Religion of Sports, the Gotham Chopra/Tom Brady/Michael Strahan sports media company, has been putting a fair amount of emphasis on their podcasts lately. One of their latest ones is False Idol, hosted by Tim Rohan (a senior writer with Religion of Sport, also known for past work with The New York Times and with Sports Illustrated). False Idol is a seven-part narrative podcast looking at Oscar Pistorius and his 2013 killing of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. (Pistorius claimed he mistook Steenkamp for an intruder, but he was initially found guilty of culpable homicide, and later found guilty of murder.)
So far, False Idol has released three episodes, with the first focused on Pistorius’ rise to fame, the second focused on his growing celebrity in South Africa, and the third covering troubling driving and gun incidents from Pistorius before he became involved with Steenkamp. The fourth episode, “Reeva,” focuses on Steenkamp herself. It’s set to be released Thursday (on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and other platforms), but Religion of Sports has provided AA an exclusive preview clip, featuring Steenkamp’s cousin Kim Martin and coworker Charleen discussing what they heard from her about Pistorius. Here’s that clip:
Martin is featured at the start, and she says “I turned to Reeva, and I said, ‘Okay, cuz, I can see…are you really happy?’ And I remember she shrugged her shoulders. And she hesitated at first to answer me, and [then gave] kind of a ‘Yessss…but we will speak later.’ If everything was completely perfect, she would have just said ‘Yes,’ and I would have seen it immediately that she was just head over heels. But I could see that there was just something, and I don’t know what it was.” She later says that Pistorius returned before they could finish that conversation, and they never got the chance to finish it. And she says “There were a lot of things going on in her private life, in her relationship part of her life, that I didn’t know about.”
Later, Charleen is featured, and she says (around 1:10) that Steenkamp told her she had been fighting with Pistorius. “She was starting to worry, because she told me that one evening, they went to an event, and they had such a bad fight, and what should she do? She was actually scared one day, she said ‘I don’t know, what do I do, what do I say to someone like that? Do people erupt like this, do they fight like this in the beginning of a relationship?'”
Those are certainly interesting comments, and they help to show False Idol‘s approach (in this episode in particular) of focusing not just on Pistorius, but on who Steenkamp was, how she wound up involved with Pistorius, and the concerns she expressed about how that relationship was going. For those interested in more on the Pistorius-Steenkamp story, this podcast is certainly an impressive deep dive into it, and it’s a topic worth that kind of in-depth examination.
