Five years after the father of a teenager was sentenced to life imprisonment for raping her and after she gave detailed accounts of how she was raped while she had to dance naked for her father and his friends, the teenager has now claimed that the accusations were false.

Her father turned to the Gauteng High Court (Pretoria) in a bid to appeal his rape conviction and subsequent sentence. He called on the court to allow him to present further evidence which would ‘prove his innocence’, notes a Pretoria News report.

The ‘new evidence’ he wanted to place before the court was that of his daughter, the victim, who now claimed she had lied all along and that it was actually her brother who had raped her.

But the court frowned on this ‘new evidence’ – especially in the light of the daughter’s detailed account during her father’s trial of what he had done to her.

The court also noted that the daughter’s ‘change of heart’ occurred after she had visited her father for the first time in jail, five years after his conviction and sentence.

The father, during his trial, faced 86 counts relating to the rape and abuse of his two daughters, between 2008 and 2010. He was, however, only convicted on certain of the charges, which included charges of rape and sexual assault. 

The court said it was peculiar that D (the daughter) proffered a conflicting version more than five years after the appellant’s conviction and sentence.

She remained mum about her new version until her father’s appeal was launched.

‘D’s different version, five years after her father’s conviction and sentence, is highly questionable,’ the court said. It agreed with the prosecution, which opposed the appeal, that the new version was unlikely to be true, says the Pretoria News report.

It was pointed out that she testified extensively of the abuse both she and her sister suffered. She explained how her mother was ordered by her father to sexually assault both her and her sister and she described, in detail, the first time she was raped by her father.

The teenager told the court that she recently realised that she needed to see her father to try to ‘fix things where I went wrong’.

She saw him in prison for 30 minutes, where she said they both just cried.

‘After the emotions subsided, we had a very good discussion, and my dad apologised to me for what he did to me and asked for forgiveness. My dad was a horrible person in my early childhood, and he would verbally abuse me and physically assault me. I could see that my dad was a changed person and that his mannerism and attitude towards me was pleasant and for the first time in my life I experienced love from my dad, something I did not know before,’ she said.

The court, however, did not believe her new version and dismissed the father's appeal.

Full Pretoria News report