[Christiane Amanpour, Cnn:] Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the program. I'm Christiane Amanpour. The murder case against star athlete Oscar Pistorius continues to rattle South Africa and transfix much of the world. The story of the heroic disabled athlete who overcame adversity to compete in the Olympic Games and his fall from grace is all playing out like a classic Greek tragedy. Police say the Valentine's Day shooting of his girlfriend, the model, Reeva Steenkamp, was a cold-blooded murder. Pistorius denies that, claiming he mistook his girlfriend for an intruder when he fired four shots through a locked bathroom door. At his bail hearing in Pretoria today, a new allegation: police say they found testosterone and needles in his bedroom. Pistorius' attorney says what they actually found was a herbal supplement. And from the police, testimony about previous encounters with Pistorius, one allegation that he fired a weapon at a restaurant just last month and that he assaulted a woman back in 2009. Police say that case was dropped for lack of evidence. Meantime, South Africa looks on in stupefied disbelief against a mounting series of blows to the national psyche, what one prominent political commentator calls a war against women, culminating recently in the horrific gang rape and death of a 17-year-old girl that had many South Africans calling for a change of culture even before the Pistorius case. To give us unique insight into the drama wracking the Rainbow Nation, one of the country's leading investigative journalists, Debora Patta, host of a national program called "Third Degree," and she's closely following the Pistorius case. Welcome to the program, Debora. And let me ask you first and foremost, how difficult will it be for Oscar Pistorius to actually get bail and to get out of jail, given that it's the highest charge that he's facing, premeditated murder?
[Debora Patta, Host, "third Degree":] In fact, in South Africa, Christiane, that is a Schedule 6 crime. As you correctly said, the highest possible crime charge that he is facing. It's a tough call; he has to prove extreme circumstances. But today was pretty much of a roller coaster of a day because the state case took significant blows. The investigating officer on the stand caved in under good probing from the defense team, who knocked a lot of holes into his argument and forced him to concede that he had contaminated evidence and that perhaps the case was not as watertight as it initially seemed.
[Amanpour:] Explosion that, Debora. What do you mean contaminated evidence? And what major holes were poked in the in the prosecution's case?
[Patta:] Well, the state's investigating officer was forced to concede that he walked onto the crime scene without wearing foot gloves because there weren't any available. And this was a pretty shocking admission. And certainly bode very badly for the prosecution team. He also was forced to concede that there was no physical evidence that actually contradicted Pistorius' version of events. Now bear in mind this is a bail hearing. We're not into the full criminal proceedings yet. There's still a lot of forensic evidence that hasn't been produced from the laboratories. But he was forced into a corner and in the beginning of the court proceedings today, Oscar Pistorius, as has been the case for many times now in court, was sobbing uncontrollably. But by the end of the day, he looked a lot more relaxed and composed.
[Amanpour:] So meanwhile how is South Africa reacting on a daily basis, as more and more of this well, not evidence, but more and more of this story gets public?
[Patta:] I think, you know, Christiane, if you'd asked me about three weeks ago, I would have said these kind of horrific stories elicit nothing more than a shrug from South Africans, not because we're cruel and heartless necessarily, but because people are desensitized; one bloody headline in this country makes way for another on a daily basis. We barely have time to catch our breath. In the week before Oscar Pistorius was accused of gunning down his girlfriend, as you correctly mentioned, a 17-year-old woman was gang raped. But in the few days between those two crimes, we had two other violent murders that didn't even make it onto most national bulletins; such is the nature of violence in this country. And I think South Africans are starting to realize that what we teach our young people and specifically how we teach our men is very important. We [inaudible] need [inaudible] in this country role models that are not about who hits the hardest or who runs the fastest. We have to teach our men to literally be different in this country.
[Amanpour:] Debora, I'm going to get more of that in a moment. But first I want to ask you, as an investigative reporter and as someone who's been following these issues for so long, you heard me talk about the other allegations from the police today, the issue of his charge by the police that Oscar Pistorius had fired a gun at a restaurant, had had an encounter potentially with a domestic nature back in 2009. That case was dropped. Now what do you know about these cases? And how is it that we or South Africa hasn't heard about these cases, given he was so prominent?
[Patta:] I think that's one of the most disturbing features of this entire case. Now whatever happens in court and bear in mind, this is a court case and still these allegations have to be proved, whether it was premeditated or an accident. But even given that, there was clearly seeds of some trouble. There were demons that were driving this young man, Oscar Pistorius, who we knew as this much-loved Olympics hero in South Africa. And yet there were signs of aggression; a weapon was fired in an open public place. It was an accident. But nobody reported it because there doesn't seem to be that kind of culture. It's as if, when you're famous or a celebrity or of an athletic status, such as Oscar Pistorius was, you have different rules applying to you. You get away with it. It's just wild boys doing their thing, letting off steam. And that kind of thing does not get reported. The allegation in 2009 was not tested in a court of law; it was dropped before it could get there. Oscar Pistorius wasn't as famous then as he is now. But certainly, that, too, seems to have been dropped and just pushed under the carpet. And now when one looks back with the benefit, of course, the exact science of hindsight, it does seem that there were warning signs, that, at the very least, Oscar Pistorius displayed a significant amount of aggression and that there were not people around him who were sort of grounding him and pulling him back to Earth.
[Amanpour:] You know, you say that. I want to play a little bit of an interview that his uncle gave today, regarding his character and the nature of his nephew.
[Arnold Pistorius, Uncle Of Oscar Pistorius:] He's not a violent person. He's a peacemaker. The he's always been a peacemaker. And that's his nature. He looks tough. He looks like the superstar and hold himself in public domain. But he's actually a very, very kind, soft person.
[Amanpour:] So that is clearly the view of the family. And yet when we were just talking about these allegations that the police detective brought up, you also sort of corroborating them, do you have the facts on that? Is that clear, what happened, what happened in 2009, this issue of the gun? Is that incontrovertible?
[Patta:] Well, the gun took place just a couple of weeks ago, and that is incontrovertible. The gun was fired in an open public area. Oscar Pistorius disputes that he fired the gun; he says it was a friend. But people who were with him said he did fire it. It was fired in accident, make no mistake. But the fact that a gun was being played around in a public is, in and of itself, horrifying. And secondly, the fact that it actually wasn't reported, that nobody saw fit to actually make a big song-and-dance about this, I think in many other parts of the world, a crime such as this would provoke a debate on gun proliferation. And the use of guns in South Africa. That doesn't seem to be happening to enough of an extent, I think, in this country. The incident in 2009 involved a former girlfriend and another woman, in which a door was kicked down at a party. Oscar Pistorius spoke very openly at the time, saying that it was a misunderstanding, that perhaps this other woman had had too much to drink, that he'd been accused of violence. He laid a countercharge and eventually the whole thing was dropped. And I think part of the problem is that South Africa wants its heroes to be unflawed. We want to believe so badly in this metaphor of inspiration that we overlook the sort of outside physical attributes; we praise those and see this glorious specimen of humanity who overcame incredible odds. We're so in love with that narrative that we actually don't look enough and deeply enough at the person behind it. And given the fact that this is a country that suffers extreme violence, where a woman is raped every four minutes and a woman is killed by her partner every eight minutes in this country, it's no wonder that we look for those kinds of metaphors for inspiration and don't probe them deeply enough.
[Amanpour:] And of course, you mentioned the issue of, you know, just looking towards heroes; everybody knows the story of Lance Armstrong, and, in a different way, his fall from grace as well. But let me ask you again, Justice Malala you probably know him; he's a prominent political commentator in your country. And he has talked about femicide, the kinds of things you were just talking about, but he also said that, you know, in his state of the nation speech just last week, President Zuma, he says, you know, lashed out against rampant violence against women. It was right after this horrific attack on Anene Booyson, then announced, quote, "Drastic measures to clamp down on workers in communities protesting against lack of services and didn't announce any serious new measures to fight any women-related abuses." What is it going to take, do you think, to change this culture of impunity? In the bigger picture?
[Patta:] Well, I think there's a there's a number of there's a number of things. Think when Justice Malala spoke about in that article, when he very profoundly spoke about a country being at war with its women, is that there is a state of emergency in some senses in this country, that things have got to a level that are untenable, that something is broken at its core. And on one level, it's a change of consciousness. I spoke earlier about how we raise men, the images we had, the metaphors we use, who we raise up as heroes, what kind of images of masculinity we have. And that's going to take a much longer time to do. But on another level, it's for a country to be shaken out of its apathy, if you will, around violence against women and face the hard, cold facts, stare them in the face, that this is a country that needs help when it comes to these issues. It requires desperate, firm action; it requires strong action from President Zuma's government and, at the same time it requires us as citizens to take matters and very seriously delve into the issues facing us and to do something about it, that we actually can't shrug our shoulders anymore. This is something that concerns every single South African.
[Amanpour:] Debora Patta, thank you so much for joining me from Johannesburg. And after a break, we will turn to another country in turmoil, Pakistan. If you think you have a tough job, try being America's ambassador there. I'll talk to the man who held that post when the Navy SEALs took out bin Laden. No, it wasn't "Zero Dark Thirty." It's the real thing, when we return.