Joost and Amor

Behind the headlines

The celebrated Springbok rugby hero Joost van der Westhuizen and his wife, the singer Amor Vittone, were a glamorous couple who captured the imagination of many South Africans. Known as their country’s own ‘Posh and Becks’, they were blessed with success, fame, public adulation and an apparently happy marriage. Until a shock report appeared on the front page of a local Sunday newspaper about a sex video … In this book, the well-known journalist, and a personal friend and confidante of the Van der Westhuizens, Gavin Prins, now recounts the story behind the story – one that has never been published before. Prins, who broke the sex-video scandal on the front page of Rapport, chronicles how a simple farm boy who had become a national rugby hero met the woman of his dreams and married her, only to fall from grace in the most publicly humiliating way possible. With his confession came a measure of redemption – until he was brought to his knees by a life-threatening illness … Hard-hitting, often shocking but ultimately uplifting, this is the true story behind the sensational headlines that have dogged South Africa’s most high-profile couple.