By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Convicted rapist and murderer Thabo Bester alongside her accomplice Dr Nandipha Magudumana filed urgent court application to interdict Netflix documentary series, titled Beauty and the Bester.
Netflix announced a new true crime limited documentary series, launching on the service on 12 September, 2025.
However the court application will be heard on the 9th of September, few days before the documentary is flighted.
In the court papers that Fullview has seen, Bester argues that the imminent release of the documentary, purpots to depict events related to him and make serious, unfounded and defamaory submissions against him.
His legal team argues that this is abuse of media freedom and direct attack to their clients constitutional rights.
International streaming platform Netflix has officially unveiled the trailer of their latest three-part crime docuseries titled Beauty and the Bester.
In the trailer, Netflix managed to secure an interview with Magadumana’s father, who is also a suspect in Bester case.
Zolile Cornelius Sekeleni, is currently out on R10,000 bail, he can be heard in the trailer that he didnt like things, his daughter was involved in.
The limited series seeks to unpack the rise and dramatic fall of Magudumana, a glamorous celebrity doctor whose entanglement with a convicted rapist and murderer shocked the nation.
The show tells the story of Bester, and Magudumana pulled off one of the most smartest moves that the country has seen by faking his own death and escaping the Mangaung maximum prison – only to be spotted as a “free man” a year later while out shopping in Sandton.
The discovery sent shockwaves across large parts of South Africa as well as the rest of the world, and later saw the launch of a manhunt to get hold of the convicted rapist and his partner in crime.
Later, they were both arrested in Tanzania and extradited to South Africa, where they now remain in prison.
Following the conclusion of the pre-trial into the escape saga, the official trial is set to commence from 10th November 2025 until 29 March 2026.
Previously Bester and Magumana have failed in their 11th-hour bid to stop the broadcast of a four-part Showmax documentary Tracking Thabo Bester.
Showmax had initially intended to release the show at 2am but rescheduled until 4pm while the matter was being argued in court. Bester and Magudumana brought urgent court applications, claiming their rights, including their rights to fair trials, were at stake.
In his ruling, Johannesburg High Court Judge Stuart Wilsom said he was bound by the decision of the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) in the NPA’s application against eTV regarding a documentary pertaining to the Dina Rodrigues prosecution.
That SCA had ruled that the test for any pre-publication interdict was that the publication would cause substantial harm to the administration of justice and that the risk was real.
All that Bester and Magudumana had shown was “generalised anxiety” that the documentary will talk about them, and that will in some way affect their interests.
“Reading the applicants’ papers, I find almost nothing that even rises to conjecture or speculation,” Judge Wilson said, dismissing the applications.
He said each party must pay its own costs, noting that Bester and Magudumana are both incarcerated and had pursued “a bona fide, if mistaken understanding of what their constitutional rights entitled them to”.
The only difference in the Showmax and Netflix documentaries is that, the latter managed to secure an interview with Magudumana’s father.