Support for Marco Borsato is growing after the hearing days in the fornication case against him. After Victor Vlam, Evert Santegoeds also makes himself clear. “If you peel away all the noise, what is left?”
While Telegraaf journalist John van den Heuvel prefers to lock up the troubled singer Marco Borsato himself, including a photographer to cover everything neatly on the front page of the newspaper, his direct colleague Evert Santegoeds has a completely different report. He joins Victor Vlam, who now chooses the Borsato camp.
Borsato soap
How does Evert follow this entire soap opera? “I don’t want to call it a soap, more people do that, but it is too serious to call it a soap. I talked about it with the whole world all weekend, because wherever I go, everyone starts talking about Marco Borsato,” he says in the podcast Strictly Private.
He continues: “Now that I’ve let it sink in a bit, I still think: what on earth have I been watching? Things that stuck are, for example, that he walks into the naked girl’s bedroom. That’s all noise on the line. That’s not the point. He hasn’t been charged with that at all.”
Over the line
Ultimately, nothing happened in that bedroom, Evert emphasizes. “Of course he should not have done that. If he had gone terribly wrong, then something would have happened that evening, but the girl doesn’t say that at all. If you peel away all the noise, what on earth is left?”
He continues: “It is the least enviable place in the Netherlands: the judge’s chair in this case. I don’t have a good feeling about it. I really think that man has been screwed.”
Deliberation and weighing
Isn’t it too early to pass judgment now? “That’s why we spent two days in that courtroom? To weigh things up. I didn’t know any better than to go there to listen to a taped confession and I didn’t know any better than to read from a diary what exactly had happened.”
He continues: “It’s not a diary at all! It’s a notebook where one page contains some things about Marco Borsato and a receipt is suddenly stuck on that page to give it some authenticity. I didn’t know what I was hearing actually.”
Marrow and bone
Evert has the feeling that Marco’s denial is authentic and sincere. He points to the emotional outburst the singer had during the hearing process.
“That outburst of his was heartbreaking and did not leave the judges unmoved, simply because I think it was as sincere as it could be.”