Happy birthday, Hoaxtead Research!

A year ago today, Hoaxtead Research published its first post: The Deranged Jacqui Farmer And Her Secret Fantasies.

Started by ‘Scarlet Scoop’ (who also originated the word ‘Hoaxtead’), our blog has always been about applying scepticism and reason to the Hampstead Satanic abuse hoax, and supporting the children, families, teachers, clergy, and residents of Hampstead against the hoax-pushers.

In its early days, though, Hoaxtead Research was also a shot across the bow of another blog, known variously as Hampstead Reach-arse or Hamster Research, run by a woman calling herself ‘Jacqui Farmer’, that had begun polluting the internet a few weeks earlier. Scarlet Scoop articulated our blog’s goal in this Mission Statement:

If Hampstead Research is ITV, then we are Channel 4. And in the spirit of C4’s  ‘Alternative Queen’s Speech’, we like to offer alternatives to the brain-hurting banality you would endure “over on the other side”….

Abe, Ella, Sabine, Jacqui, Bellender, Nutty Neelu, Sheriff Yank Skank et al have done enough damage to the Hampstead community. They have illegally published the names, addresses, phone numbers and descriptions of teachers, parents, social workers, clergymen, judges and churchgoers. They have slandered, threatened and harassed hundreds of innocent people. They have abused two vulnerable children by illegally plastering their confidential testimonies all over the web, thereby wrecking their lives as well as deterring other abused children from coming forward in future.

These nasty, evil people have broken enough laws, destroyed enough innocent lives, wreaked enough havoc, told enough lies. And it is time to stand up and say no. No more can these cowards be permitted to ride roughshod over the laws of our land and the morals that we hold dear. This is not medieval England or 17^th century Salem and ridiculous satanic panic campaigns run by Bible-thumping maniacs will not be tolerated in 21^st century London. Hoaxteaders, we hereby comprehensively reject your farcical claims that an entire school shuts down every Wednesday for an orgy with the kids (without ever getting caught) – and that thousands of babies have been cooked and eaten at McDonald’s by hundreds of people.

It didn’t take long for the Hoaxtead gang to realise that we meant business. Early on, ‘Jacqui Farmer’ said:

Scarlet Scoop is following the blog and nearly every time I make a post it is twisted and posted elsewhere. S/he is posting the c-word in the comments. Dirty, vicious, nasty stuff; abusive. So someone could either an obsessed cult member. Or a paid up member of the security services? My email has been – illegally – hacked.

‘Jacqui’ was wrong on almost all counts—no ‘c-words’, no cult members, no security services, no email hacking. We’ll freely admit that we were following her posts and responding to her libel and harassment of the people of Hampstead.

In fact, we were going further than that: it had quickly become clear that ‘Jacqui’ was a pseudonym, and the team of committed volunteers behind Hoaxtead Research decided to ferret out her true identity, in hopes that the police would be able to press charges against her.

Teamwork: The soul of Hoaxtead Research

Our blog has always been a team effort, though one person (originally Scarlet Scoop, followed in late August by El Coyote) does the actual writing. The effort to identify and track down ‘Jacqui’ was a classic example of Hoaxtead Research teamwork at its best.

She had gone to some trouble to disguise herself. Her trademark videos were narrated in a digitally altered voice that more than one person described as reminiscent of Vogon poetry. This immediately led us to wonder whether she was a known quantity in the truther community, who for some reason wanted to remain anonymous.

After many false starts, one of our team discovered Jacqui’s first Hoaxtead video (on one of Sabine’s blogs) that seemed less altered than subsequent productions. Another team member, who works as a sound engineer, removed the digital altering, and was able to produce something resembling a human voice. But whose?

We searched in vain for a match, until we learned that another group had been hunting for ‘Jacqui’ as well. We joined forces, and they told us that they had found three YouTube channels in which the videos sounded as though they’d been narrated by the same voice we’d unscrambled:

The name [we] identified is Charlotte Ward who wrote a research paper with professor David Voas at the Institute of Social Change, Manchester Uni, published in a peer-reviewed journal 2011: “The emergence of conspirituality”….

The chain was roughly… the YouTube channel Eddythecat7.. Somewhere the word “conspirituality” popped up…. I googled this odd word and found the paper with Voas. Then the YouTube channels conspirituality & conspiritualize… then a comment left on a forum signed off “regards charlotte ward” by a poster handle “carleea”… and a lot of places she’s used that name including on [the David Icke forum].

Using voice recognition software, we were able to confirm that the other group’s Charlotte Ward was indeed ‘Jacqui Farmer’. In fact, we discovered that Charlotte had left a great many more fingerprints online than she believed.

For example, she accidentally told us her email address when she forgot to close her tabs during one of her videos:

So much for us ‘illegally hacking’ her email—she’d left it on one of her Eddy the Cat videos, in plain sight! (Alton was her married name.)

We were unsurprised to find that Charlotte was a long-time friend of Belinda and Sabine; and after a bit more digging we discovered that she and her ‘video man’, Jacco de Boer (‘Jackie Farmer’, geddit?) were holed up in Suriname. This rendered Charlotte immune from immediate prosecution, though the police tell us that should she return to the UK, they will have a nice welcoming committee ready to greet her.

The quest to find ‘Jacqui Farmer’ was one of our first endeavours, but over the past year we’ve worked to expose many, many more of the Hoaxtead crew’s lies and foibles. We rely in large part on input from team members, who are continually sending in titbits of information, observations, and evidence of the Hampstead hoax.

Our goal remains the same: to stand up and say a resounding “No!” to the liars, scam artists, and gullible dupes who’ve done their best to destroy lives by spreading this hoax. And we’ll keep on doing that for as long as need be, until Hoaxtead is nothing but a bad memory.