According to The Star, Peet van Zyl has said that a UK newspaper has quoted him out of context in an article they published over the weekend, which states that Oscar Pistorius is unquestionably planning on writing a tell-all book about the night he shot Reeva Steenkamp and the subsequent murder-trial.
Speaking to the publication, Van Zyl said: “That’s the problem I have with the media. They take things out of context.
“They write things as if they’ve had a lengthy conversation with you. If only people could listen to what’s said and write facts, and not write what you want to write.”
Van Zyl explained that he never said a book is definitely on the cards, but that he merely responded to a question put to him about the hypothetic possibility of Pistorius releasing a book.
Said Van Zyl: “I was asked if writing a book is something he’d do and I said we could look into it in future, but we had not discussed it. There’s no plan so far.
“It was a hypothetical question and I gave a hypothetical answer. If he were to write a book, it would be about his life so far.”
Pistorius was on 12 September 2014 found guilty of culpable homicide after the judge ruled he killed his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, by mistake when he shot and killed her through the toilet door of his home in Pretoria.
The Observer quoted Van Zyl as saying: “He will write his own book, we’ve discussed it. We’ve talked about ideas and concepts. I’m not going to go into details now.”
Meanwhile, the mother of Pistorius’s ex-girlfriend, Samantha Taylor, recently released a book she co-wrote with journalist and author Melinda Ferguson. The tell-all book by Patricia Taylor , about her relationship with the athlete while he dated her daughter, is called ‘Oscar: An accident waiting to happen’.
South African journalists Barry Bateman and Many Wiener have also published a book, called ‘One Tragic Night: The Oscar Pistorius Murder Trial’.