Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2003. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - October 19, 2003
Nashira Davids
De Lille, leader of the Independent Democrats, and Smith, a well-known journalist, and New Africa Publishers are being sued for R600 000.
The HIV-positive women are also demanding that the offending passages be removed from the unsold copies of the books.
The women said in court papers in the Johannesburg High Court this week that the biography had ruined their lives.
An estimated 5 000 copies of the book have been sold. The biography deals with, among other things, De Lille's exposure of a "nest of abuse and exploitation taking place in clinical trials conducted for a US-based company on HIV/Aids patients at Kalafong Hospital near Pretoria".
In a chapter titled "The murky world of HIV", Smith told how HIV-positive people were urged to participate in the trials in 2000.
Five patients died during the trials and the three women approached De Lille for help after they too became ill. De Lille requested a special debate in Parliament which resulted in the trials being halted.
But in April last year, a month after the book was published, the women brought an urgent application in the Pretoria High Court to have the book removed from shelves as they had not informed their families of their HIV status.
De Lille said yesterday that she had affidavits to prove that the women gave consent to have their names used in an investigation into the clinical trials.
She added that before her book was published their names were also used in two media reports on the clinical trials.
"I am confident that it will be proven that their names were not used maliciously or intentionally," said De Lille.
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