Özcan Akyol does not put an end to the doubts about the existence of Matthijs van Nieuwkerk’s howler video. “You can provoke me, but I’m really not going to show the video.”
It is very strange: Özcan Akyol states that a video showing Matthijs van Nieukwerk behaving horribly is circulating en masse in Hilversum, but apart from the Sterren op het Doek presenter, no TV prominent has seen that video. Does that howler video even exist? Or is Eus lying a bit? There is a lot of doubt about it.
‘Where’s the video?’
Wilfred Genee asks Özcan point blank in the latest episode of Today Inside. “Everyone is working on that video you keep talking about.”
Özcan replies: “Not everyone, just the media world, but spread the word.”
Wilfred: “Where is the video?”
Özcan: “Where is the video? On the phones of the people involved.”
Provoke
Wilfred is also not sure whether Özcan has integrity. “And why doesn’t anyone see that? Everyone says: there may not be a video. There are now clearly doubts.”
Özcan does not allow himself to be provoked: “No, if you are going to provoke like that, you hope that the person who says it will of course give it, but I won’t do that, because they are the people’s videos and they are about it. I’m not going to talk about it.”
Wilfred: “But it does exist, the video?”
Özcan firmly: “The video certainly exists.”
Do you own a video?
René van der Gijp then: “But those people showed the video to you, but did not send it to you?”
Özcan: “No, I saw it on the screen, to convince me.”
Johan Derksen: “Eus, I understand that these are recordings that were made for a documentary, but were not included in the documentary.”
Özcan: “That’s right, yes. That’s right.”
“Does he hit them?”
Wilfred: “But what do we see that makes you so shocked? Does he pull people over a table? Does he hit people?”
Özcan: “No, not at all. Apparently it was something that had been known in that area for some time, but I have never been there during the day. Those rehearsals were so fierce and he could scold people and say, “Hey, why isn’t that image there? There must be an image! Hurry damnit!’ Those kind of things.”
“I told them, oh, it scared me, and the editors said, ‘Yes, this happened every day, this is not special at all. It’s naive of you that you never knew.’”
Never angry
Özcan doesn’t understand why he’s under fire like this. “I’m a bit surprised about it, because you’re not allowed to work on progressive insight. I’ve known him for quite a long time, but I’ve never seen him angry, so when you see a video of someone being angry, you think: who is this? I don’t know that person at all!”
To him, Matthijs was ‘always cheerful, always optimistic’. “But then you see that someone is apparently very angry with everyone during the day. That’s why I thought: I’ll withdraw. If you have been friends with someone for ten years and you have never seen him angry and then you suddenly see it, you think: how is this possible?”
Does Eus regret it?
Does Özcan regret his revelation about the video? “I was perhaps a little too honest about the process why things changed for me and I can no longer defend him 100 percent, because I doubt it myself. Apparently that is very important to the media.”
Johan: “For the media… Victor Vlas, eh, or something. Flame. He’s quite concerned about it. I don’t know who Victor Vlam is.”
Özcan: “I also read: ‘If they don’t have the video, then the video must not exist’, but it went wrong for fifteen years and they also had no knowledge of anything.”