José finds it striking that Johan Derksen has adapted his story ‘a little’: “Derksen, who never bends, realizes full well that he has crossed a border. By bending the story in such a way that it doesn’t look like rape, he hopes to get to the other side of the line again. cowardly. cowardly. cowardly.”
I lay on the couch yesterday, King’s Day, and looked at it eight o’clock news† Johan Derksen (73) passed there who was in the Talpa program VI had casually told that he, like Johnny de Mol, had sometimes committed a youthful sin. For example, when he was 22 years old, he had once pushed a candle ‘in’ with a ‘Miss’ who was lying unconscious on the couch. His accompanying hand gesture left nothing to the imagination. Needless to say, he added that you’d be jailed for something like that these days; that this could ‘technically’ be seen as rape.
I was already a bit nauseous from all the consumed cavates and tomcats, now I was over my neck. I thought of the girl in question, now a woman of about seventy. You can bet she never forgot the incident. Maybe she’s repressed it—too painful, too embarrassing, too embarrassing. Most likely, she then felt she had brought it upon herself: if only she hadn’t been drinking so much, hadn’t taken those guys home, hadn’t she… I know only too well how mercilessly women can punish themselves.
The rat Johan Derksen
Later in the evening I saw the fragment pass by a few more times; at Arjan Lubach, at ON 1† Time and again I saw Derksen’s table companions burst out laughing. The roguish remarks were not out of the air: how big had that candle been, Steven Brunswijk inquired with a grin. ‘Great,’ said Derksen dryly. René van der Gijp said with a laugh that the lady had gotten off mercifully, because suppose there had been a baseball bat next to the couch.
Every time I had to puke in the bucket I had put next to the couch just to be safe.
And as I rinsed my mouth, I wondered: who’s worse? The rat Johan Derksen, or his even rattier friends? Which is worse: Derksen’s ‘youthful sin’, or the commotion of his table companions? Or the fact that these men believe themselves to be supreme, and still think that in front of hundreds of thousands of viewers you can laugh, howl or roar with impunity in front of hundreds of thousands of viewers?
candle gate
What makes me curious: are there still men (and women) who shrug their shoulders and shout: ‘Ah, dude, what’s in there? VI is discussed at the table, that is just man talk! That happens in so many changing rooms and canteens, you shouldn’t be so frumpy about it, those are jokes!’
I think that a line has been crossed, that most people in the country have lost their laughter, and that Talpa, the broadcaster that already has butter on its head anyway. That the candle gate is going to have a tail and that Derksen realizes that all too well. After all, less than a day later he, the coward, adapted his story: he wouldn’t put a candle in it – how horrible that sounds! – have stopped, but put it between her legs. Another hand movement now had to underline his claim.
It won’t help Derksen and his old comrades. It’s done with their stale and abhorrent complacency.
Magazine maker and journalist José Rozenbroek is a news junkie. Every week she writes a column for Libelle about what strikes her and about what she gets excited about.