Hoaxtead FAQ: Promoters of the hoax

Over the past few weeks we have been constructing a ‘frequently asked questions’ section of this blog, to enable readers to quickly review the basics of the Hampstead SRA hoax. We’ve talked about who forced RD’s children to lie about having been abused by a cult; we’ve reviewed the medical evidence; we’ve looked at the lack of forensic evidence; we’ve talked about the police investigation; and we’ve discussed the videos of the children, and how and why they were made.

Today we’re going to delve a bit deeper.

While the basics of the hoax are relatively straightforward—an embittered and angry mother and her new boyfriend decide to cut her children’s father out of their lives forever by alleging that he sexually abused the children. While they’re at it they decide to trash a school community they felt had offended them.

What makes this hoax different is the way in which it was conceived, constructed, and marketed to a particular audience. In this FAQ we’ll attempt to reconstruct what happened, who was involved, and why it played out as it did.

1. Aside from Abraham Christie and Ella Draper, who was involved in promoting the hoax?

In the beginning, the core team consisted of Belinda McKenzie and Sabine McNeill, who run an organisation called the Association of McKenzie Friends. They had worked together in the past on various other projects involving the family courts, but most recently before the Hampstead SRA hoax began they had both been involved in promoting the Hollie Greig hoax in Scotland.

Sabine herself has admitted that she knew Ella prior to May 2014, through their shared interest in yoga and nutrition. We know that Ella met her new boyfriend, Abe, at a raw foods event in that month.

Both Sabine and Belinda have cultivated many contacts in the online ‘truther’ community over the years. One such woman, Charlotte Alton Ward, had been 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.

Charlotte Ward previously ran a blog called Conspirituality, based upon a word she and  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  inordinately proud. In November 2014, Charlotte unceremoniously removed her Conspirituality blog from the internet, for no obvious reason. It was paid up until November 2015, according to DNS records.

In November 2014, Charlotte Ward changed her name to ‘Jacqui Farmer’ (a play on her boyfriend Jacco De Boer’s name). During that month, ‘Jacqui Farmer’ self-published her (really badly written) e-book, Illuminati Party, allegedly an autobiographical work. In effect, Charlotte completely changed her identity, and used the book to cement her bona fides within the ‘truther’ community.

We believe that Belinda recruited Charlotte to help publicise the Hampstead SRA hoax, and that this shift in identity was done deliberately, enabling Charlotte to operate under cover of her new name.

2. The videos of the children were released in February 2015. Is that when the hoax started?

We would argue that it began much earlier than that.

On 11 September 2014, the day the children became subjects of a Protection Order and were removed from Ella’s care, Abe and Ella emailed Brian Gerrish of the UK Column, in hopes that he would pick up the case and help them with publicity:Abe also tried to pull his friend Bill Maloney into the hoax at this point, but apparently this didn’t work out as planned. Abe expressed indignation that Maloney wouldn’t play along, and later turned on both Gerrish and Maloney, denouncing them as “shills”.

It seems odd to us that at a time when the children have been taken into protective custody, Abe and Ella are thinking more about how to publicise their case online than about how to have the children returned to them. While their efforts to involve Gerrish and Maloney failed, we think it was the first attempt to put the hoax into operation.

The next steps occurred on or about 14 November 2014.

That was the date when Sabine created a Dropbox file in which she posted Ella’s original “witness statement” naming the children, parents, teachers, clergy, and businesses in Hampstead that she and Abe wished to target:

Oddly enough, Ella did not actually fire her legal team until December 2014, which makes Sabine’s Dropbox post look premature. Why would Sabine bother doing all this prep work, unless she knew she was about to take over the case?

14 November is also the date when Charlotte Ward self-published her Illuminati Party e-book, officially beginning her new life as “Jacqui Farmer”:

However, there is reason to suspect that the hoax had been in the planning stages since May/June 2014.

On 8 June, 2014, Belinda McKenzie published the following call to arms on her blog:

Dear All

After hitting a low point last month, financially that is to say I’m happy to report that I’m back in the saddle, thanks to the great generosity of a dozen supporters who between them have enabled me to continue to make trips up to Scotland in the coming few weeks – YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE and I’m exceedingly grateful to you, you’ll certainly be on the Roll of Honour when this fight is concluded and hopefully successful!

Not a moment too soon as the really active part of the Battle, what I call my ‘Special Operation’ is about to commence. I mentioned this a few weeks back and asked for volunteers willing to allow me to inform you & hopefully enlist you VIA YOUR POSTAL ADDRESS – maybe that was the problem, I didn’t at the time give my my postal address? so here it is 83 PRIORY GARDENS LONDON N6 5QU.

So drop me a line and all will be revealed, as long as I’m satisfied that is that you’re not a McKenzie Enemy (I’ve a good idea who all of those are by now!)

Even without any ‘volunteers’ I will still be able to carry out the Operation but it will certainly help to have a few people assisting – but NB it can be done from home and will not take much of your time at all.

In usual Belinda style, it combines a not-very-subtle hint that her finances are at a low ebb, and a promise of great things to come, for those willing to pitch in and help with her ‘Special Operation’. She ends this post with a hint:

 But I’m more and more of the mind that to beat this enemy I call Paedophilia UK…shouting on the street is not going to achieve very much, in fact in Scotland it will just get me locked up, as I’ve already been warned will happen – “McKenzie is next!” has appeared on certain blogs and forums recently….

How to do, how to do? has been churning in my mind all year, on ever-dwindling resources, with only a relatively few faithful supporters (not so much of me but of the cause) when an army is needed! Where, how and when to strike when there may only be one chance to do so?? Etc., round and round, day and night – people have been telling me I look a bit ‘spaced out’ these days, no wonder, if they realised what’s going on inside my head!

Well happy to say I now have the answer to all the questions so it’s just a case of rolling out the rest of the programme and reassuring everyone this really is entirely doable.

While this could have referred to another project she had up her sleeve, so far as we can tell, her dance card was filled with Hoaxtead for the latter part of 2014 and the majority of 2015.

Indeed, on Belinda’s blog of 16 November:

Apologies for the long lapse in sending out ‘Battle News’ and the less said about why I ‘dried up’ for 5 months the better.

Fortunately the mainstream press & media are really onto the issue of Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) these days and there’s been no shortage of articles and reports to read on the subject, has there, plus innumerable videos online. Which is absolutely great, public awareness cannot fail to be growing! Yet there’s still nowhere near enough real ACTION to get at the core of the problem and a lot of fiddling about at the edges, for example, the string of white-haired old men hauled up before the courts charged with abusing teenagers decades ago….

Now, one of the reasons I’ve been out of communication (although have given the odd ‘sign of life’ here and there so no one would be worried – I assume most on this mailing list approve of me?! Big Hi here to McKenzie Enemies, love you!) is that I’ve been battling all year with a) BT, Microsoft & Amazon aka ’internet connectivity’ and b) the damned finances, having taken on 4 more ‘dependents’, all victims of/fugitives from the skewed British so-called justice system struggling to get children back and urgently needing help with accommodation, travel, legal fees etc.

This is the first outright mention of Belinda’s involvement with Ella that we’re aware of.

She follows up with a zinger:

I find money largely boring and am not remotely interested in it, apart from it’s being an indicator of the ebb-and-flow of human psychological compulsion which is a fascinating whole area. But as I’ve discovered painfully this year, lack of money is a serious impediment to being able to help people, especially children, or even being able to move around, hence my public activity has more or less ground to a stop, despite a few friends momentarily pitching in to help, god bless you, your names are inscribed in gold on my heart.

The obvious solution is to SET UP A CHARITY which is what I’m now in the process of doing. After a few months dithering around trying to decide whether I really do want to run a charity? yet another children’s charity, on top of the hundreds already registered with the Charity Commission? I’m going to take the plunge so THE KNIGHT FOUNDATION which is going to be a charity with a difference! will be launched at long last on 30^th November this month in Camden London (see below details of venue & time).

This is the first public mention of Belinda’s infamous non-charity, the Knight Foundation. It was originally set up to receive donations in support of Belinda’s latest cause: the Hampstead Hoax.

3. Why did Abe and Ella contact Brian Gerrish in September 2014? What did they hope to achieve?

If Abe and Ella’s real goal was to have the case properly investigated, and the children’s stories vindicated, sending the story to Brian Gerrish was an unutterably foolish choice. They must have known that doing so would foul the police investigation, and put them both in a very bad light. It would make it harder, not easier, for Ella to get the children back.

However, it’s clear now that their goal was never to have the case criminally investigated. As they made clear during the ‘Finbarr video’, they had never intended to get the police and CPS involved in this case. The only reason the police had become involved is that Abe’s brother-in-law Jean-Clement Yaohirou had taken his recording to the police, fearing that the children’s allegations might be true.

In fact, having the police involved had thrown a real spanner in the works; and now, the police had removed the children from Ella’s care.

The original idea had been to take the video evidence to Family Court, where Ella had always dealt with RD in the past. They would present their ‘incontrovertible evidence’ that the kids had been abused, RD would be banished from their lives forever, and the families and teachers they named would have to undergo the indignity of a social services investigation—revenge for the slights Abe and Ella felt they’d endured during their time in Hampstead.

Once all that was accomplished, they could work with Belinda and Sabine to spread the story of ‘ritual abuse’ across the internet.

Once people saw the images of two adorable children describing the most foul abuse possible, all they’d have to do was sit back and watch the donations start pouring in.

Instead, Jean-Clement had taken his covertly recorded audio to the police, and Abe’s old nemesis, DC Steve Martin, who knew him from his past child abuse charges, had come into the picture. And now, instead of RD losing his children forever, they’d been taken from Ella.

The whole plan was going pear-shaped in a hurry, and Abe and Ella realised that if they wanted to salvage anything from it, they needed to act, and fast.

So they sent the bait to Gerrish, hoping he’d jump on it and start getting the story out onto the troofer airwaves. However, it seems that rather than jump on the story of a lifetime, Gerrish passed the story on:

U got this email 11.9.14 – the day children were snatched, U said nothing then. WHY

This is just part of the original email sent by ella to Brian Gerrish on the night Xxxxx and Xxxxxxx were UNLAWFULLY snatched by police & Barnet Social Services. Gerrish kept his mouth shut and just passed the email to fellow SHILL, Bill Maloney – who passed it to a police informer named Nathan Wedger. Wedger passed it back to police, and thence to DC Steve Martin – one of a gang of corrupt officers who were busy scapegoating the children, and covering up the rapes and murders. Gerrish said nothing publicly until the case exploded on the internet six months later.

Gerrish would only jump on the hoax bandwagon in February 2015, after Sabine had leaked the videos and list of alleged cult members. By that time, it had become the story of the moment on the troofer internet circuit. If Gerrish had ignored it at that point, he would have looked woefully out of touch.

4. But why would anyone bother creating a hoax like this? What would the motive be?

The simplest explanation is money. However, we don’t think this tells the whole story.

A slightly more complex way of looking at it would be that Ella’s interest in keeping the children from seeing their father again, Abe’s interest in paedophilia and cult practices,  Sabine’s interest in promoting the idea that the child protection system is corrupt, and Belinda’s interest in collecting money from gullible people coincided to create a ‘perfect storm’.

The original plan seems to have been for Abe and Ella to “collect evidence” that the children had been abused; this happened while they were all in Morocco during August 2014.

The phone videos, which were long enough to offer tantalising glimpses of what had happened, but short enough to leave the watcher wanting more, were created as part of the marketing plan. This was done in much the same way that a company might produce a series of similar-but-different adverts, which they would roll out to boost and maintain interest over a number of months.

They were designed to appeal to the ‘truther community’ online, and they succeeded at that: by the time Mrs Justice Pauffley handed down her judgement on 19 March 2015, it was estimated that at least 2 million people had viewed the videos. That figure has probably doubled or quadrupled since then.

These kind of viewing figures can lead to massive donation figures, which Belinda anticipated when she created the Knight Foundation.

5. If all this is true, why are none of the original Hampstead hoax promoters speaking to one another now?

Things began to go south when Abe and Ella rushed to Abe’s brother-in-law’s house the night they arrived home from Morocco. Abe just couldn’t wait to put the children through their paces in front of Jean-Clement; he lacked the judgement to realise that his brother-in-law, like any normal person, would feel compelled to take his evidence to the police.

The police investigation concluded with the children being removed from Ella’s custody, which threw the entire plan into a tailspin: now, the focus had to switch to getting the kids back under their mother’s control.

Sabine “accidentally on purpose” released the videos, along with Ella’s witness statement, to Henry Curteis of The Tap Blog in February 2015; this infuriated Ella and Abe, who had planned to dole the videos out one at a time, but now found that the hoax had blown up in their faces.

Belinda and Sabine tried to put a good face on it, turning the retrieval of the children into one of their “cases” and parading in front of the Royal Courts of Justice…until Sabine discovered that both she and Ella were wanted by the police. Both fled the country—Sabine to Germany, and Ella to Spain—leaving Abe and Belinda to fight the battle on their behalf.

Ultimately, Abe would turn on the Association of McKenzie Friends, feeling that they had undermined his and Ella’s strategy; Sabine was arrested when she returned to the UK; Belinda was served with an injunction preventing her from discussing the the case; and Charlotte Ward’s Hampstead Research blog was beset with problems, culminating in Abe and Ella claiming that she, too, was a shill.

Clashes of personality were inevitable with this volatile pack of psychopaths and narcissists; the wonder is probably that the entire hoax didn’t go south sooner than it did.

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As we build the Hoaxtead FAQ, we are asking our readers to contribute questions they’d like to see addressed. Let us know what you think we should be discussing here, and we’ll do our best to add it to the FAQ!