Die Antwoord, Afrikaans for "The Answer", is comprised of Jones and his partner Yolandi Visser, who have a child together. They became an online sensation in 2010 and attracted a global cult following through their music, art and unconventional film clips, and starred alongside actors Hugh Jackman and Sigourney Weaver in the 2015 film Chappie. Among Die Antwoord's millions of fans was Sparkes who, in June 2013, received an Instagram message from her favourite Die Antwoord member, Visser. Die Antwoord member Watkin Tudor Jones, also known as Ninja, performing in France in 2015. Credit:EPA "i saw ur tumbla! v cool..how cn i get in touch wif u?" the comment from Visser read. Hours later, Visser introduced herself to Sparkes via email, attached a photo of herself and asked to meet Sparkes should they tour Australia. She also told Sparkes that Jones, who goes by the stage name "Ninja", also wanted to connect with her.

The email from Visser was sent on June 22, 2013, and read: "yo yo yo skull of foxes!!! wats pumpin ur style is on point! ninja showd me ur tumble blog… i like i like!! he also gun say hi 2 u! will be cool 2 hang & get hi as f--- wen i cum 2 aus nxt tym! stay bad! xxx." The attention left Sparkes feeling "absolutely overwhelmed and shocked". Before she could reply, she received a message from Jones. Then another. Within 24 hours, she had half a dozen from the then 38-year-old rapper while communication with Visser ground to a halt. "He referred to Yolandi as his little sister, basically disassociated their relationship," Sparkes said. "Within the next couple of days, correspondence became more intense. I was receiving up to six emails from him per day and I would reply twice. I was quite overwhelmed." By June 23, 2013, Jones sent an email to Sparkes complaining about not being able to reach her by telephone. The next day, Jones emailed Sparkes insider videos of Die Antwoord with a note: "Just secret k cos u in our clikkkkk xx". By June 26, he sent explicit photos of himself to Sparkes. "There was this power imbalance. It all seemed too surreal to grasp what was happening so I was very much in the moment and trying to come off like a cool person," Sparkes said.

Reaching out: Die Antwoord member Yolandi Visser contacted Zheani Sparkes through Instagram. Credit:Matthew Tompsett Their conversation quickly turned towards the occult, a topic Sparkes frequently wrote about on her Tumblr blog. Jones claimed to be a "warlock" and that Sparkes was his "witch". His phone conversations became more frequent and increasingly personal. It was then he allegedly commented on how Sparkes resembled his daughter, Sixteen Jones, before he began to steer conversations with his young fan towards a more romantic nature. "He was taking on this father figure type of role, also telling me how special I was and ... he was the first one to say I love you," she said. "I was feeling happy and feeling validated and getting constant attention from somebody who everyone loves." According to emails, he soon offered to travel to Australia to meet Sparkes and she agreed. However, that changed in peculiar circumstances. Lyrics from The Question by Zheani "The fear, only 20 years, to find out I'm deceived. The nice man for the internet is not who I came to meet. I never told what happened because the fear of disbelief, For years my brain could not conceive what happened to me."

On a night when Sparkes had her drink spiked while having a post-work drink with her then boss and housemate, Jones began to change plans while Sparkes was feeling the effects of being drugged. "He was calling it a 'spell' to heal me, [speaking in] psycho-babble, unhinged messages referring to the spiking as a 'quickening'. He never called it spiking, I was poisoned and this 'sped things up'," she said. Sparkes says she woke up to messages from Jones claiming to have spoken privately with her boss to arrange for her to travel to South Africa instead. "While I was still under the influence, he convinced me that I should come to Africa instead of him visiting me, [saying] it would be much easier and better - but how scary is Africa when I am in Australia getting my drink spiked?" she said. According to emails seen by the Herald, Jones immediately had his assistants arrange Sparkes' first passport and international flights, booking her travel from Brisbane to Cape Town. Jones reassured Sparkes' mother everything was fine, texting her; "shes in SUCH safe hands. thanks so much 4 everthing Renata!!! xx n."

Rise to fame: Die Antwoord perform with Red Hot Chili Peppers in 2013 in South Africa. Credit:Gallo Images Editorial. When Sparkes met Jones at Cape Town, however, she began to feel uneasy. "He insisted prior to my arrival that I was not to speak when he picked me up from the baggage claim at the airport. It was just him by himself and I wasn't allowed to talk until we got into the car," she said. "I felt like the way you see an animal on David Attenborough react to a lion in the distance." Battling travel fatigue, an ear ache and nerves, Sparkes desperately wanted time to unwind. Instead, she says Jones had other ideas. "I wanted to have a shower because I felt really spun out ... but he wanted to have sex with me right then and there," she said. "I just didn't really know what to do."

Sparkes said that interaction set the tone for the rest of the trip. "It was very clear to me that it wasn't what I thought it would be," Sparkes said. "He didn't have any patience to get to know me or to make sure I felt comfortable or anything; he was in it for what his own plans had been." She became more uncomfortable throughout the trip due to Jones' erratic behaviour. "I noticed he had different voices and personas that went with the voices and he would switch between them," Sparkes said. Jones took her on a trip to the Wilderness near the town of Knysna and allegedly picked up tattoo needles and magic mushrooms to take with Sparkes.

Die Antwoord's Watkin Tudor Jones, aka Ninja, is accused of sexually assaulting an Australian musician Credit:DPA "I didn't want to do it with him is because I had seen weird little cracks in his personality starting to peak through in the four days before that," Sparkes said. She eventually succumbed to his pressure on their last day in the Wilderness, taking the drugs with Jones which she claims heightened his already erratic behaviour. "He was talking about Jesus and then relating Jesus back to him," she said. "Then he switched really quickly and started to talk about his brother committing suicide. [He said,] 'Last time I saw my brother it was right here and we were on shrooms.' I was like 'What?' "I remember tripping and being, 'Crazy celebrity man brought me to the location where he last saw his dead baby brother before he killed himself and they did shrooms together.' "

Sparkes says she was feeling uncomfortable and asked to return to their accommodation before it began raining. As soon as they went back, she says Jones began to aggressively have sex with her against her will, choking her while behaving violently. She says he looked to have passed out immediately after the ordeal, then woke up 30 seconds later and claimed to have no recollection of anything that happened. She refused to discuss the incident with him despite repeated attempts. "I was just in shock. I wouldn't discuss it," she said. "I might be young, naive, dumb, but I knew what had just happened but I didn't know how to address it and I didn't feel safe to address it." Sparkes felt "unsafe in his company" after her alleged ordeal. "I was alone, I didn't know anyone in Africa. I just wanted to get back home to Australia in one piece. There was a lot all at once to come to terms with," she said. She recalls crying on the flight home and falling into a bout of depression upon her return home, drinking regularly.

But the emails and messages from Jones didn't stop. He frequently asked Sparkes to talk about what happened in South Africa and, in one exchange, referred to her trip as a "ritual". In October 2014, an email appeared from Jones asking to meet Sparkes on the group's 2015 Australia tour then another in February 2015, encouraging her to join them as an assistant. Sparkes says she hoped to gain closure on the events in South Africa and joined them but left in tears before she was due to finish, claiming to have been treated like a stranger. After talking about the alleged incident with a loved one years later, she expressed her anger through music. She released a song called The Question in March, retelling her alleged ordeal with Jones in great detail. It gained traction online, prompting Die Antwoord's lawyer to send a cease and desist letter. She ignored it, and claims Die Antwoord were then complicit in releasing revenge porn about her. Content seen by the Herald suggests Jones shared links to the explicit images of Sparkes on his own social media platforms. Sparkes filed a police report claiming to be a victim of revenge porn, in which she accuses Jones of sexually assaulting her.

In a statement Jones' publicist provided, he denied Sparkes' allegations against him. Others speak out The backlash against Sparkes prompted others, including their long-term manager, Jay Savage, to speak up about Die Antwoord's conduct. He saw the same pattern of behaviour of Die Antwoord towards others within the entertainment industry. "There are no relationships that end amicably [with them]. When a relationship ends, it ends with you being consigned to a scrap heap," he said. "The behaviour is ferocious, it's unrepentant, it's unremorseful. Someone can't just be told goodbye, they have to be buried in some way."

Savage, the former head of Sony ATV publishing in South Africa, has known Jones since 1995 when that behaviour first surfaced. "He was always extremely dishonest and would lie to your face but he hadn't yet developed the kind of malice and callousness that came later," Savage said. Die Antwoord's Watkin Tudor Jones, aka Ninja, at a fashion show in Paris in 2018. Credit:AP He ignored much of that for the two decades he worked with Jones as they pursued success in a cut-throat music industry. Their journey towards global fame forged a close bond and Jones would confide to Savage, even about women and sex. "The things I heard were mostly boastful, conquest stories. Indiscreetly I would get shown explicit photos," Savage said.

"He is not someone who is into sex. It's not a sex thing, it's a power thing. It's not a thing of connection, it's a thing of domination. Just how Yolandi and him work together in it, that's the mysterious key to it." They all shared a tight-knit family bond until the relationship ended abruptly in late 2016. Jones and Visser accused Savage of indecent conduct, accusations strongly refuted by Savage and his family. It was a bitter break-up similar to that with their former filmmaker and art curator, Benjay Crossman. "I have worked on hundreds of projects for them and seen them live more than a hundred times. I have been with them around the world," he said. "But somewhere on the way they just disrespected me so badly, they treated me like a dog - an absolute dog."

"Treated me like a dog": Artist Benjay Crossman opens up on Die Antwoord's behaviour. Credit:Flickr/Very Livingston.

Denied credit for any of his artistic work and fearful Die Antwoord's conduct could lead to serious harm for others, Crossman decided to speak about their behaviour. Part of that was Jones' aggression towards women, which he says was never far away during performances. Crossman recalls witnessing the first incident occurring early in their rise to fame with a local support band in South Africa who were excited to meet Die Antwoord. "Ninja grabbed her [the lead singer] by the throat backstage, held her up against a wall and told her how whack she was, how hard she was trying but she wasn't shit. He was choking her," Crossman said. The most public incident, he says, happened in June 2012 in New York during rehearsals for a performance on The David Letterman Show. "They were trying to come up with the dance moves for the song and Yolandi [Visser] was not getting it right and Ninja hit her really hard," he said.

Two years later in Padova, Italy, there was another incident with a girl. "Ninja tried to rip her top off or something," Crossman said. 'Get off of me, get off of me' That girl was Italian-American singer Jade Carroll, who is known by her stage name Dionna Dal Monte. She was successful in Italy with her music but is infamous for other reasons. "I got invited to play the Summer Jamboree which is a festival here that is very, very big and I decided to do a little bit of burlesque for one of my last songs," she said. "I stood in a bikini and I have a swastika tattoo on my chest - on my boob - and it was visible." Getting that tattoo at the age of 16 when she was angry and rebellious was something she already regretted, well before photos of her appeared in Italian newspapers, websites and television where she was labelled the "the Miley Cyrus of Nazi punk".

Off Key: Dionna Dal Monte performs her ill-fated Burlesque show the Summer Jamboree, exposes her swastika tattoo. Credit:Alberto Polonara "I became popular for this tattoo," Carroll said. "People know who I am before I even tell them. They don't know me by face, they just known me as 'Swastika Girl'." Her infamy travelled beyond Italian channels and piqued Die Antwoord's interest. Through an acquaintance in the music scene, she says Die Antwoord "exclusively" invited her to their show in Padova in June 2014. "When I got there I had realised the first thing out of his [Jones'] mouth was 'Swastika Girl'. He yelled it as loud as he could backstage," she said. Just as Jones allegedly presented himself as an expert in the field of the occult to Sparkes, Carroll says he came across as knowledgeable about what he assumed was her key interest.

"[He kept] telling me how much he enjoys Hitler, his band name and everything that he goes about is reminiscent of Hitler and how he would like to build a cult similar to what Hitler had," Carroll said. Caroll said Jones was persistent in wanting to see the tattoo, asking her relentlessly to see it until she obliged. "I showed it to him and he was like 'Oh my god, oh my god', and he started to put his hands in my shirt - it was like a shirt dress you wear with stockings - and he started to literally put his hands on my breasts inside my shirt," she said. "He's grabbing my tits while I am trying to push him off. I said 'Get off of me, get off of me', and he's grabbing my breasts. He puts his hand under my shirt dress, into my stockings and literally tries to put his hand inside my vagina." During the short ordeal, she initially froze out of shock before fending Jones away, running to another room to find her husband.

"When I finally got him off of me, I grabbed my husband," she said. "I said, 'Let's get out of here.' I ran out of there very fast." Days later, she told her husband what happened. It wasn't until she heard Zheani's song, The Question, that she revisited her alleged ordeal. "I knew that for sure she was telling the truth because there was one specific phrase that I knew for a fact that would only come out of a person that would spend time with Ninja," Carroll said. "He told me that I am beautiful and that I am very similar to his daughter." When contacted by The Sun-Herald via his publicist, Jones denied all allegations that were laid against him. "I shouldn't even have to take the time to say this, but these claims by Zheani Sparkes, Jade Carroll and Benjay Crossman are false," Jones said.