THE ANGELLA JOHNSON INTERVIEW
YOU just cannot keep Peter Soller out of the headlines. The lawyer who made legal history when he successfully represented unmarried father Lawrie Fraser has been in the news again this week; this time facing criminal charges after Fraser’s child was kidnapped from his adoptive parents in Malawi.
Some people in the South African legal profession regard Soller as a liability, a shyster lawyer hell-bent on publicity and bucking the system at all costs – including those borne by his clients. They cite his handling of the vagina acid burn case last year as a misguided insistence on going to the wire, even when the odds are clearly stacked against him.
The result of this ”reckless pursuit” of a multi-million rand judgment on behalf of Bernadette Gibson, who suffered severe burning at the hands of her negligent gynaecologist, was a supreme court award way below what had been offered in an out- of-court settlement. If only he had given her better advice, critics cry.
In their eyes, he has all the dignity of a nude at high noon on Jan Smuts Avenue; almost wanton in his indiscretions – giving out private information about the mental state of his clients and other intimate details. Imagine my surprise when within minutes of our meeting at his central Johannesburg office he handed out colour photographs of Gibson’s burns, including a lurid shot of a catheter inserted into her vagina, as if they were holiday snaps.
His explanation is that Gibson had given permission for them to be used as exhibits at the trial and they were thus a matter of public record. But I wonder if she expected them to be shoved into the faces of journalists discussing the case tangentially, several months on.
The high profile ”acid burn” case was his public flogging and it still rankles. ”It aggrieves me a lot because she got a raw deal,” he says, looking at me with dull eyes. ”It was a travesty of justice. How, and what right does a man [the judge] have to determine whether a woman has been damaged in this way … I wonder how he would have felt if someone had poured acid over his private parts?”
It is not an intellectual argument, but he declares it with passion. Perhaps the same blind passion that leads him to make courtroom drama out of personal injuries cases; ask any judge and he will tell you emotional detachment is the prerequisite of a good lawyer. Soller, however, will not apologise for being ”too emotional”.
Having heard his reputation traduced privately and publicly by other lawyers, I was surprised to find the man much more affable than I had been led to believe; though he tries to mask it with a cynical hard-boiled image, one young female clerk insists ”he’s a real softie”.
At 52 Soller looks like a man who has seen and experienced too much suffering. Every groove and line in his drooping face shrieks pain. His face is wan and polished by the diligence of hard circumstance. He appears to view the world through sad eyes.
Despite the phenomenal success of his constitutional battle for Fraser (the court ruled that biological fathers should have rights in adoption cases), he seems unable to believe that once again his hard work and perseverance have paid off. It is as if he always expects to come off a loser and his mind has been programmed to expect nothing else.
Some people are able, over the years, to build up a fairly secure resistance to emotional pain. But Soller has never been able to; no sooner has a nip of someone’s suffering hit his senses than the emotional hangover begins. It is a real handicap for a lawyer who revels in taking on lost causes, inevitably pitting him against commercial giants.
So it was that when he took on the 1992 inquest into contaminated hospital drips which allegedly killed about 120 babies, Soller says he came up against the powerful lobby of two major banks representing the manufacturing company.
”These banks were also my corporate clients. They called me in and warned that I would lose business unless I walked away.” Head tilted back and eyes narrow in confidentiality, he rattles off the banks’ names declaring he did not ”give a continental stuff” if they sued for libel … but this newspaper does, so I’ll leave them out of it.
Soller, who had about 80 people (he is vague about the numbers) working in his partnership at the time, said he discovered the drips were not being manufactured under strict protocol. But the magistrate refused to let him lead with this information. ”Without this evidence I could not win the case,” he says bitterly.
It was not his only loss. The banks withdrew their business, his firm went bust and he became insolvent; then the car went, the house was auctioned and pretty soon his wife skipped town with another woman. ”She was looking for an excuse to leave and this was it.”
The pain was all the greater because after only two years of marriage she took their young son with her. Soller has three other children by his first wife, but the toddler was his pride and joy. He was to spend nearly a year searching for him.
‘I had a friend who lent me money to fly to Cape Town virtually every weekend, until one day quite by accident I spotted her car and followed it.” At this point his voice quivers with the memory: ”Domestic troubles are the most destructive in life. I want to cry when I think of those times.” This incident may offer an insight into his decision to fight Fraser’s claim for parental rights without pay.
Ironically, for a man who likes to specialise in medical cases, Soller met his ex-wife (a nurse) while recuperating at the Morningside Clinic, after a 10-minute liver biopsy landed him in intensive care. The surgeon had punctured his lungs. Did he sue? ”No. It was my friend. We grew up together and he was very apologetic.” He is now suing the doctor on behalf of a client who had surgery for sweaty hands and left hospital eight month later after his oesophagus was ruptured.
Soller had wanted to be a doctor and got good grades from King Edward School, but his father – a Jewish immigrant from the East End of London who made a modest living in the rag trade – could not afford to put him through medical school.
He switched to law, working as an articled clerk by day, then attending Wits University’s law school by night. But his office bookshelves buckling under weighty medical textbooks are a testament of his continued interest in medicine, as are his love of watching operations and autopsies. Freudians may say he takes on medical malpractice cases to compensate for not becoming a doctor.
He says it’s a duty. ”I see the suffering of human life and I try to address injustices as best I can. Most of these people come to me with no money because they were told I would not give up. And I won’t.” Even if, inevitably, he knows there is no fee forthcoming.
Today Soller shares a practice, partly bankrolled three years ago by the loyal client who lent him money to search for his son, which employs eight people. It has been a long haul from the stigma of insolvency and a period of depression – only kept at bay by Prozac and sleeping pills.
Eventually the bar council declared him a ”fit and proper person” to resume his practice, but some advocates still refused to work for him unless paid upfront. ”It takes a long time to get back on the financial ladder. I’m still not making money beyond what is needed for the firm because I have no corporate clients, only people who come off the street or are recommended.”
Things are, however, looking better for Soller, who lives in a house off Louis Botha – another lifeline from the loyal client. He is planning to open a small office in Cape Town to allow more frequent contact with his son who is now seven.
This is not a man who knows how to go belly-up. Whether he likes it or not, and I suspect he does, his true mtier will continue to be representing lost causes. ”Life is sad, but interesting. I make no apologies for caring.”