TikTok star Habeeb Hamzat, popularly known as Peller, has disclosed that he suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a football coach as a teenager.
He said the experience derailed a football career that could have taken him to the World Cup.
Speaking on the latest episode of The Honest Bunch Podcast which was published on YouTube on Monday, Peller said, “I’m supposed to be at the World Cup currently.”
He said he was about 14 or 15 years old at the time. “My coach was gay. I didn’t know what that was about then,” he said.
He explained that the coach used to gather the team at an uncompleted building before training.
“There was an uncompleted building the coach used to sit down and gather us before we went to play football on the main field,” he said.
He said latecomers were usually fined, and he could not always pay.
“He will tell the rest to go to the field and say, ‘Habeeb, wait. You came late,’” Peller recalled, adding that the coach would then call him closer. “He will ask me to come closer to him and start pressing my breasts,” he said.
Peller recounted one occasion when the coach summoned him to Agric, Ikorodu, on the pretext of an errand.
“One day he asked me to come to Agric in Ikorodu. I went to meet him there. He asked me to help him bring something. The thing had no meaning,” he said.
On arrival, he said the coach undressed inside a one-room apartment. “When I gave him the thing, he had opened his body. It was in a one-room. Me, I was just there. I was sitting. He asked me to come to the bed. So I told him, ‘Come to the bed as how? I just came to give you something,” he said.
He said the coach tried to placate him with a promise.
“He said I shouldn’t worry that he will be letting me play full matches,” Peller said.
He recalled stepping outside to join other children playing ball nearby, which angered the coach.
“Some children were playing ball outside of his window. I went there and joined them. He got angry and was asking why. He called me back inside and locked his door,” he said.
He said he looked at the coach and told him he needed to urinate, and that as the coach opened the door, he ran away, adding that the coach never saw him again after that.
Peller said the incident pushed him away from football.
“It was then I became wise and started doing my tap tap tap,” he said, referring to his shift into livestreaming.
He added that he had barely any following before meeting Jarvis. “I used to have two views, three views before I met this ‘aunty’ on livestream,” he said.
He said he later learned, through an associate in Lekki, that the coach had a history of similar misconduct elsewhere.
“My camera guy asked if I knew coach DY. He said it was a coach that was gay in a place he mentioned that he used to live before, that they found out the man used to do gay stuff and they chased him away. I said I knew him, that he came to Ikorodu,” Peller said.