Home Affairs minister owns up as sex tape leaks online
A sex tape featuring South African Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba has been leaked online.
Gigaba, who admitted to having filmed the video for private consumption, said he lost control of it to hackers whom he said had been blackmailing him since last year.
The tape was on Sunday released to the public forcing the minister to apologise to his children, extended family and South Africans in general for the embarrassment.
MEANT FOR WIFE
According to the PR firm he appointed to respond on his behalf, the video was created for transmission to the minister’s wife but landed in the wrong hands after hacking.
Gigaba said circulation of the video was after failed attempts to extort money from him shortly after he was appointed as Minister for Finance in 2017.
“These blackmail/extortion attempts as well as the illegal interception of my communication/hacking of my phone have all been reported to the relevant law enforcement/intelligence agencies and I am advised that the resultant investigations are still continuing.
‘PAIN AND EMBARRASSMENT’
“I take this opportunity to publicly apologise, in advance, to the rest of my family – especially my kids, my mom and my in-laws – and the South African public for the pain and embarrassment the likely wider distribution of this private material will cause,” he said in a statement.
The minister added that circulating it was in gross violation of his privacy and was not in public interest.
“I hope our nation will, someday, constructively engage with the question of whether it is correct to condone and promote the gross invasion of the privacy of others by distributing such material, more especially in the clear absence of a public interest justification,” he added.
My wife and I have learned, with regret and sadness, that a video containing material of a sexual nature, meant for our eyes only, which was stolen when my communication got illegally intercepted/my phone got hacked, in 2016/17, is circulating among certain political figures…
— Malusi Gigaba (@mgigaba) October 28, 2018