Story by: Chapel Fowler
Video by: Cambria Haro
Photos by: Cambria Haro
DURHAM — In the opening shot of his two-minute, 30-second video résumé, Peter Norton, 39, looks directly at the camera and smiles softly as he introduces himself. Then he looks down. The camera zooms in on the left side of his head, which is covered in a swath of thick, curly blonde hair.
In the next shot on the reel, it’s 2003, Norton is 23, and the left side of his head is shaved and covered in a patchwork of stitches, scars and bandages. He has a black eye, and his face is swollen and bruised. He cannot speak.
In the end, the decision to go public with the incident that has defined his entire adult life — a brutal assault at the hands of a nightclub bouncer in South Africa, five taxing years of recovery and the effects that still linger today — was his and his alone.
Sixteen years ago, a life-threatening brain hemorrhage took his speech, forced a creative mind to communicate in new ways and taught him a lot about forgiveness and strength along the way. He’s comfortable with his past and excited for his future. And last year, in a huge step for his recovery and healing, he shared his story.
“My reel, it was quite a difficult thing to put out there …” Norton said. “It was tricky for me to do, but I wanted to.”
‘The softer skills’
His life in Pietermaritzburg, the capital city of the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa, was rooted in creativity. And his first love was music.
As a teenager, he saved money to buy a guitar, wrote his own songs and bonded with his older brother, Richard, over a shared interest in rock bands R.E.M. and U2.
“I’m quite a scientific, technical guy,” Richard said. “The softer skills are his forte.”
Peter pursued a degree in music production and sound engineering. In one class, he had to synchronize 30 seconds of audio with 30 seconds of video. It was the first time he’d worked with the mediums simultaneously, weaving them together to form the best possible story, and he was hooked. His 30-second assignment turned into a five-minute music video.
His focus shifted from sound to film, and, after he graduated in 2001, he gravitated toward the only reliable source of income for a newcomer in the videographer field: shooting weddings.
Within his first few assignments, he knew he’d chosen the right career. And as he got his bearings, he started working independently on side projects, too. Norton wanted bigger events, bigger clients and bigger challenges as a filmmaker.
Before that, though, he took a break. He flew to Nepal and hiked to Mount Everest’s base camp. He lived in Spain and worked on a yacht as a ship hand. In 2003, he returned to South Africa temporarily as a 23-year-old looking for his next adventure.
“That’s the moment my life changed,” he said.
‘Falling like a log’
Pietermaritzburg is a very small city. More of a town, really. The type of place where you bump into someone you know almost daily.
“There’s not much going on,” Jessica Hart said. “There was only one nightclub at one point.”
On Nov. 15, 2003, she went to that nightclub, Crowded House, to enjoy a Saturday night in town. Around 1 a.m., she was standing outside the club talking with a friend, Wendy, when she watched a bouncer escorting a 23-year-old man out the front door.
“Oh, I know this guy,” Hart thought. “I’ve met him before.”
The bouncer gradually backed Norton into a corner formed by the wall of the club and the late-night hot dog stand sitting right beside it. Hart, who briefly met Norton at a party the week before, kept stealing glances as the two men talked. She felt something was off.
“You’ve got the music in the background, so I don’t know what was said between the two,” Hart said. “I just saw the punch coming and, next thing, Peter just falling like a log.”
The bouncer, who was also a professional kickboxer, had knocked out Norton with one swing. He dropped, and his head smacked against the concrete.
Norton only had a small nick on his head, but he couldn’t tell Hart how many fingers she was holding up. Or what his name was. He couldn’t communicate at all. An ambulance arrived and whisked him away to the nearby Grey’s Hospital.
Stories like these — second- and third-hand accounts of the assault that changed his life — are all Norton has. His last memory of that night was driving into town, parking his rusty, yellow Volkswagen and meeting friends from The Purple Turtle, the swanky restaurant where he worked as a waiter, for drinks.
“Waking up in the ICU, I didn’t really know what happened,” Norton said. “I had no recollection. And I couldn’t speak.”
‘Close the book’
In the following months, “hope was rare” for the Norton family, Richard said.
They were simultaneously throwing their weight at a state-led court case against the bouncer, who was charged with attempted murder, and caring around the clock for Norton, who underwent an emergency brain surgery. They were shocked by the assault and furious at various bureaucratic shortcomings.
For one, the ambulance crew that transported Norton from the nightclub to the hospital violated procedure, Richard said, when it didn’t properly secure him in his stretcher. When they arrived at the hospital, a disoriented Norton tried to run away and fell down a flight of stairs.
The defense honed in on that, arguing Norton’s brain injury occurred on that fall, rather than from the punch. The bouncer’s lawyers also argued their client acted in self-defense and painted Norton as a “ranting lunatic” that night.
The state found the bouncer not guilty, and the Nortons decided to devote 100 percent of their efforts to who mattered most: Peter.
He lived with his parents, Michael and Lynne, and attended speech therapy, occupational therapy and physical therapy — the injury on the left side of his brain affected the right side of his body. The most frustrating part, he said, was accepting that if he wanted to speak again, he had to start over.
In a way, it offended him. He was 23. He’d graduated from high school and college. He knew what he was doing. And his mind was working fine. When his therapist gave him a folder’s worth of simple assignments — including large, printed letters for him to sound out — Norton was angry. He was better than that.
“I was a bit reluctant to do that, and I probably didn’t do it as much as I should, those practices of the vowels and the mouth movements,” he said. “If I had, I probably would’ve been able to speak better and a lot quicker.”
He slowly realized he had to put in some effort. He watched people speak and imitated it best he could, and he played golf to calm his nerves. He was starting from Square One, and he was OK with that.
Progress came slowly but surely. In the early stages of his recovery, he could only say one word: f***. As his neurologist later told him, it conveyed the last emotion he felt during the assault before his brain injury. Norton used the versatile curse word for everything. He still laughs at the time a local priest visited him in his hospital room and gave him an ice-cold Coca-Cola.
Norton looked at the gift, smiled at the priest and let out a long, joyful “Fuuuuuuuu ….”
As he moved on to sentences, breakthroughs came at random times. Once, as his parents were leaving his room, he called out “Good night!” Another time, on a golf course, he watched one of his father’s friend hit a drive on the 18th hole and yelled “Good shot!” In both instances, his parents burst into tears of joy.
By age 28, Norton had made an almost full recovery. He was confident in how he spoke and anxious to leave his parents’ home. Five years after the assault robbed him of his next adventure, he moved to London in search of a new one.
‘We can get through anything’
In 2013, Jennifer Macfarlane met Norton for a drink on Kloof Street, a trendy area of Cape Town. She was so hung over from her best friend’s bachelorette party the night before that she almost canceled the first date with her future husband.
They bonded, primarily, over creativity. Macfarlane was a longtime creative director in the advertising field, and Norton was fresh off a two-year stint in London, where he freelanced as a camera man and video editor. He’d also started his own production company, Weaving Pictures.
On their second date, Norton opened up about his assault. It wasn’t exactly by choice. The injury left scar tissue on his brain, which caused occasional post-traumatic epileptic seizures. In the middle of a conversation with Macfarlane, he felt one coming on and explained, quickly yet calmly, what might happen.
She didn’t bat an eye. In her 20s, Macfarlane had frequent panic attacks and, with the help of her psychologist, learned to quell them by focusing externally, on things around her, rather than internally, on herself and the oncoming attack. She led Norton through a few exercises on the spot: counting up to five and back down to one, counting items on the table, counting trees outside.
“I could feel the feelings wash away,” Norton said. “I was like, ‘That was amazing. I’ve never been able to do that.’”
Macfarlane, who grew up in Cape Town, read of Norton’s assault from afar 10 years before she met him. His positive attitude, she said, was both inspiring and contagious. She had recently lost her father and found Norton’s depth and perspective on life a big help.
To this day, she still marvels at how well he’s recovered. Occasionally, Norton will get nervous in a new speaking environment, such as this interview, and take a few seconds to breathe and reset his thought patterns before talking. Outside of that, Jennifer said, you’d never notice.
“It also makes me think: if he can get through that, we can get through anything,” she said. “In terms of looking for a life partner, it was a no-brainer. No one else could stand a chance, because he was the strongest man I’ve ever met.”
When they married in 2016, they had already sent their résumés out to the world in search of the next adventure. Through a New York connection, Jennifer landed a job working with Ulta Beauty in Winston-Salem.
After three years, they moved to Durham four months ago. It more closely mimics the vibrant and diverse South African cities they grew up in. Jennifer works at the advertising firm McKinney, and Peter, who has worked with brands such as Adidas, Reebok, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Land Rover, is looking for freelance projects throughout the Triangle.
Part of his pitch: how his assault changed his approach. Without speech, Norton had to express himself in new ways. And he started noticing those same nuances — a glance, perhaps, or subtle body language — in his subjects.
That was especially helpful in 2015, when he edited an extensive wildlife documentary series for the Smithsonian Channel. He worked with limited action footage of the silent animal subjects and relished the challenge of piecing their stories together, because, as he jokes, “you can’t really ask a lion to ‘do it again.’”
The Nortons’ current focus, however, is that next adventure they were looking for. His name is Mackinnon Norton, and he was born August 13. He already owns a tiny toy camera, and his parents estimate he’ll probably be “the most photographed and filmed baby around.”
When Mackinnon is old enough, Peter looks forward to telling his son his story. There’s a lot to learn, he said, about perseverance, positivity and forgiveness. Especially that last one.
“The way I look at it, I’m OK now,” he said. “I have a small speech problem, and if I get scared I may have a small epileptic fit, but it’s fine with me where I ended up. Even meeting Jen. If it didn’t happen, I probably wouldn’t be here, wouldn’t be with Jen. I can’t hold resentment.”
