Elna McIntosh, a Gauteng sexologist and radio host, won an apology from a researcher and an NGO behind a report used to help close down The Ranch, a brothel in Johannesburg.
McIntosh appeared this week as plaintiff in the Cape Town High Court in a defamation suit against researcher Bernadette van Vuuren and the Cape Town-based NGO Molo Songololo.
She sued Van Vuuren and Molo Songololo for R250 000 each because of defamatory statements she alleged Van Vuuren made in a report compiled for the NGO and the asset forfeiture unit (AFU) about her work at The Ranch.
McIntosh ran health workshops for sex workers at The Ranch and counselled them. Her work ended in December 2000 when a curator from Deloitte & Touche closed the brothel in terms of a court order obtained by the AFU.
A research paper by Van Vuuren entitled Preliminary Report Findings on Research into the Trafficking and Forced Prostitution of Women in South Africa was at the core of the case. Van Vuuren linked The Ranch to allegations of trafficking in women. The report implicated McIntosh in the alleged crimes of ”living off the gains of prostituting trafficked women” because of her workshops.
Van Vuuren suggested that McIntosh’s counselling and workshops represented a ”collusion in the trafficking of women and living off the gains of prostitution”.
”The fact that this report was presented as the work of an independent NGO supposedly interested in the welfare of foreign sex workers is outrageous,” McIntosh said this week. ”It was in fact nothing more than a hatchet job commissioned and paid for by the AFU, who have failed to disclose this in their court application to forfeit The Ranch.”
Van Vuuren and Molo Songololo agreed to apologise to McIntosh and Andrew Phillips, owner of The Ranch, for any hurt or embarrassment the paper had caused. The agreement was made an order of the court.
”Dr McIntosh was not guilty of any criminal or improper conduct or of collusion, or was in any way guilty of living off the gains of prostitution,” the agreement read. ”Andrew Phillips was never party to the trafficking of women” and ”any of the sex workers at the Ranch were not under any form of coercion, pressure or deception from Andrew Phillips.”