/ 16 March 2009

Advocate Barbie: I am a victim too

Former advocate and sex crimes accused Cezanne Visser, better known as Advocate Barbie, apologised in the Pretoria High Court on Monday for ”everything that happened”, but said she was ”also a victim of Dirk Prinsloo”.

Visser, sporting a modern shorter hairstyle, told the court she could at times ”think like a normal human being”, but when Prinsloo was with her and when it came to things sexual, she did not think, but only did what Prinsloo wanted.

Prinsloo disappeared while on a court-sanctioned business trip to Russia, leaving his former mistress to face the music alone.

She said she was ”very sorry” for her role ”in everything that happened”, but felt it was all Prinsloo’s fault and that she was also one of his victims.

”I am a victim of this man … he ruined my life.

”I am sorry that I became involved in these things. I’ve admitted most of it, but Dirk was in control of my life.

”I did do things that were wrong, but I did not take the initiative.

”Even when he was not there, Dirk was always present in my life,” she said.

She denied she had ever done anything on her own initiative regarding the sex crimes against women and children of which she stood accused.

Questioned by prosecutor Andre Fourie, Visser admitted that she might have told an employee of a children’s home she and Prinsloo would give the children sex education if the children’s home did not.

This was after Visser was refused any further contact with an 11-year-old girl, who was reportedly so upset by her sexual experiences during a weekend visit with Visser and Prinsloo that she had to be kept out of school.

Visser said she had never denied the child’s allegations, but as far as she could recall, she had told the woman that was how Dirk wanted it and that was how he wanted to raise children.

Visser insisted that she had ”worshipped” Prinsloo and found it difficult to leave him, despite the best efforts of her parents and even after a psychologist told her she should get out of the ”abnormal relationship”.

She admitted to making numerous false statements under oath. One was to get a family violence interdict against her parents, and later to imprison her mother for violating the interdict.

”I did not even know what was said in those statements. Documents were stuffed into my hands, I was loaded into the car and the next moment an interdict had been granted.

”I can’t say why I chose Dirk over my parents. I don’t think I wanted to be seen with anyone else than Dirk at that stage. Dirk was everything to me,” she said.

She insisted she was ”not thinking like an advocate” then or even now.

Visser stressed that she could still not explain why she acted the way she did during her relationship with Prinsloo.

She could not reconcile that conduct with her personality or the woman she was today.

Visser described Prinsloo as a ”monster” who tried to manipulate magistrates and judges and was involved in getting illegal Chinese immigrants into the country with his brother.

She claimed he had even instituted a false claim against his professional insurers, claiming he was medically unfit to practice on the strength of a psychologist’s report that he suffered from depression.

Visser revealed that her mother, Susan, was so upset by her relationship with Prinsloo and the interdict her daughter had obtained against her, that she at one stage threatened to commit suicide.

Despite this, she had signed an affidavit trying to get her mother imprisoned.

She claimed it was only because Prinsloo had insisted on a settlement that she and her mother went to see a psychiatrist and a psychologist in an attempt to heal the rift between them.

The trial continues. — Sapa