohde to describe the woman who the state claims he strangled to death on the morning of July 24 2016.
Susan has been depicted as the living embodiment of the old chestnut about the fury of a scorned woman. Of Susan the loving mother, or Susan the faithful wife, or Susan the fun-loving friend — silence.
Deeply mysterious
Watching Rohde testify about his late wife under questioning from his lawyer was at times akin to witnessing a pair of amateur anthropologists speculating about a new tribe they had just blundered upon. They were two men grasping for words to describe the alien world of women.
Was that thing Susan used to carry called a “handbag”? An “evening bag”? Was it normal practice for women to hire clothes to attend a fancy event?
When defence lawyer Graham van der Spuy put the latter question to his client, Judge Gayaat Salie-Hlophe interjected.
“How would he know?” she asked. A reasonable question, given that the ways of womenfolk were clearly deeply mysterious to Rohde in general.
When Susan insisted that Rohde see a psychologist to explore the roots of his infidelity, Rohde found himself at such a loss to convey Susan’s cray-cray to the shrink that he insisted she meet Susan herself.
Rohde testified that he told his psychologist: “To understand what I’m going through . . . you need to meet Susan yourself.” The implication: when you do, you’ll finally get it. Psycho.
“Did she do any work?” asked Van der Spuy, implicitly dismissing the idea that raising three children for her CEO husband would constitute anything more than an amusing pastime.
Returned to university
Shockingly, it emerged that a woman previously painted as an appearance-obsessed nutbag had indeed once had interests beyond stalking her husband. In fact, she had returned to university in her 40s and completed her teaching degree, staying awake until 2am most nights to study.
Yet despite this evidence of steely inner drive, Rohde undercut it all by suggesting that his wife had remained something of a ditzy slacker.
“I think she got a bit surprised how hard you have to work as a teacher,” he remarked.
Another of Susan’s faults, it emerged from Rohde’s testimony, was that she was extraordinarily foul-mouthed. In almost every instance when Rohde reported direct speech from his late wife, he put an F-bomb in her mouth. Fair enough: he was recounting the events of the night before she died, when the two had fought over his affair and she may indeed have been painting the air blue with her words.
But it was noticeable how coy, how courteous, how gentlemanly Rohde’s own speech on the stand was by contrast.
When called upon to identify a certain area of Susan’s anatomy on a crime-scene photograph, such was Rohde’s delicacy that he could barely find the words.
“I’m pointing at Susan’s . . . um . . . um . . . bum area. Backside,” he eventually managed.
Asked to demonstrate the position of the cord around Susan’s neck on a female court orderly, Rohde protested: “I don’t want to hurt the lady.”
In Rohde’s chivalrous lexicon, his affair with a co-worker was “rekindled”.
When he snuck out to meet his mistress at the work event where Susan died, the two “met up briefly around the corner for 10 minutes and said hello to each other”. Under pressure earlier from his lawyer to acknowledge that he actually possessed genitals, Rohde would admit to a session of “intercourse” on a previous occasion.
Compare this gallant gent with the screeching fishwife Rohde invoked Susan to have been: swearing, drinking wine “directly from the bottle”, and “dancing provocatively” with his male colleagues at a work function.
In creating this poignant contrast, Rohde was aided by his lawyers, who drew the court’s attention to the fact that Susan called Rohde’s mistress “a whole number of deplorable swearwords”. They ignored the fact that in Rohde’s own WhatsApps to his wife before her death, he is shown effing and jeffing too.
Language: always such a fascinating thing to watch out for in a courtroom.
Note Rohde’s characterisation of the physical fight he had with his wife on the night of her death, described variously as an “argument”, a “disagreement”, and a “wrestling match”. The last term there conjures an image of two physical equals tussling. Susan weighed 51kg. Rohde has the stocky build of a former rugby player, although he would describe himself as “not a physically strong guy”.
You and I might refer, in normal people’s language, to a man hitting a woman.
Rohde, by contrast, “made contact with the tip of her nose”. His arm “made contact with her face”. His elbow “connected with her nose”. The phrasing suggests that
Rohde’s limbs act completely independently of his body or will.
Rohde has presented the court case against him as a cruel and heartless obstacle to his major goal: to be left alone to mourn his wife.
“I haven’t been able to even grieve Susan,” Rohde lamented. In his world — a world inhabited by countless other men, including Oscar Pistorius — Rohde has already been punished quite enough.
“The way I think of it, I already have a life sentence, to be honest with you,” Rohde told the court. It was one moment where Rohde did indeed seem to be telling the truth.
Furious. Aggressive. Volatile. Irrational. These were all adjectives used by Rohde to describe the woman who the state claims he strangled to death