When law professor Pierre de Vos' Twitter account retweeted a child pornography image two years ago, instead of reporting the tweet to the police, De Vos claimed he had been hacked and spent his time deleting other, older posts where he mocked people claiming their profiles had been hacked.
The director of public prosecutions has since, according to AfriForum, declined to prosecute. AfriForum now wants answers and wrote a strongly worded letter to the National Prosecuting Authority, claiming the decision was “premature, irrational and based on an embarrassing and deliberately incomplete investigation”.
On Tuesday, TimesLIVE broke the news of Gerrie Nel's letter to De Vos.
“Now I find out for the first time after two years that the NPA already made the obvious decision that there is no testimony that would justify a prosecution. I don't know what I said recently that angered AfriForum to the point where they are circulating false allegations,” De Vos said on Tuesday.
According to Nel and his team, the “irrational decision” was either based on incompetence or a deliberate failure to proficiently deal with the issues at hand because of the stature of the suspect.
“The haste to make a final decision supports the inference of incompetence or avoiding a prosecution against a prominent professor of law,” Nel wrote.
On September 10 2022 at about 5pm De Vos' account retweeted a video clip depicting an unknown minor boy engaged in explicit sexual conduct with an unknown adult male that was retweeted.
Eleven days later the complainant, who is now represented by AfriForum, reported serious allegations of contraventions of the Films and Publications Act 65 of 1996 — as amended — to the Humewood police station.
According to the letter, AfriForum is of the belief that De Vos, who holds the Claude Leon Foundation Chair in Constitutional Governance at the University of Cape Town, was the beneficiary of “either selective investigation or downright incompetence by the SAPS”.
“Based on the lack of attention the matter received, our client was left believing that she was dealing with either selective investigation or downright incompetence by the SAPS to proficiently investigate the alleged crime,” Nel wrote.
As a result, on November 2 2022, AfriForum submitted a service complaint to SAPS management.
“SAPS were seemingly satisfied that they had concluded investigations and consequently, our client's criminal complaint was presented to the prosecutor for her decision.
“Though De Vos later claimed his account had been hacked, AfriForum believes this defence to not hold water.
“Circumstantial evidence suggests that De Vos' Twitter account was only accessed from Cape Town before the retweet, not from abroad, refuting any claims of inexplicable access.”
When they looked into the matter, AfriForum found the docket to only contain the complainant's affidavit and an unsigned electronic affidavit by De Vos.
“It is apparent that the SAPS and the NPA accepted De Vos’s unsigned electronic affidavit as sufficient to not only register a case docket on his complaint but to serve as a version in the case wherein he was identified as a suspect. We are left astonished by the SAPS’ courtesy to accept an unsigned affidavit as sufficient to register a case docket. Our experience has demonstrated a reluctance by SAPS to even accept original signed affidavits as the so-called A1 statements,” AfriForum wrote to the NPA.
They claim De Vos, because of his stature in the legal world, was receiving unfair treatment.
“It remains inexplicable that the SAPS and NPA would accept a complaint statement from one docket as sufficient to serve as a warning statement in another. This creates the ineluctable inference that De Vos received special treatment.
“De Vos says he was alerted to the retweet at 17.31 on September 10 2022. He describes the two videos retweeted to his Twitter timeline as 'obviously of pornographic nature' and that he unshared the videos. He was also informed by a journalist that his account had been 'hacked' and he subsequently changed his password,” Nel wrote.
This AfriForum sees this as being problematic.
“No statements were obtained from the individuals De Vos referred to, nor is there any indication of where De Vos was on this particular day.”
They found the timeline of events to also be suspicious.
“Having not taken any formal steps to report the post, De Vos was informed by a journalist on September 17 2022 that AfriForum was considering filing a criminal complaint against him. It was only the following day that he informed his followers that he had been hacked.”
Yet De Vos still had not reported the incident to the police.
“As a law professor, he must have been aware that the videos depicted a sexually abused child or child pornography and what his obligations were in that regard.”
The following day De Vos attempted to lodge a complaint with Twitter that his account was compromised.
“Despite being confronted with child pornography on his timeline, he continued to refer to the video merely as 'pornographic.' De Vos reported the account identified as @Club_21_ to Twitter. Although his version is that he attempted to contact Twitter, there was no attempt to report the matter to the SAPS,” Nel wrote.
According to AfriForum, De Vos refers to a “technical expert” who advised him to download an archive of his Twitter account and search for a document that recorded the locations from which his account was logged into.
“He does not identify the 'expert,' nor is the expert approached to establish what it was De Vos sought advice on and what version he provided when seeking such advice.”
This is where AfriForum feels bad investigative work has compromised the case.
“Besides his version, there is no corroboration for his claim that mobile device applications were permitted to post material on his account. Neither does he indicate from where his account was logged into on the relevant date.”
De Vos requested that the matter be investigated, but AfriForum feels that by then he had already broken the law by not reporting.
“Notably, this was 18 days after De Vos detected that a crime had been committed. The criminal charges De Vos identified as requiring investigation relate exclusively to his contention that his Twitter account had been unlawfully accessed,” AfriForum wrote.
“De Vos does not offer access to his laptop, work computer, or iPhone, and the SAPS has not taken any steps to extract the necessary information from them.”
AfriForum claims this request to be a smokescreen.
“We submit that De Vos’ complaint is an afterthought designed to obfuscate his failure to report child pornography to SAPS. That is one of our client's complaints. An investigation of De Vos' enquiries and communication with the SAPS to investigate his case and identify a suspect could confirm that his filing of a criminal complaint and opening of a docket was an afterthought,” Nel wrote.
“The timeline of events reveal how a law professor spent almost three weeks reporting, removing and unsharing social media posts coupled with changing passwords and responding to the public, rather than immediately reporting child pornography to SAPS.”
AfriForum pointed out that De Vos, who in the past has made several Twitter posts when other people claimed to have been hacked, knows the risks of being hacked, and methods to prevent such occurrences. In the days after the incident he deleted those tweets.
“Having ridiculed other users for their foolishness in allowing their accounts to be hacked one would expect De Vos to have shielded himself from a similar fate. His conduct in removing his previous 'you should know better' tweets only strengthen our client’s suspicion,” AfriForum wrote.
The NPA could not comment immediately, but this will be added when received.
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