Judge sent collage of sex positions, testifies secretary
Judicial Conduct Tribunal into complaint of sexual harassment against Judge President Selby Mbenenge resumes Monday
Eastern Cape High Court judge’s secretary Andiswa Mengo gives testimony before the Judicial Conduct Tribunal. Photo: Office of the Chief Justice N Mabusela
Andiswa Mengo wanted help with an assignment on gender-based violence, but Judge Selby Mbenenge sent her a picture of a half-naked woman instead.
- In her evidence before a Judicial Conduct Tribunal on Friday, Mengo insisted that she was not interested in an intimate relationship with Mbenenge.
- She said her responses to him were an attempt to “please him”, because she did not know what else to say.
In response to a request by judges’ secretary Andiswa Mengo that Eastern Cape Judge President Selby Mbenenge help her with an assignment on gender-based violence, he sent her a picture of a half-naked woman. This is what Mengo told the Judicial Conduct Tribunal probing her complaint of sexual harassment against the Judge President on Friday.
In earlier conversations that same day, he had sent her heart emojis and an emoji of a python, which she interpreted as being a penis, she told the Tribunal.
During another WhatsApp exchange, he sent her a “collage” depicting sexual positions in what she interpreted to be a request about which position she preferred.
While Mengo claims she was not interested in Mbenege’s advances, and in previous testimony claimed to have told him “no” several times and that his badgering disgusted her, there has also been evidence from the transcripts of exchanges in which she appears to play along with him during their extensive WhatsApp messaging, often after work hours.
In one of the exchanges, he twice sent her heart emojis to which she did not respond.
He then sent her a python emoji followed by a question mark.
“It was very annoying,” she said.
She then asked him to assist her in writing an “intro” for an assignment – she is studying law – on gender-based violence.
In response, he forwarded her the photograph of what was described by evidence leader advocate Salome Scheepers as a half-naked woman.
Mengo became emotional when asked to describe the picture. Tribunal Chair Bernard Ngoepe said, “We can all see it.”
After the Tribunal took a break to allow Mengo to compose herself, Scheepers asked her how she felt about this picture. She said, “I felt naked. And my spirit was torn.”
She had replied to him with a virtual sticker of a man hanging himself with toilet paper. “I wanted to tell him this picture and these messages are putting me under a lot of stress,” she said.
A few days later, in another exchange, she said Mbenenge had sent her a collage of pictures depicting sexual positions, which he then deleted.
According to the messages, he told her to “watch it alone”.
She responded: “It’s nice”.
He said: “deep thing?”
Mengo responded: “You deleted it before I could finish. It’s clear you go half way.”
She said she understood the “deep thing” message to mean that he wanted to know what position she liked.
Asked why she had responded in the way she did, she said she had not known how to respond.
“I knew that he wanted me to respond in a manner which pleases him. Whereas I knew that whatever I wrote I did not mean it.”
Regarding another conversation in which she introduced the subject of foreplay, she said she did not want to engage in foreplay with him but again, she had done it because, “I did not know what to say and he is someone who does not listen when I say no.”
She said she was “being sarcastic” and was “fed up” by a question from him asking if “long tom” was ok for her.
“The conversation was sexual. I realised that he was asking in particular about the size of penis that is right for me,” she said in explanation of her response – “of course” – to him.
The Tribunal will resume on Monday.
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