By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The High Court secretary Andiswa Mengo has testified that Eastern Cape Judge President Selby Mbenenge sent her subsequently deleted WhatsApp stickers of “his private part with hair exactly the same colour as [the hair] on his head”.
Mengo is giving evidence before a Judicial Conduct Tribunal into allegations which could result in Mbenenge being found guilty of gross misconduct and facing impeachment.
The record of the multitude of WhatsApp messages Mengo and Mbenenge exchanged over many months is before the tribunal. It shows that Mbenenge deleted many of them after he sent them.
Some, however, Mengo replied to directly, leaving a trail.
The tribunal is probing allegations by Mengo that Mbenenge sexually harassed her between 2021 and 2022 through multiple suggestive messages via WhatsApp, inappropriate comments, gestures regarding her appearance at work, and a specific incident in his chambers.
On Wednesday evidence leader advocate Salome Scheepers asked if she could recall the content of some of the deleted messages he sent her in the early hours of a morning in June 2021.
An emotional Mengo said she could clearly remember one: “It was a picture of his private parts – with the hair the same colour as the hair on his head. It was clear that he was standing above a toilet cubicle.”
At about the same time, he sent her a message reading: “BJ=?”.
This message was not deleted.
Asked by the evidence leader if she knew what that meant, she replied, “Yes, it means blow job”.
She said she had not responded to the messages. He then sent her a further three messages (also deleted). She said she only recalled the content of the third one, it was reminding her that she should delete her messages.
Scheepers then referred her to her initial complaint to the Judicial Service Commission in which she had claimed he had sent her “stickers” which were “quite explicit, of a pornographic nature”.
These were being disputed by Mbenenge because they had been presented “in gallery form”, rather than in screenshots as with the rest of the documented evidence.
Mengo said these had also been deleted by him, but not before she had saved them to her “favourites” on WhatsApp on her phone.
She insisted that they had been sent to her by “the Judge President of the Eastern Cape”.
During her earlier evidence this week, Scheepers and the tribunal chairperson Judge Bernard Ngoepe, asked her about some of her responses to Mbenenge’s sexually suggestive messages.
In one, when he asked if she was “quick to melt”, she had responded with “depends”. She also referred to “cooking on the side” and that you had to marinate meat before cooking it.
Asked again about this on Wednesday, she insisted that she had been talking about actual cooking, which she was doing at the time of the message exchange.
There were no hidden meaning behind her replies, she said.
Nor was she “using parables”, as tribunal president Judge Ngoepe suggested.
While she said she felt like a “cheap woman” and believed Mbenenge was attempting to sexually groom her, she could also not explain why she had replied to his messages, always sent after work hours and sometimes in the early hours of the morning, with laughing emojis and “embarrassed” monkey emojis.