Jissie, it was shocking - Joost
2009-11-01 22:46
Johannesburg - Former Springbok Joost van der Westhuizen, who confessed at the weekend that it was him filmed having sex and doing drugs in a controversial video, maintains that was the only time he has cheated on his wife, Amor Vittone.
“No, jirre. No, no, that was the only time. Jissie, it was shocking.”
Asked why he had condoms with him (if it was the first time), he said: “Probably because a guy doesn’t know how far it will go. I’m not going to go into detail. I get embarrassed.”
He vehemently denied rumours that he had a relationship with the former high jumper Charmaine Gayle.
Van der Westhuizen was speaking at Johannesburg’s Rosebank Hotel on Sunday, where he met the media to promote his biography, Joost: The Man in the Mirror, in which he admits it was him in the video filmed in 2006, getting oral sex from a stripper and snorting a drug - possibly Cat - with her.
When the video was made public in February, he strongly denied it was him.
Same circles
Van der Westhuizen would not say on Sunday how he met stripper Marilize van Emmenis, saying only that they “moved in the same circles”. He maintained that the occasion in the video was the first and only time they had sex.
It remains a mystery why Van Emmenis was so certain it would happen that she put a video camera in her handbag to film the event.
“Here I am now,” Van der Westhuizen said heatedly. “I’ve made lots of mistakes, I lied, I was wrong. I wasn’t a very good person, that’s in my book.”
Things between him and Vittone are “definitely not 100%”.
“Something like that doesn’t come right overnight. Naturally the trust is broken.”
He said although they are not talking at the moment about getting divorced, he realises it is a possibility.
“If Amor can’t forgive me and decides to leave, then I could lose her.”
'I cried a lot'
However, she is supporting him about the book, although it was not “lekker” for her to read it.
When the video came out, Vittone asked him if it was him. “I said ‘no’. I don’t think I convinced her.”
At the end of August, he confessed to her while she was cooking one night. “She was very quiet. I could see the pain. I could see it in her eyes. She cried a lot. I cried a lot. A lot, a lot.”
He denied he has only confessed now to help the book sales. “I think there are much easier ways to make money than to humble yourself in public,” he said.
And while he admits the whole affair has cost him financially, he maintains: “We are still living the same. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with my finances.”
Now he says he just wants to get on with his life and try to get his self-respect back.
“It will come with time. I first have to forgive myself.”