Sex claim driver 'rewarded'

2003-06-17 17:57

Cape Town - A chauffeur who made sex pest claims against Freda Adams was rewarded by being made bodyguard to Democratic Party leader Tony Leon, the Cape High Court heard on Tuesday.

Adams, a former Western Cape MEC, is suing former premiers Peter Marais and Gerald Morkel for defamation, and Marais for sexual harassment.

She told Judge Anton Veldhuizen that when she took up her post as MEC, she informed her allocated chauffeur-cum-bodyguard, Gerard Schultz, that she would make very little use of him, and that he would be a simple messenger between offices.

He objected, because this meant he would earn less money and in September she received a letter saying he was taking her to court for sexual harassment.

She said Schultz had, however, confessed to two of his superiors in the police, Captain Christian Carelse and Inspector George Solomons, that it was never his idea to take the matter to court, or to go to the media with it.

Well rewarded

Schultz was "very well rewarded" for lending his name to the affair, because a few days after media reports on the claim he became personal bodyguard to Leon on his public appearances in the Western Cape during that year's local government elections.

He had earned "thousands of rands" in extra cash for these duties, she said.

Though Schultz's harassment case was theoretically still lodged with the court, despite its particulars of claim having been set aside by judicial order, she (Adams) was "not losing any sleep over it".

When Morkel's advocate Alwyn Moller sought to question her on details of the chauffeur's claims, Adams's counsel Fiona Gordon-Turner objected that this was irrelevant.

Moller said he was seeking to show that her character was not as "snow white and untouchable" as she portrayed, but Veldhuizen ruled that because the claims had not been dealt with in papers filed before the hearing started, they could not be canvassed now.

- SAPA