Angela’s lies: Garden fence gossip gone mad

It can be very difficult for those of us who are more or less normal to comprehend what makes someone like Angela Power-Disney tick. Watching last week’s video with Angela and Heather Brown/Pru Halliwell (or Andrea Garland, no wait, we mean Susan Garland…or whatever she’s calling herself today) we were struck by the almost complete absence of truth, from start to finish.

Similarly, this snippet of Angie-speak, shared yesterday by Liza Radley, illustrates Angela’s ability to create fiction seemingly from thin air, and then wave it about triumphantly, as though it were truth:

Where to even begin?

We know for a fact that no one at Barnet Social Services has leaked any info—despite Heather Brown’s claim that she called and spoke to someone. Two of our readers, separately, contacted Barnet Social Services with the allegation. Both readers reported back that Barnet took the possibility of a leak seriously, but following internal inquiries, they were able to provide assurances that no one had leaked anything at all about RD or his children.

So it follows that none of what Angie claims about “unsupervised access including weekends away” and “social services saying they are not old enough to get Judge to stop his access” is even remotely true.

Angela claims to have “got info that Abe was a pimp in the past”—yes, she “got info” all right. Once again, straight from Heather Brown, whose acquaintance with the truth is just as distant as Angela’s.

We’ve already discussed Angela’s false allegations about Ella having participated in making child sex abuse videos, and thoroughly debunked them. (Incidentally, we note that the person who Angela claimed gave her the “intel” [no one ever shares gossip with Angie, it’s always “intel”] has fled Facebook, and really, who can blame her?)

Why all the lies?

The phrase “ipsa scientia potestas est” (“knowledge itself is power”) is an old one, appearing in Francis Bacon’s Meditationes Sacrae in 1597. Of course, Bacon was speaking of “knowledge” as belonging to God, but it’s a truism that the person who holds knowledge has an advantage over those who don’t. Several hundred years before Bacon, Imam Ali wrote, “Knowledge is power and it can command obedience. A man of knowledge during his lifetime can make people obey and follow him and he is praised and venerated after his death. Remember that knowledge is a ruler and wealth is its subject”.

Angela’s claims to “special” knowledge, while completely spurious, nevertheless have succeeded in convincing some of the more gullible troofers (those who are still speaking to her, at least). She collects “intel”, and doles it out to her followers as though she’s offering them a precious gift—something they won’t get from anyone else. The fact that none of her “intel” happens to be true is really of no consequence to her, or to them: the power comes in the ability to be seen to have the knowledge…er, excuse us, “intel”.

Now and then, as in the story about Ella and the CSA videos, Angela’s “intel” backfires on her. She lost dozens of previously loyal followers over that one, many of whom defected to the Team Costa. Many people would have called it quits at that point, but not Angela. Without missing a beat, she simply carried on.

Whispers as weapons

Before the advent of the internet, Angela would have been (and probably was) the proverbial garden fence gossip. She’d have been the person who claimed to know everything about everyone, and once you were inside her charmed circle, she’d have told you, in a gleeful whisper, whose husband was seen coming out of another neighbour’s back door in the middle of the night, or which teenaged girl had to be whisked away for a “long holiday” after getting a bit too friendly with a boy down the road.

The neighbourhood gossip uses whispers as weapons. Knowledge, whether true or not, becomes ammunition, to be aimed at anyone who displeases in any way.

Angela denigrates those she doesn’t like—anyone who’s offended her, as Abe and Ella did by turning against her and depriving her of her “special status” within the Hampstead SRA hoax. She saves up “intel”, hoarding bits of malicious gossip, for the inevitable time when her current best friend steps out of line and becomes her bitterest enemy…and they always do. Angela’s friends have learned to their sorrow that anything shared with her can and will be twisted into hateful gossip, and used against them repeatedly.

Betrayal and backstabbing are second nature to her—whatever it takes to help cement her status at the top of the Hoaxtead mobster heap.

In sociological circles, this behaviour falls under the heading of “relational aggression”: it’s a way for an individual to become powerful within their peer group, to be viewed as central to the group.

However, while this behaviour can lead some people to follow someone like Angela, in the end it will work against her, undermining her position as more and more people recognise her gossip and smear tactics for the lying, vicious power grabs that they really are.