'YOU DIDN'T BREAK ME'

Nicoleen Swart speaks out a year after that awful abuse video went viral

- ELRI BOUCHER

THERE’S a date tattooed on her left hand: 18-11-18. It’s the day she finally took her life back.

Home is in Durban where the sun shines a lot, there’s plenty of space for her two dogs to run around, her teenage boys play rugby under blue skies and monkeys chatter in the trees.

It’s been a year since horrific footage went viral of Nicoleen being beaten by her husband, Jaco Swart, in the office of his car dealership in Sinoville, Pretoria. In a second video he’s seen following her into the showroom, headbutting her and kicking – first in the stomach, then between her legs.

The assaults happened on 15 and 18 November 2018 and the last attack was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The devil was in his eyes, Nicoleen says. She was convinced he was going to kill her.

“That was my turning point. I left everything and just ran.”

She went straight to the Sinoville police station, laid charges and applied for a protection order. Jaco was arrested and spent a week in jail. After he was released on bail, he disappeared to the Cape – but by December 2018 he was back in Pretoria and broke into the family home in the middle of the night.

“The children and I were hysterical,” Nicoleen recalls. “He wanted to take us to Cape Town, saying he had a new life for us there. I kept calling the police and he eventually fled.”

The assault case against Jaco went ahead, but very slowly and the pandemic further delayed proceedings. Eventually her stepdad, Jan Basson, persuaded her to go the private prosecution route.