Finnbarr and the Glastonbury connection

The positive identification of Finnbarr Hagan last week has led to much excitement, followed by some extremely interesting discussions chez Hoaxtead Research.

We’ve known for some time that on 4 September 2014, when Abraham Christie and Ella Draper brought RD’s children back to London from their month-long torture and indoctrination session, their first stop was at Abe’s brother-in-law’s home. Abe put the children through their paces for Jean Clement’s benefit—and fortunately, Jean Clement made an audio recording of that event, which highlights Abe’s pushing, leading, and coaching the children to describe the imaginary “cult”.

According to Mrs Justice Pauffley’s judgement, Jean Clement recordings were given to police, and on 5 September Barnet police began their investigation at about 3:00 p.m. They conducted their first ABE (Achieving Best Evidence) interviews with the children that evening.

The Araya connection

One point that is not raised in the judgement, but which is mentioned by the little boy in one of his police interviews, is that he enjoyed the trip to Glastonbury that Abe, Ella, his sister and he made between the time they returned from Morocco and their first police interview. In other words, they made the return trip from London to Glastonbury—a 3-hour drive each way—during the day on 5 September. In the above screenshot from the infamous never-ending Hampstead discussion thread on the David Icke Forum, Ledingue points out that “AS” (Araya Soma) claimed that her connection to the case was via her friend Lisa, a former girlfriend of Abe’s. As Ledingue says, it seems an odd choice to drive for six hours with two fatigued children, and for what?

Despite Araya’s claims that she met Abe for the first time after he and Ella had returned from Morocco, it’s more likely that she’d known him for some time, and that he was making that trip to ask her for help.

But help with what?

As we pointed out last year, it seems that Araya became quite deeply involved in promoting the hoax, almost right off the bat. Her mission: to contact alleged film-maker Bill Maloney, and enlist his help in promoting the hoax. In this series of Facebook posts, we see Araya doing her best to interest Maloney, who gives her the cold shoulder:So…no joy there. Maloney was having none of it. Of course this didn’t stop Araya from continuing to spread the hoax far and wide, particularly after Sabine released all the videos and details online.

Gerrish gives Abe the brush-off

When we originally heard the Finnbarr recordings, we wondered whether he might have been sent by Brian Gerrish to assess the situation and determine whether it was worth promoting. Finnbarr has at least a passing familiarity with Gerrish’s UK Column, having written at least one article for them in 2009.

We know that Abe contacted Gerrish early on, as he sent him this email on 11 September 2014: This doesn’t look like an introductory email, the sort of thing one would send to say, “Hi there, Abe here, and have I got a story for you!”

Rather, this looks as though he’s already been in touch with Gerrish, and is simply spelling out the details of the so-called cult. As Drifloud points out, Gerrish apparently turned away from Hoaxtead after receiving this email. He only jumped on board the Hoaxtead train once Sabine had released the videos and the list of names and addresses, via the Tap Blog and Veterans Today respectively.

It sounds very much as though Abe and Ella had been expecting big things from Gerrish, and he let them down badly.

Where does Finnbarr fit in?

We now believe it’s unlikely that Finnbarr was sent by Gerrish to check out the situation and report back. The information he gathered during his interviews with the children would have made the above email redundant: Finnbarr had it all recorded on his phone.

Given Maloney’s seeming indifference to Araya’s requests for assistance on behalf of Abe and Ella, it doesn’t seem very likely that Finnbarr was visiting on Maloney’s behalf, either.

At this point, it’s not really possible to say with any confidence what Finnbarr’s role is—though there is the rather tantalising fact that he seems to have a connection to Glastonbury. There are multiple YouTube videos featuring him with his bagpipes on Glastonbury Tor, and as recently as October 2016 he states on Facebook that he spends time there: It’s probably a stretch to state that Finnbarr has any connection to Araya—even though his visit to Abe and Ella’s London house seems to have occurred within days of the trip they took to Glastonbury. It’s possible, of course, but we don’t want to fall into the trap of fitting facts into a theory, rather than building a theory that matches the facts. Let’s leave rampant speculation and dogmatic cherry-picking to the Hoaxtead mobsters and their ilk, and stick to what we can verify.

The story of Finnbarr remains very much an open book.