In 2016 I received a special recognition for blowing the whistle on human right violations from Blueprint for Free Speech.
Here Is the award listed :
Special recognition Whistleblower Aris Danikas
At the same time, Johan Booysen, desperate to escape prosecution and in order to gain public support as well as interfere with judicial processes, wrote a book called “Blood on their hands”, with the assistance of another biased journalist, Jessica Pitchford.
Jessica was tasked to provide credibility to Johan Booysen by introducing the narrative that his prosecution was a state capture attempt to silence him for being a top cop while the criminal charges against the Cato Manor unit and himself were still pending. Clearly this book publication was an intimidation attempt to apply pressure to the judiciary, via a media court process.
Once more I was deliberately kept out of a right of reply, although within the book there is a public disclosure stating that:
“The meetings, interactions and events described in this book are in the public domain in one form or another – via sources ranging from affidavits, forensic reports, court submissions and official inquiries to media coverage and opinion pieces. In some cases, parties have been offered right of reply in terms of the issues raised in these pages. The responses have been incorporated where appropriate.
Every effort has been made to ensure the factual accuracy of the contents of this book, but should any errors have occurred, the publisher and author apologise and would welcome any information that would enable them to amend any mistakes in future editions.“
From an email dated August the 12th 2016, by the legal department of Sunday Times to Jessica, it is clear that she was given the opportunity to contact me for comment before Booysen’s book was published, but she never did.
After the book was published, I wrote to Jessica and her publisher protesting their unethical and unprofessional misconduct.
In return I received an Attorneys reply, representing Pan Macmillan South Africa (Pty) Ltd and Jessica Pitchford, suggesting “resending me a list of questions which they attempted to send to me previously ( Lie ) and will consider any responses for potential inclusion in a
subsequent edition of the book.”
Their reply was insulting to say the least, as clearly from the email correspondence between Sunday Times and Jessica Pitchford, I made myself available for comments to them before the book was published regarding the book, but they never responded. Clearly Booysen did not want Jessica to correspond with me and expose the false narrative of his book.
What’s interesting though is the fact that within the book, Jessica is repeating fake and unproven allegations about myself, as dictated from her single source, General Booysen, first published by Noseweek and later repeated by discredited journalists and Author Jacques Pauw published by Daily Maverick. No supporting evidence was ever produced by the author of the book. There were never any criminal or civil charges instituted against myself for such allegations. Later, in an article written for Daily Maverick, Jacques Pauw repeated Booysen’s fabricated allegations against me without providing evidence. I lodged a complaint against Pauw for this article. As a result I won an apology and the right to reply to the defamatory and false allegations against myself published by Daily Maverick, repeating the very same fake news contained in the Noseweek articles and Booysen’s book.