Matthew Booth cheating saga: a fairy tale poisoned by a cheesecake

They met in 2000 after the Olympics. 

He was 20 and fresh from Cape Town to the big city. 

He was immediately floored by her athletic beauty, even though she was in her pyjamas the first time they met, babysitting the child of one of his teammates. 

She wasn't a typical model, all full of herself. Nor was she a football fan. Good. He wanted a partner, not a groupie.

On their first date at a Portuguese restaurant  in Johannesburg they talked so much they eventually left when the staff were sweeping the floor under their table. 

Theirs was a fairy tale marriage, universally admired and celebrated. A union of soul mates. Each other’s best friends. 

They loved spending time together,  going to the movies, playing rounds of golf and Pacman at the local arcade.

She once had a number plate that read PRENUP. Nothing sinister, a tribute to her sense of humour, she joked. 

“We are in it for the long haul,” she once told Garth Cliff.  She imagined her 2m husband and herself one day walking around with walking sticks.

“I think a dialogue; communication is always a good thing,” he said during one of the numerous interviews where they shared their secret recipe for romance. 

“Never going to bed angry with one another,”  he said. “It’s something that we haven’t always got right all the time, but that’s something that we always talk about, that we have to do.”

But this week the fairy castle came crashing down in excruciating detail.

On Monday former beauty queen Sonia Booth accused her soccer legend hubby Matthew of cheating on her, revealing what she claimed were sordid, shameless details of his adulterous affair. 

The 2001 Miss SA second runner-up exposed the soccer star’s alleged infidelity in a series of Instagram posts, sharing receipts from Valentine’s Day 2022 when she claims the affair began.

Sonia revealed that she hired a private investigator to corroborate her initial suspicions.  The PI followed Matthew and the woman accused of being his mistress on escapades to Polokwane, Pietermaritzburg and Umhlanga.

He had baked his lover a cheesecake in the dead of  night, she fumed. 

She had discovered one of her Tupperwares  at the other woman’s  house.  

Cheesecake became Twitterspeak for adultery; recipes were exchanged on the internet. 

Tupperware trended on social media, now the new slang for stealing another woman’s husband. 

The feud escalated. 

He denied the accusations and threatened to sue her for defamation. 

She accused him of following her and breaking into her car. 

Sonia shared a live video on her Instagram timeline, alleging that her husband followed her to the gym using the car tracker and searched her car while she was inside. She claimed the video was evidence should anything happened to her. 

But for the spectators it was a circus of hilarity, glee, memes  ...   collective Schadenfreude at the pain of celebrities who seemed to have it all.

At the core of the scandal, their two boys. 

When two bulls battle it out, it is the grass that suffers, so goes an old adage.

Sonia was a  businesswoman, an author, a broadcaster. 

Born in Pimville, she spent most of her high school years in Orange Farm, but soon the world was her oyster.

He had grown up in Cape Town and played soccer since the age of five. 

Sonia and Matthew had gone through so much during their time together. 

In the beginning theirs was often a long-distance relationship. 

Matthew had attempted to go to more established leagues, England or Spain, but for various reasons this hadn’t worked out — then an opportunity opened up in Russia. 

In 2002, he went to Rostov. Sonia was just finishing her degree and was pregnant.

He spent the first three months by himself. As soon as she finished, she went to stay with him.

“You can imagine a woman from Soweto staying in Russia, in the south of Russia, and she used to stick out like a sore thumb.

“In fact, even myself, I would walk around, and I would have this beard and wear a certain design of clothes and people would instantly recognise me as being foreign’,’  he told a  journalist. Russia was still insular.

Together they embraced this foreign life.  She made friends,  attempted to learn the language.

By the time they left in 2008 he was fluent in Russian.

The first time Matthew held his eldest son, he thought he was sick because he was so thin and fragile. 

“You know, it’s funny because on television you see these kids on the adverts, all chubby and thickset and well-built.”

He missed the birth because he was in Russia and Nathan came two weeks early. “So, when he arrived at the airport, I looked inside the car chair and I just couldn’t believe how small he was.”

At 13-years-old he was almost as tall as his dad.

In one of her three books, Sonia detailed her terrifying ordeal in ICU after being diagnosed with fibroids. The pain was so excruciating that she wanted to die. Being a mother gave her the will to survive, and the support she received from Matthew helped her pull through. It made their love even stronger . 

We might never know where the relationship went wrong but we know that their children will be the ones who suffer the most.

Lisa Vetten, a GBV researcher attached to the University of Johannesburg, says a breakdown in a relationship can be hard for children as they often become a centre of conflict.

“They might have to choose between their parents and the parents' anger might filter down to them. A situation like this needs to be handled sensitively.

“When people fall apart in public, in general we shouldn’t be helping them to further break down. A bit of compassion is important. Because a spat might backfire and create a lot more difficulty,” says Vetten.

Gauteng based psychologist Nosipho Masitha says cheating can be categorised as a form of abuse in some cases as it involves neglect.

“When people cheat they barely sit back and think to do it in a sound manner and be reasonable.”

Sonia claimed Matthew had been dipping into their son’s education fund to impress the other woman and his peers and had been using her vehicle for their liaisons. 

She arranged a sit-down with the woman’s husband. The heartbroken husband allegedly corroborated her findings over coffee, which she documented with pictures and recordings.

Vetten said it was often difficult for people to dissolve their marriages amicably due to emotional attachments and asset-splitting woes.

“Assets can be messy. They could be worried about who will take the house, the cars, and just the fear of starting afresh — divorce can be tedious. It’s a stressful situation where one may want to end the relationship and the other party does not. It can depend on the level of anger, especially if the other partner has moved on,” she said.

Next week South Africans will move on to the next scandal. But when the two boys Google their parents’ names in future, the details of their split will be out there for all to see.