Eighteen days before she was shot four times through a bathroom door, 29-year-old law graduate Reeva Steenkamp told her boyfriend Oscar Pistorius that she was “scared of [him] sometimes” in one of 35,654 pages’ worth of WhatsApp messages extracted from Steenkamp’s phone and read aloud in the South African High Court in Pretoria overnight, on the fourteenth day of the high profile, high cost murder trial.
Pistorius, pictured above, wept as Steenkamp’s words were read aloud for the first time to a courtroom where her mother and friends were present to hear in unnerving precision the details of their tempestuous “double standard” relationship:
“You have picked on me excessively… I do everything to make you happy and you do everything to throw tantrums. I’m scared of you sometimes and how you snap at me and of how you will react to me. You make me happy 90% of the time and I think we are amazing together… but I am not some other bitch trying to kill your vibe… I’m the girl who fell in love with you but I’m also the girl who gets side-stepped when you are in a shit mood. I get snapped at and told my accent and voices are annoying.”
“We are living in a double standard relationship. Every five seconds I hear about how you dated another chick. You really have dated a lot of people yet you get upset if I mention one funny story with a long-term boyfriend.”
Police “mobile phone expert” Capt. Francis Moller told the court that of the 1,000 exchanges extracted from Steenkamp’s phone, “Ninety percent [of all the messages] were normal and loving conversations.”
The remaining 10% of the messages read aloud by the prosecutors paint a portrait of Pistorius by Steenkamp as jealous (“I was not flirting with anyone today. I feel sick that you suggested it“) and easily upset (“I am trying my best to make you happy and I feel as though you sometimes never are, no matter the effort I put in. I can’t be attacked by outsiders for dating you and be attacked by you, the one person I deserve protection from“).
“I just want to love and be loved. Be happy and make someone SO happy,” wrote Steenkamp in a message about Pistorius losing it at her over chewing gum and talking in an accent. “Maybe we can’t do that for each other. Cos right now I know u aren’t happy and I am certainly very unhappy and sad.“
The case has been adjourned and will resume tomorrow.
via The Guardian, AP
Photo: AFP via Getty
