Gerrish hitches a ride on Hoaxtead’ s coattails

Despite dragging his feet when Abe and Ella tried to enlist him and Bill Maloney to help them promote the Hampstead hoax in early September 2014, it seems Brian Gerrish decided to include a melodramatic, lie-riddled account of the story in a speech he made at one of Andy Peacher’s conferences this past summer.

Many thanks to Sheva Burton for pointing this one out to us: the references to Hoaxtead start just past the 31-minute mark.

Although Gerrish avoided this hoax like the plague when it first surfaced, he picked up on it when the videos of RD’s children went up online, and reported on it pretty regularly during the spring of 2015, until Sabine’s arrest outside the Royal Courts of Justice in early August 2015.

So what would make him decide to dredge the hoax out of cold storage four months ago? That’s open for debate, but what’s very clear is that his version of the story is peppered with falsehoods.

For starters, at 31:50 he states, “I was able to meet the mother and her partner. I was able to speak to the boy”. Really, Brian? Really?

Not that we generally take Abe’s word for…well, anything, really. But he was quite emphatic when he disavowed Gerrish and Maloney last winter, because they both sat on their hands rather than pitching in to help (as we believe Belinda had assured Abe they would):

In this post from last March, we show that Gerrish received an email from Abe and Ella on 11 September 2014…the day the children were taken into police protective custody. So how did he manage to “speak to the boy”?

Answer: he didn’t.

He’s making it up to make himself look like an important part of the Hoaxtead mythos, when the reality is that he only covered it when the story went public in February 2015 because everyone else was, and he’d have looked a right tit if he hadn’t.

A little further along in the same speech, Gerrish claims that he “knows” the police were forced to cover up the alleged cult, because he was present with a group of police officers—”good men”, he says—when it happened.

Izzat so, Brian? Somehow it seems unlikely. For one thing, what would Gerrish be doing hanging out with a group of cops, “good men” or otherwise, when they received some sort of order (from whom?) to quash the cult allegations.

The rest of his version of the story has more holes in it than a Swiss cheese—if we were to enumerate them all, we’d be here all day.

Why is he bothering? Well, Gerrish has always liked to play the Big Man on Campus, and what better way than with a hoax that’s so full of twists and improbable turns that he could add almost anything he wanted—so long as it made him look important—without anyone questioning the veracity of his claims.

Because ultimately, it’s all about Gerrish, isn’t it?