Johannesburg – When eight young models headed to a shoot on the morning of July 28, they were excited. The coronavirus pandemic had kept them out of work for a long time and they had been chosen to act in a music video.
The pay was minimal, they practically did it for free, but it wasn’t the money that excited them, but the opportunity. Maybe this would be the chance they were waiting for, when their careers would finally take off.
But there were no lucky breaks. Instead, it would be the worst day of their lives.
South Africa is a country at war with its women. It has one of the highest rates of sexual violence in the world and on that July day eight more names were added to its long list of survivors.
I met four of the young women who bravely shared their terrible story. They were accompanied by their mothers, who fought back tears as they listened to their daughters recount the horrific ordeal. CBS News has changed their names at their request to protect their identities.
The 22-person film crew was filming in an abandoned mine dump in Krugersdorp, near Johannesburg. As they were finishing the final scene, a gang of armed men burst onto the set and forced everyone to lie on the floor, sisters Bontle and Amanda said. The sisters would often finish each other’s sentences when one became too distressed to speak.
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“Some of us tried to run,” Bontle, 19, said. “But you know, we couldn’t, because they were shooting.”
“And there were men scattered everywhere,” interrupted her older sister Amanda. “They were expanding, maybe 15 or more.”
The women were surrounded by the attackers, who wore balaclava and forced them to lie face down in a deep pit. The male crew were stripped and held captive in a separate area.
First they robbed everyone of their phones and cash. Then came the violations. The women told CBS News that the attackers took turns with the eight women, who were tortured and brutalized for more than three hours before their captors fled.
“We were crying, you know, some of the girls. They were also screaming as they were being raped,” Bontle said.
“And in front of our eyes,” Amanda continued, “the other one, she was raped in front of us.”
The men threatened to shoot the women if she refused to cooperate.
“Telling me he’s going to kill me and all that stuff if I don’t listen to him,” Amanda explained. “And then I say, let me do what he says, because I don’t have a choice. And then he took me somewhere, like… next to the hole.”
At that point she burst into tears, unable to continue, her eyes wide in horror and struggling for words as she remembered how they tried to bury her alive.
Her sister Bontle was dragged to another area and raped twice. When a third man approached her, she thought she was going to die.
“I saw that he was actually going to rape me. And then I said, ‘I’m bleeding, I can’t’. I pretended I’m having a miscarriage.”
They took her back to the pit and then left her alone.
When the women were attacked, their friend Zintle managed to climb a tree and hide for about an hour. When she couldn’t hear anything anymore, she jumped down, only to be grabbed by one of the men and raped.
Then there was Anita, 26, the leader of the group and the one who had recruited her friends to shoot the video. Now she lives with terrible guilt, blaming herself for what happened. She begged the men to take her instead of her friends.
“I was just begging them not to touch any of the women,” he said. “If it has to be me, let it be me.”
But no one was spared and she too was gang-raped several times.
For Anita, it reopened old wounds. She told CBS News that she was raped as a teenager. And now this.
“But now, when it happens again, it’s like, why am I even in this world? Am I made or put in this world to be a rape victim? And every time I would try to do something good, I just have to arrive. again and begin…” She couldn’t continue. Her loud sobs filled the room.
When their attackers finally fled the scene, the battered and broken women went straight to the police station to report the crimes. Then they were violated a second time: their names and address were leaked on social media. Anita was devastated.
“I just thought, why didn’t I just die? Because I mean, what’s the point? You’re killing me again. Now, you’ve already killed me and taken me, and taken like my innocence, my purity . And now you just want to kill me physically, where I can’t even go outside and take a breather without people in my neighborhood seeing me, seeing my frustration, seeing that I’m not well.”
August is traditionally the month in which this country commemorates the heroic struggle of South African women against apartheid. But there hasn’t been much to celebrate lately. It has become a month of mourning. A woman is raped almost every 12 minutes in the country, and these are only the ones reported to the authorities.
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But this latest gang rape has brought down a country worn down by gender-based violence. It has sparked outrage and protests against what many see as ineffective, even misguided policing.
It has been alleged that the suspects in the attack did not speak a South African language. Police have arrested more than 120 men, all of whom are in the country illegally. None have been charged with rape. Authorities say they will test his DNA to see if there is a match with evidence collected from the victims.
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Lisa Vetton, a researcher at the University of Johannesburg’s Gender Violence and Urban Transformation project, believes the criminal justice system is failing women.
“You can see in the last decade how the number of violations that are being prosecuted, that are being prosecuted, has gone down,” he told CBS News. “If you’re looking at this, and this goes hand-in-hand with worsening treatment by your police, there’s also no incentive to report… Why go through this when there’s none guarantee you are? You’re not even going to see justice?”
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Since the attack, the young women told CBS News they have been living in fear. Anita said she wakes up every night feeling like “someone grabbed my arm and I smelled one of the guys who was raping me.”
They say they jump whenever they hear gunshots and worry that now their names are known, their attackers will seek retaliation.
“We just don’t know what to do anymore, because we were scared for our lives, not just our lives, but our families’ lives, because now we’re all not safe,” Bontle said.
For them, like thousands of women in South Africa, long after the physical damage has healed, the emotional scars remain.
