My hunt for the man who raped me
Deon Wiggett was the target of a paedophile and has written a gripping book about tracking down the man charged with raping him. Claire Keeton interviewed the author to find out how he exposed the accused predator and his manipulations
Early in 2019, Deon Wiggett sat down in his loft with a pile of index cards to begin hunting paedophile accused Willem Breytenbach. By December, his efforts had culminated in the “bullfrog” being arrested and charged with seven counts of sexual assault/ indecent assault. Wiggett’s book about the investigation reads like a thriller with flashes of humour and the author at its racing heart. He says of My Only Story: The Hunt for a Serial Paedophile: “This is not a tragic rape story. It is a real detective story full of excitement. You can’t make this stuff up.”
His tenacity has made sure that Breytenbach, who allegedly raped him when he was a schoolboy of 17, will never harm boys again. Wiggett did what Grey College allegedly could have done 30 years ago: expose Breytenbach and stop him.
“I wanted to stop this man taking from other boys what he had taken from me before it was too late,” says Wiggett.
Sexual predators ‘rife’
By the time Wiggett wrote his book — after releasing his award-winning podcast series, My Only Story, in November — 50 boys and men had accused Breytenbach of rape and sexual assault, and all of them were still traumatised, he says.
Sexual predators are rife, Wiggett warns in his book, describing how to spot and catch a “common bullfrog like mine”.
His hunt for Breytenbach started in the summer of 2019, by trawling social media with neat index cards on his desk. The book follows the seasons.
Wiggett identified dozens of Breytenbach’s potential targets on his social-media sites, including Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. The bullfrog’s Facebook profile was of him grasping very young men in either arm, among many more young men exhibited in his clutches on his social-media pages.
“We meet a rotating cast that all have a certain look: smart, kind, slender and silky smooth. Young men who could look like boys if the room were dark and you took off your glasses,” Wiggett writes.
Once he tracked someone down with some certainty, he would send them a sensitive message and hope for a reply. This was always going to be hard.
He says: “I was looking for people who had had their trust broken, whose instincts were not to trust, and asking them to trust me.
“But I never really thought I would not be able to do it, even through afternoons of doubt and mornings of self-hate,” says Wiggett, who jokes like his father used to do. “I thought I would still be able to pull this off because it was that important to me. It was about how I can get my experience to mean something.
“I laugh to get a bit of distance,” says the author, whose irreverence and laugh are infectious.
The stack of index cards grew higher, littering the study he shares with his organised, and apparently tolerant, husband of 16 years. “It is not just [Breytenbach’s] targets I will have to find. It is also the other inhabitants of his scummy pond.”
Another step was to focus on the seven missing years in Breytenbach’s career on his LinkedIn profile, when the disgraced teacher did three short stints in boys’ schools, with hostels packed with teens.
Remembering that Breytenbach had boasted about teaching at Grey College, Wiggett visited the Bloemfontein school and its archives.
The most exciting moment of his investigation came on an autumn day, after meeting the first guy to share his story of abuse, named Ben in the book.
“I had been trying to open Fortress Grey [Grey College] for so long. After only a hunch and sense of profiling, he appeared; he called me, and I had a brother. It was no longer just me,” he says.
Wiggett also made an ally in a young man who worked for Breytenbach’s firm and had allegedly been sexually abused by him. No fewer than six times.
‘Grey gentleman’s code’
Breytenbach allegedly perpetuated his sexual offences at his own digital-media companies that he started in 2014 after leaving Media24: first Lumico and then Lightspeed Digital Media.
By the time the first episode of his podcast aired, on November 7 2019, Wiggett had enough evidence to go to the police with affidavits. On December 3, the man who had operated for decades with impunity was in handcuffs, accused of sexual offences. His youngest alleged victim was only 12.
Wiggett says vehemently: “Children are more likely to be raped than catch coronavirus in SA. We should be protecting them from paedophiles,”
But back in 1990, when a 15-year-old bravely sounded the alarm after fleeing a bullfrog’s sweaty grabbing of his genitals, the school put its reputation above the boy, Wiggett’s book reveals. Breytenbach departed stealthily to another boys’ school, where he could seemingly follow the same pattern, while the boy who broke the “Grey gentleman’s code”, by speaking out, was bullied relentlessly as a “moffie”.
Wiggett says: “There’s a narcissism in the way Grey College handles itself, and the way Donald Trump handles himself is not dissimilar, because there is this version of ‘we could never have done anything wrong’ and ‘if anything went wrong’ [it wasn’t our fault] and ‘if the facts don’t suit us, we will use alternative facts’.
“Grey College is the ultimate villain,” says Wiggett. “In essence the book is about the men who care about children, and the absence thereof ... It is about childhood sexual abuse.”
In the final interview of the book, Johan ‘Mr Grey’ Volsteed, who was deputy headmaster at the time Breytenbach abruptly left the school (15 August 1990), told Wiggett and News24 journalist Riaan Grobler that he did not know everything that happened at Grey and would not have kept quiet about alleged abuse.
“If I knew, I would definitely have not stayed quiet,” he said, in a reply marked by stuttered denials. Volsteed said the headmaster in 1990 has Alzheimers.
Asked by Grobler how he felt about the allegations against Breytenbach, he said: “I was disappointed. I was sad. It isn’t, it’s not the thing, what to me was really important at Grey, of the Grey Gentleman, and it was obviously not how you should treat a gentleman as a teacher.”
By the time Wiggett met Breytenbach, he had moved into the media. In 1995, the alleged rapist started at Die Burger, being promoted in his 19-year career at Media24 to executive positions. Under this banner he ran a school newspaper project, giving him a reason to hang out with smart yet naïve schoolboys.
Slowly he groomed Wiggett, the boy who longed to be a writer. By the time he took Wiggett into a deserted Saturday newsroom in 1997, the teen had no reason to be suspicious of his mentor.
But on the way back to Wiggett’s Stellenbosch home, Breytenbach took a detour past his own flat in Green Point where he allegedly raped the teen who was roughly half his weight, on an ugly blue rug.
Only a psychopath could “rape strings of people without being consumed by guilt”, Wiggett reflects. Unlike the serial killer, the child-raping psychopath is single-minded about getting his hands on children and his patterns of behaviour and trophies are clues to this netherworld, writes Wiggett.
“The trophies are there for his friends’ benefit, because paedophiles often hunt in packs ... And so a man like Willem may post pictures on social media in which he is seen to be enjoying the company of children.”
What Wiggett didn’t expect was to find stories of perpetrators whose assaults mirrored Breytenbach’s alleged crimes, only to find out the abuser was another man entirely.
Wiggett asks: “When was the last time a South African school said, unprompted by public scandal, ‘this has happened’?” By law it is a crime not to report the sexual abuse or rape of a child.
“Many people are not interested [in co-operating] and would rather put their heads in the sand. I’m an activist and I will f***ing make them,” says Wiggett.
“What has made me angry is the institutional hypocrisy ... which created a culture of enablement,” he says, recommending reforms to prevent abuse, for example, in the way teachers are vetted.
“This would not cost money. It is common sense!” In the interview he urges parents to better understand the patterns paedophiles follow and pay attention to the adults around their children, not least figures of authority.
“It is not going to help arming your child with pepper spray and phone appswhen it is likely the [paedophile] is in the house, or on the school outing, in the church, or schul or mosque.”
“I’m aware I sound like I’m hectoring parents when I have only cats,” he says. Yet he has given them a gift: this livewire author has worked out a model to help them identify serial child abusers.
Of his own parents, Wiggett speaks with devotion. “At its base, the book is a love letter to my father. He is in the last sentence and it is dedicated to him [‘For Dadda’]. My experience, at the hands of that other man, was the exact opposite of what my father taught me: love, compassion, empathy and idealism.”
His father’s death in November 2017 was the shock that triggered Wiggett’s memories of rape.
To find fellow survivors, likely also afflicted by amnesia, Wiggett sounded a siren through his podcasts — and they have been coming forward.
“I am confident in saying [Breytenbach] raped hundreds of boys,” says Wiggett, who in his book defines rape as any sexual assault.
“Child rape, and I suspect adult rape, takes away your ability to feel safe in your body and creates an anxiety which is not unfounded ... This reserve of fear lies in your body,” says Wiggett, encouraging his “brothers” to seek professional therapy
“Talking is where healing lies, or you remained governed by this story your entire life.”
I wanted to stop this man taking from other boys what he had taken from me, before it was too late
Shock that triggered memories
In his book and his podcast, which Wiggett copublished with News24, Wiggett has finally expunged his “only story”, making way for new ones in his life.
The first season of the My Only Story podcast was trending at No 1 in SA in November. News 24 editor Adriaan Basson, producer Alison Pope and News24 investigations editor Pieter du Toit were among the powerful allies Wiggett needed in making it.
In the third episode of four, on November 21, the sexual offender “Jimmy” is named as Willem Breytenbach. Wiggett could confidently do this because criminal charges had been laid and on December 3 Breytenbach had been arrested at his psychiatrist’s rooms in Hartenbos, near Mossel Bay.
A squat and isolated figure in the Cape regional court last month, his eyes wary above a black mask, Breytenbach declined to comment on the charges.
He will appear in court again on November 17 and is on bail, restricted to the Mossel Bay district.
At last Wiggett feels safe in Cape Town, knowing Breytenbach is no longer lurking below the mountain.
“It was my conviction I had to do something,” he says. “Now I am the writer I have always wanted to be. I have satisfied something important in helping people and it was deeply meaningful for me as an activist and an artist.”
Pre-orders are open for the book, which will be in stores from October 19.