How we compelled Africa’s largest listed company to retract a book, issue a public apology and pay a multi-million-rand settlement, without filing a single court document.

At a glance

Client: Barend du Plessis, former Minister of Finance

Opponent: Media24 and NB Publishers (Tafelberg), a Naspers company

Publication: The Lost Boys of Bird Island, published August 2018

Allegation: that the client was among three apartheid-era ministers who abused boys on Bird Island

Charges against the client: none, ever

Court papers filed: none

Duration: 19 months, from publication to settlement

Settlement: Multi-million-rand, announced by Media24 on 28 April 2020

Outcome: worldwide withdrawal in print and digital, an unconditional public apology, settlement paid

The matter

In August 2018, Media24 released The Lost Boys of Bird Island through NB Publishers’ Tafelberg imprint. The book accused three apartheid-era cabinet ministers of flying young boys to a rocky outcrop off Gqeberha, then Port Elizabeth, for horrific abuse. Two of the accused, Magnus Malan and John Wiley, were dead. The third was our client, Barend du Plessis, the former Minister of Finance.

On 13 August 2018, days after the book’s release, co-author Mark Minnie was found dead of a gunshot wound at a smallholding in Theescombe, outside Port Elizabeth. The public read it as a cover-up. The book’s unverified claims hardened into accepted fact. In November 2018 the police confirmed that forensic results showed the death to have been a suicide.

Mr Du Plessis had been charged with nothing. He was convicted in the court of public opinion regardless. He was in his seventies and in poor health. His opponent was Naspers, the largest listed company in Africa, with the resources to fund a protracted defence. A standard defamation action against Media24 would have run five years of interlocutory applications and procedural delay.

Our client did not have five years. He needed his reputation restored and the book off the shelves in his lifetime.

The allegations in the book were grave. Allegations of that kind must be investigated wherever they are made, which is precisely why they must be evidenced. Our client’s case was never that such abuse does not happen. It was that the specific claims made against him were unsupported by any evidence, and that the publisher had put them into the world without verifying them.

The strategy

Litigation is a tool, not a default. Firing a summons at a media empire invites years of procedural trench warfare. We bypassed the legal department entirely.

First, we dismantled the facts. Drawing extensively on independent investigative work, including that of the journalist Jacques Pauw, we showed the foundation of the book to have no factual basis. There were no military helicopter logs. The island had no fuel cache to support the flights. Witnesses changed their stories. Mr Du Plessis’s official diaries placed him in other provinces, and on some dates other continents, when the book had him on the island. The widely publicised “secret dossier” did not exist.

We did not bury those facts in a court filing. Johan Victor drafted an open letter directly to the Naspers chairman, Koos Bekker.

The letter did not threaten a lawsuit in the abstract. It set out the fabricated evidence point by point and put a direct question about the corporate ethics of Africa’s largest company.

“Today Naspers is the largest listed company in Africa… What has happened to its core values and ethics?”

That shifted the terrain. Naspers was no longer a publisher being asked by a lawyer to defend a book in a courtroom. Its leadership was being asked, in public, whether it stood behind defamation and fabricated evidence.

Read the letter [PDF]

The outcome

The publisher did not concede once. It conceded three times, each concession further than the last, and we filed no court document at any stage.

On 3 March 2020, NB Publishers accepted that the contested statements could not be verified independently, apologised to Mr Du Plessis, and withdrew unsold copies and the e-book from circulation.

On 17 April 2020, the publisher went further. It withdrew both the English and Afrikaans editions in all formats, with no reprint, and apologised for the emotional harm caused to the Malan and Wiley families.

On 28 April 2020, Media24’s chief executive, Ishmet Davidson, issued an unreserved apology on behalf of the company, stated that the allegations were unfounded, and announced a multi-million-rand settlement to Mr Du Plessis.

The total withdrawal of a published book is exceptionally rare in media law. A complete retraction, an unconditional public apology and a settlement, all secured without setting foot in a courtroom, is rarer still. We achieved in months what the conventional route would have failed to deliver in a decade.

What the matter establishes. Reputational harm by a publisher is not only answerable in court, and for a client without five years to spare it should not have to be. Where the evidentiary foundation of a publication can be dismantled factually, and the question of whether to stand behind it can be put to the people accountable for the corporate decision, a publisher’s own governance becomes the fastest route to a remedy. This is not a substitute for litigation. It is a decision about which instrument reaches the outcome the client needs, in the time the client has.

Chronology

The documents

Open letter to Koos Bekker, chairman of Naspers. Johan Victor Attorneys & Litigators. The letter that opened the matter. It sets out, point by point, the absence of any evidentiary foundation for the allegations against Mr Du Plessis, and puts the publication to Naspers as a question of corporate ethics rather than of litigation.

Statements of NB Publishers and Media24, 3 March, 17 April and 28 April 2020. The publisher’s own words, in sequence: the acknowledgement that the contested statements could not be independently verified, the total withdrawal of both editions, and Media24’s unreserved apology https://www.news24.com/southafrica/news/media24-to-pay-barend-du-plessis-r3m-settlement-over-claims-in-the-lost-boys-of-bird-island-20200428 and multi-million-rand settlement.

Public record and citations

The outcome of this matter is verifiable independently of anything said on this page. The publisher’s admissions and the contemporaneous reporting are set out below.

Related reading

• Holding investigators to account: the De Waal defamation case
• Trial by social media: High Court clears Cape Town attorney convicted in a Facebook comment thread

Facing a publication? Defamation matters are decided by how quickly the evidentiary foundation of the publication is tested. Contact Johan Victor Attorneys & Litigators on 021 422 0369 or info@jvalaw.co.za