When did Hoaxtead really begin? New evidence changes the timeline

If you had asked us a few months ago, “How long has this case been going on?” we might have replied, “Since about January 2015, when Sabine leaked the first reports to Veterans Today and then TheTapBlog”.

But new evidence keeps emerging that pushes that timeline back to at least November 2014, if not much earlier than that.

This has grave implications, as it seems to point to a degree of planning and intent on the part of the Hoaxtead originators: Abraham Christie, Ella Draper, Belinda McKenzie, and Sabine McNeill.

Please note: in contrast to our usual habit, we will not be putting up hyperlinks to several of the following references, as they lead to illegally leaked information that should not have been made public in the first place.

In June 2015, Sabine posted a synopsis of the Hampstead case as she saw it (complete with inaccuracies, misleading information, and outright lies, but that goes without saying). That synopsis contained a link to an 11-page document prepared by Ella, outlining her bizarre allegations.

She claims that Ella approached her in November 2014. Indeed, the link leads to a Dropbox file, which shows a post date of 14 November, 2014:

The 11-page document contains names, addresses, occupations, children’s names, and other confidential material that has no business being posted on the internet, so we are not linking to it. However, it resembles the file that Sabine leaked to TheTapBlog in late January 2015.

And lest there be any doubt as to who owns the Dropbox, this handy notification of authorship can be found in the bottom right-hand corner:

We know that Ella ‘hired’ Sabine and Belinda as her McKenzie friends in late 2014, after she’d fired her legal team, rehired them, and then fired them again. We assume that they were not giving her the answers she wanted, whereas Sabine and Belinda would have been only too happy to oblige.

But is it possible that Ella and Sabine and/or Belinda had met even earlier than November? We have absolutely no proof of this, and it feels dicey to speculate, but we do have this tantalising titbit, sent to us by Sheva Burton last fall:

Has anyone seen any sign of some other ‘Special Operation’ that Belinda’s been running? We haven’t.

As far as we can tell, her dance card was filled with Hoaxtead for the majority of 2015. We do find it interesting that she wanted to recruit volunteers via postal address, rather than email; this seems to imply a more hands-on approach, with Belinda exercising more control over her army of minions.

But wait! There’s more!

But this isn’t the only thing that makes us wonder how long this hoax was in the making: many of you who’ve been around for a while will recall ‘Jacqui Farmer’, late of the Hamster Research blog.

First, a bit of relevant history.

If you’ve been with us from the early days of this blog, you might even remember that we unmasked ‘Jacqui’, revealing her identity as Charlotte Alton Ward, a British woman living in Suriname with a man named Jacco De Boer (whom she calls ‘Video Man’).

In early May, one of our team members discovered the first known video pertaining to the Hampstead case. While it was produced by “Hampstead Research”, the video was hosted on Sabine’s blog on 24 February, 2015:

This video was remarkable, in that it was less ‘scrambled’ than some of Charlotte and VM’s later efforts. The fact that it was scrambled, though, told us that its narrator was probably already known within the Truther community, and was making an effort to remain anonymous.

Once we’d had one of our volunteers unscramble it, we set about comparing it to known voices. It didn’t take long for another team member to discover three YouTube channels, all run by Charlotte Alton Ward. We were interested to note that the channels contained multiple videos by Belinda, as well as by Maggie Tuttle. Sabine was listed as a subscriber.

In fact, along our travels we discovered numerous links between Charlotte Alton Ward and both Belinda and Sabine. This includes the fact that Charlotte was at one time a tenant in Belinda’s house in Highgate. She claims to have witnessed (and wished to help with) the eviction of Declan and Lola Heavey in March 2013. Lola has detailed their experiences with Belinda elsewhere.

We won’t bore you with the details of unravelling Jacqui’s identity, other than to mention three things that might be important here:

1. Charlotte Ward previously ran a blog called ‘Conspirituality’, based upon a word she and a university professor, Dr David Voas, invented. Roughly translated, it conflates conspiracy theories and spirituality. They wrote a paper about it in 2011, of which Charlotte was quite inordinately proud. We’ll expand upon this, perhaps, in a later post; but the main point here is that Charlotte unceremoniously removed her Conspirituality blog from the internet in November 2014, for no obvious reason. It was paid up until November 2015, according to DNS records.
2. In November 2014, as well, Charlotte Ward changed her name to ‘Jacqui Farmer’ (based on translation of Jacco De Boer’s name into English).
3. And also in November 2014 (which is getting to look like a very busy month indeed!), ‘Jacqui Farmer’ self-published her (really badly written) e-book, Illuminati Party.

In fact, November 2014 is beginning to look very much like ‘launch time’ for Belinda’s ‘Special Operation’, which (if we are guessing correctly) could have been planned much earlier. Once Sabine had leaked the documents to TheTapBlog, ‘Jacqui Farmer’ began to record videos, then set up Hamster Research, which for a number of months served as a centering point for those who believed in the hoax.

We do realise that we’re running the risk of stepping straight into the rabbit-hole here. Please keep in mind that we’re not stating anything definitive, and we don’t want to fall into the trap of confirmation bias, where everything starts to look like it supports a preconceived plot.

We’re interested to know, though: what do you think?