Helping other women by telling her story
FORMER TV and radio personality Tracy Going held the audience enrapt at her book launch in Port Alfred last Saturday, as she related the horrifying tale of the abuse she received from a man she was in a relationship with.
Going’s book, Brutal Legacy, is about this relationship and its aftermath, and was a personal catharsis for her to deal with the demons.
She was invited to launch her book at The Bean and Olive, as part of their Never To Forget Journey series. The restaurant was jam-packed with locals, mostly women but a few men too.
“We read other people’s stories to know we’re not alone,” Going began.
She said the latest statistics were that three women are killed every day in South Africa, and comparatively, in a country like Italy, a woman is killed every three days.
“Do you know what it takes to kill a person with your bare hands? How much brute force it takes?”
She said Brutal Legacy was not a redemptive story, despite how much she put into it.
She said her relationship of abuse was mercifully short, at only five months. An early warning sign was overhearing how her abuser spoke to his ex-girlfriend over the phone. “He said to her, ‘Leave me alone you bitch!’ I said to him afterward, ‘I hope you’ll never speak to me like that.’ He said, ‘You won’t deserve it.’ And I thought, yes I wouldn’t,” Going said.
But it wasn’t long after that, that she had her first bruises. She was choked, dragged around the house by her hair and held hostage for more than nine hours. She got a restraining order against her abuser, whom she identified only as Richard (he is not named in her book). “Even then, he showed up at my house and beat me up.”
A court case followed, but Going said in retrospect, “He was never going to be found guilty.”
Richard fled the country, but he returned and was prosecuted.
“He was found guilty because he pleaded guilty. The magistrate said, ‘I believe this man deserves another chance.’ He said the man was a victim of provocation,” Going said, to gasps of incredulity.
She said she learned she was not the first woman he had beaten up.
She said she wanted to take readers on a journey with her, back to her childhood growing up in a rural home with an alcoholic father given to unpredictable fits of rage. She recalls hearing her mother’s blood-curdling screams. Then on to her own story of abuse. “I wanted to explain the horror in the courtroom, of spending three days in the stand in court and he [Richard] was only in the stand for three hours – all it took to tell his story. I was accused of exaggerating, because I blew up photos of my face to A4 size,” Going said.
“I also wrote the book for my children and for myself, for my own healing,” she said.
“It’s taken me 18 years to write this story. I could have written it years ago, but nobody wants to read anger and bitterness. I needed the space to write more objectively and write it as creative non-fiction.”
She said what really prompted her to write was when Oscar Pistorius murdered Reeva Steenkamp, and a psychologist told her she could never be objective about Pistorius because of her own experience.
“When I thought about Reeva and her dying moments, I realised how lucky I was. It wasn’t an easy decision. Did I really want people to know my story? It was news when it happened but it was 18 years ago and people had forgotten.”
She said she had chosen not to name her abuser in the book because “he didn’t deserve to be named”.