Pearl Thusi's chilling encounter with Thabo Bester: new documentary raises questions

I wouldn't have been as interested as I was in watching the new Netflix documentary, "Beauty and the Bester", had it not been for the fact that Thabo Bester and Nandipha Magudumana were so hell bent on it not releasing. 

Their failure to block the documentary only fueled my curiosity, so as soon as it showed up on the streaming platform, there I was on it like white on rice.  

However, one segment in particular, featuring actress Pearl Thusi, raises questions about its relevance.

Thusi's encounter with Bester is chilling. She recounts how, back in 2011, Bester reached out to her for a fake television hosting job via Facebook.

"He's genuinely crazy", Thusi says. 

Instead of a normal interview setting, they spent 25 minutes driving around. Bester then confronted her with a knife, and during this tense moment, she managed to talk him down.

"I've never felt so stupid. I think I asked him 'Why are you doing this?' ... For me as a young Christian woman, this was an opportunity to do the right thing, and I really believed that I was about to help someone." 

Attempting to guide Bester, she took him to a church and even gave him a Bible. 

"We prayed together and then him and I left. I saw a police van and said, 'Oh, I can ask the police to drop you off."

After that day, Thusi never saw Bester again. 

At the time she didn't report the incident to the police. She thought that he could be "saved" - then  later discovered that Bester went on to kill his girlfriend, model Nomfundo Tyhulu. 

In the doccie she starts to sob and wipes away tears while saying that if only she had reported it to the authorities, then maybe she could have saved Tyhulu.

She basically blames herself for what Bester went on to do following their encounter. 

"That day I dropped him off, cos they put him in the back of the police van, I could have told them what had happened and maybe I could have gotten him locked up and that I could have saved someone's life, like someone who actually needed to be saved," she confesses.

She could have stopped at the point where she never saw him again.

The water-works and guilt trip was totally unnecessary and her 5 minutes didn't really add substantial value to the overall production. 

"Beauty and the Bester" succeeds in drawing attention to a terrifying narrative of manipulation and deceit, but Thusi's story, while emotional, feels somewhat misplaced within its framework.

• "Beauty and the Bester" is currently streaming on Netflix.