Blubbering “Blade Runner” Oscar Pistorius took acting lessons before testifying at his murder trial, according to a new report.
The once-beloved Olympian — who regularly broke down in wailing sobs on the stand and even vomited during other testimony — was privately coached so he would appear more sympathetic, former South African Sunday Times columnist Jani Allan wrote on her blog.
“I have it from a reliable source that you are taking acting lessons for your days in court,” she wrote in an open letter to Pistorius on JaniAllan.com, saying his acting adviser was one of her “close friends.”
But “your coach has an impossible task,” Allan wrote, referring to the double-amputee runner as a “faux hero.”
“Oscar, I look at you mewling and puking in the witness stand. You truly represent everything the West loathes about white South Africans who live extravagant lives in expensive laagers,” she wrote, using a South African term for large, heavily secured homes.
Pistorius, called “Blade Runner” for the prosthetics he runs on, is on trial in South Africa for fatal shooting his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, at his Pretoria home on Feb. 14, 2013.
He claims he mistook the model for an intruder when he blew her away as she cowered in the bathroom. Prosecutors say he shot her in anger after a heated argument.
Allan called Pistorius’ story “preposterously ridiculous,” but said that even if it were true, it’d prove him a killer.
“The implication of this is that it would have been more acceptable to shoot an intruder the way you did — execution from behind a closed door,” she wrote.
Allan compared Pistorius, 27, to Eugène Terre’Blanche, the leader of the hate-driven South African white-separatist Afrikaner Resistance Movement. He was murdered in 2010 in a wage dispute with a farmhand.
“Terre’Blanche was cut from the same cloth as you, Oscar,” Allan wrote.
“He was given to boasting, vain in all things, narcissistic in the extreme and flying into terrible rages when things didn’t go his way. I suspect this description fits you.”
She added that Pistorius was always a sore loser.
“There were the eruptions of temper and your fury when you thought you weren’t fairly treated,” she wrote. “I realized long ago that you might have been a fast runner, but you never have been sportsmanlike in your behavior. Not on the track or off it.”
Pistorius’ trial has been adjourned until May 5 for a string of upcoming national holidays. He faces 25 years to life behind bars if convicted.