Trial by Media

The 2013 Valentine’s Day murder of FHM model and paralegal Reeva Steenkamp and subsequent trial of her partner, Paralympian Oscar Pistorius was the forefront of South African litigation, and served as a contemporary reminder on how justice is influenced by fame and public opinion.

In 2014, Oscar Pistorius was tried and initially found guilty of culpable homicide by judge Thokozile Masipa,¹ with a maximum sentence of five years’ imprisonment, concurrent with other charges. This sentence sparked an enormous public outcry, which culminated when Pistorius was briefly released on parole in October 2015 after serving one sixth of his sentence. This public outcry was measured in an online study conducted by the media monitoring group Data Driven Insight (DDI), who found that 8.43% of 6.2 million online media content declared Pistorius as guilty, compared to just 1.14% who claimed him to be innocent.² Shortly after his release, the Supreme Court of Appeal overturned Masipa’s original conviction and found Pistorius guilty of murder. Masipa resentenced Pistorius to six years in prison, which was again further appealed by the state, and was subsequently changed this sentence to 15 years – the minimum term for murder in South Africa.³ Oscar was denied right to appeal in 2018 as well as parole in 2023, due to not serving a minimum parole-eligible term. His parole request was approved in November 2023, just days before this opera was completed. In January 2024, Pistorius was released from prison.

This opera is not, however, solely about Oscar Pistorius. Trial by Media invites its audience to experience other critical perspectives of this story, including those of the magistrate and the media. To wit, this opera also hopes to offer a sensitive and important portrayal of arguably the most crucial perspective: Reeva Steenkamp who was, naturally, the only other person present when she died. Whilst the opera follows the natural narrative of the trial, there are moments of metaphysical emotional reflection, where our characters reflect upon as well as challenge each others’ viewpoints in a manner not typically found in court, but perhaps found on online social media, where the majority of public opinion for this case formed.

Schalk Schoombie, the work’s librettist, adopted this same approach of creation by sourcing text from both published and online social media sources, including those from public Twitter and Facebook accounts. Schoombie’s resulting libretto possesses a raw, unfiltered quality that brilliantly contrasts the acute sharpness present in the original court transcripts, Schoombie’s other sources, which anchor the opera’s narrative arch.

I hope that the music of this opera captures the Nietzschean ‘Perspectivism’ present in this story whilst simultaneously highlighting the emotional height of each pillar of polar opinion, together with the ever increasing rhythmic impetus that existed during both the trial of Oscar Pistorius and murder of Reeva Steenkamp.

“There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’ be.” (Nietzsche)

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¹     Culpable homicide is equivalent to Manslaughter in the UK, US and Canada.

²     ANI, ‘People, Media More Likely to Declare Pistorius “guilty” than “innocent”: Survey’, Business Standard India, 13 March 2014,

https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ani/people-media-more-likely-to-declare-pistorius-guilty-than-innocent-survey-114031300167_1.html

³    South African Government. Criminal Law Amendment Act 105 of 1997, Pub. L. No. 105, § 51, A105-97 22 (1997).