Adv. Kotie Engelbrecht (Vercueil) is an Advocate of the High Court of South Africa with over three decades of experience in law and corporate governance. Admitted as an Advocate in 2015 and holding an LLB from the University of South Africa (UNISA), she is a member of the Gauteng Society of Advocates and the ADR Network SA panel. It is her lived experience as a survivor of gender-based violence, narcissistic abuse, and coercive control that compelled her to write this book — bringing both the sharp analytical mind of a legal practitioner and the courageous voice of a woman who has lived through the very trauma these pages address.
Speaking up
There are no bruises. There is no single incident a court can point to. And yet the damage is total — a mind dismantled, a bank account emptied, a family turned into a weapon. This is narcissistic abuse and coercive control: violence without a mark, waged in silence, and for too long, unanswerable in law.
Speaking Up is the book South Africa's legal system has been waiting for. Advocate Kotie Engelbrecht (Vercueil) — a High Court advocate and a survivor herself — takes the reader inside the psychology of the narcissist, the eight stages of psychological enslavement, and the cult-like dynamics of the narcissistic family, before doing what no one has done with this clarity: translating that lived horror into the statutes, case law and courtroom strategy that can actually hold abusers accountable.
Drawing on South African legislation, international precedent from the UK, Ireland, Australia and Canada, and a bold proposal for a new civil compensation framework, this is at once a legal manual for practitioners, a survival guide for victims, and an unflinching call to lawmakers to finally criminalise coercive control.
Woven throughout are the real voices of survivors — raw, unedited testimony that turns legal argument into undeniable human truth.
Speaking Up is a reckoning. It is a roadmap. And it is proof that the silence is finally breaking.
More info →This book is both my testimony and my fight for justice — for all of us.