'It was shocking' — Lady Zamar gets candid about social media backlash

Songstress Lady Zamar says she blamed herself for what happened to her back in 2017.

It's been nearly three years since Lady Zamar laid sexual assault charges against her ex-boyfriend, musician Sjava. 

In episode one of Showmax's new show called Unfollowed, Lady Zamar had a candid conversation about why she opened up about the alleged rape and the social media backlash she faced afterwards. 

The singer said that it took a friend directly telling her that what she’d been through was rape, for her to start freeing herself.

“Because I always felt like it was my fault, I never put the words ‘sexual assault’ to it,” she says. “A friend of mine said, ‘When somebody does this without your consent, it is rape.’ But I was like, ‘There's no way! I’m Lady Zamar. Who the hell is going to do that to me?’ It took a very long time for me to get to the point where I was able to say it with my mouth, process it with my mind.”

She shared she finally took the decision to open up because she felt she was in danger.

“My team had said, ‘Listen, people will not believe you because of the time,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, I understand that. But this is not about whether people believe me or not.’ It was a matter of my safety ... I knew that as long as I kept his secret, I would be at his mercy.”

The National Prosecuting Authority declined to prosecute, citing insufficient evidence. As of August 2023, the backlash continues online.

Each episode of Unfollowed will focus on a different South African celebrity, including Jub Jub, Mihlali, Nonhle Thema, Ntsiki Mazwai, Phat Joe, Tol Ass Mo and Zoe Mthiyane.

Since then, Lady Zamar has been cyberbullied. She recently responded to the backlash, writing a lengthy post asking how she had become an easy target for attacks on the timeline.

“Why do you guys hate me so much? You guys don’t know me or my full story and you don’t know why I’ve kept quiet for such a long time. You guys have no idea how you break a person.

“I can’t move on from your assumptions of what happened to me. You’ve made your opinions my truth. What’s the end goal of all this hate and why are you so determined to believe a story that’s not even full of mine? When I try to tell you my truth you guys don’t want to hear it, when I try to move on, you guys attack me,” she wrote.