Woman accuses her dad of rape 37 years later
She says her father raped her repeatedly when she was a little girl. Now, decades later, Chantelle hopes a guilty verdict against him will bring her the peace she so badly craves
SHE can’t remember when last she cried about her childhood. She desperately wishes she could, but the tears just won’t come – so for decades the pain has remained buried deep inside her. “The older I got, the harder it was to cry,” Chantelle Akers says.
But the trauma manifests itself in other ways. For instance, when she testified in the district court in Uitenhage earlier this year that she’d been abused and raped for years, she looked down and noticed her body was quivering.
“My hands were shaking so badly I had to cling to the witness stand,” says Chan- telle, who lives in Port Elizabeth.
The man she was testifying against is the person who was supposed to protect her against life’s onslaughts: her biological father. And at the age of 48, more than three decades after Chantelle’s reported abuse, she finally got the chance to confront Lionel Potgieter (70).
“I kept reminding myself the truth would set me free, no matter how hard the defence tried to discredit me,” she says. “It was my body. I’ll never forget it. I was a child who went to bed fearful, who hid myself away or ran away to friends’ homes when I heard his car in the driveway.”
Chantelle laid a charge against her father almost three years ago. She claims the abuse started when she was only 11 years old and went on for about six years.
“People resent me for taking such a sickly old man to court,” she says.
The case against her father has been postponed eight times since the first court date on 26 September 2016 due to his ill health. A reader’s letter in a local newspaper criticised Chantelle for waiting so long before laying charges. The heading was “Report rape immediately – not 25 years later.”
Chantelle responded with her own letter, explaining that many children are too scared to talk about what happened to them. She says throughout the years she was tempted to speak out but was worried that nothing would happen if
she told her story.
Even after she’d laid charges she often felt she’d spoken out to no avail as the case was repeatedly postponed – each time after the submission of medical certificates indicating he suffers from hypertension and stress.
But despite all the delays Chantelle is determined to see it through.
“I want him behind bars,” she says bluntly. “So that I can finally get closure.”
SHE alleges she was only 11 years old when the sexual abuse started and says she “didn’t know any better”. “For all those years I’d thought that’s what dads do to prepare their daughters for adulthood,” she says. We’re chatting to her poolside at a hotel in her home city.
Chantelle, a divorced mom of two boys, is an administrative clerk at a plastic-film producer.
Her dad used to threaten her, she says. He’d tell her if she said anything to her mom about what he was doing to her, she’d leave and then Chantelle and her younger siblings – a brother and a sister – would be left alone with him.
She says because she shared a bedroom with her sister, her dad would take her after hours to the cement factory where he was a manager. Her testimony is that’s where the abuse happened.
Lionel denied this in court and has entered a plea of not guilty.
“There’s no physical evidence – it’s my word against his,” Chantelle says.
One piece of evidence submitted in court is a 22-page letter her sister wrote when she was 15 years old. In it she claims their father started molesting her at age 11. She’d written it when she was in therapy for her anger issues and the psychologist had shown the letter to the girls’ mother.
“We hadn’t known about each other,” Chantelle says. “But when my mom found out about it she took us away. We moved elsewhere in Uitenhage and she divorced Lionel.”
IT WOULD be three years before Chantelle found out about the existence of the letter. She was almost 20 at the time and her mom had asked her for the umpteenth time why she had so much rage inside her. That’s when Chantelle told her mother she’d been raped as a child.
Her sister (now 46) recently had a nervous breakdown, which was why she decided against testifying in the case. Their mother (68) and brother (45), who’d also found out about the claims of abuse, testified about how it had affected their family through the years.
Chantelle has had no contact with her father since her parents’ divorce.
She was 33 when she heard her dad had remarried and had another daughter. The thought of a young child in his home weighed on her. When the girl was about to turn 11, Chantelle decided to call her father’s new wife and warn her to protect the little girl.
In February 2015 she got a phone call from her dad. His words upset her so much that a few months later she decided to lay charges against him for the abuse she says she’d suffered when she was a child.
She says people keep asking her why she waited so long to lay charges against the person she calls her abuser.
“I used to think it was something I had to live with, could live with. But my relationships, my self-image, my life after [the abuse] had been all about survival,” she explains.
She recalls an incident when she was 13. She thought about stealing her dad’s gun from the safe and shooting him with it, she says.
“I don’t know what stopped me at the time but I would’ve gone to a real jail instead of the psychological one I’d been living in almost all my life.”
Chantelle believes her relationship troubles later in life and her failed marriage of 13 years is the result of her inability to trust men.
As a teen she developed anorexia and now she’s able to look back and realise it was an attempt to take back control of her life and body – by controlling what she put in it. At age 12 she weighed only 41kg. Now she’s 1,78m tall and weighs a healthy 60kg.
“I like how I look now and I appreciate who I am. I feel empowered,” she says. “I’m not a victim, I’m a survivor.”
YOU contacted Lionel Potgieter but he declined to comment. Since our interview with Chantelle, he has appeared in court, testifying in camera. The verdict was due to be delivered on Friday 27 July.
‘I was a child who went to bed fearful, who hid myself or ran away’