The Oprah School on Trial

“The reality is the charges I charged Makopo with are very minor offenses compared with the other things I do,” said state prosecutor Etienne Venter, who has been prosecuting sexual offenses in South Africa’s courts since 2000. “Yesterday in here I had an 11-year-old testify that she had been raped. I’ve had a 5-year-old testify about her rape—really all ages, from 5 to 72.”

So far, Makopo’s trial has moved in fits and starts. It began this summer, suspended for two months, and resumed again last Wednesday, October 22. Since her arrest last November, Makopo has been required to stay within a 50-mile radius of this courtroom. For now she lives up the road with her friend Lebo, whom she met while working at Oprah’s school, and who is one of four friends supporting her here today.

Winfrey told journalists she had been “shaken to the core,” and called the Makopo incident “one of the most devastating—if not the most devastating—experience of my entire life.”

Everyone rises when magistrate Thelma Simpson enters the courtroom just after 9:00 a.m on Friday. Simpson calls for the courtroom to be cleared. Because she is charged with assaulting minors, proceedings will continue in camera. Brown paper has been taped on the windows of the corridor. Today, the third of six girls will testify from a separate room, on closed circuit TV, so she will not have to face Makopo.

With Makopo inside the closed courtroom, I talked to her friends who had wandered outside for a smoke break. Until this whole thing blew up, Lebo, 24, worked weekends as a hairdresser at Oprah’s school.

“Working only three days a week, I earned more than $200 a month!” Lebo tells me. “It was such a great job. I wish I could get a job like that again, but I probably never will.”

The unemployment rate here tops 40 percent, and many survive on government grants of less than $100 a month. After the allegations surfaced, Lebo says, most employees at Oprah’s school were told their jobs were suspended.

“I was so surprised when I heard about Tiny,” says Lebo. “But my boss said we need to stick by her through this. Other people, they didn’t stick by her. No one is on her side because they’re hoping to get their jobs back.”

I look over and see that Makopo has come out of the courtroom to join us. She nods to me and greets her friends in Sesotho, the lingua franca among black South Africans in this mostly-poor region. Makopo bums a Stuyvesant cigarette from a friend and lights it in a cupped hand. When she draws on it, her cheeks hollow.

Her friends ask how it’s going inside. Makopo says, “Sharp, sharp,” a colloquial term that means “just fine.” She asks me which newspaper I am from. I try to explain The Daily Beast. She says: “I think the news stories are just saying the same things, over and over.” Then she goes quiet.

Makopo smokes the cigarette down into the butt, until a friend says it’s gross and makes her put it out. It’s time to go back inside.