Finding Abe and Ella’s price: Why are they recanting?

In yesterday’s post, we noted that in their efforts to evade the Awkward Question several of us have been asking them for the past month, Abe and Ella managed to score a beautifully executed own goal. The question (why did Ella not notice that her ex-husband and ex-partner both had gigantic “cult” tattoos in very private places?) seems to have caused some serious squirming and scrambling, until finally Abe blurted out that RD didn’t get his tattoo until after he’d left Ella; and Ella seems to have told American interviewer Nathan Stolpman that in fact, Mr Draper wasn’t actually in the cult after all:

(S)he mentioned that Mr. Draper, her ex-husband, was also involved with the cult, the Satanic cult. I’ve spoken with her now since and asked her about it and she says now she doesn’t believe that was the case and that was maybe something she was prompted into coming up with at the time when she was under duress.”

In fact, the notion that Mr Draper was not just “in” the cult, but was its major financial benefactor, has been put about by none other than the Defective Detective herself, Kristie Sue Costa.

In a blog post written on 28 April 2016, she states this very clearly:

So according to Kristie Sue, who of course takes her orders directly from the Gospel According to Abe and Ella,

There is one single person responsible for this entire Hampstead situation, drum roll please….

Ella Draper’s first husband.  He is responsible for sending RD to Ella.

From the “Jean-Clement recording”,
“All three children are involved in the cult now. From two different men, who are cult members. She came to me, because she knew I didn’t, I wasn’t a weird guy. She knew there was something, I was clean. And she knew, in her heart, that I could help her. She didn’t know how. I didn’t know how. … Her first husband, he sent the second man to her. “

Why doesn’t anyone talk about this?

Mr. Draper & his wife (redacted) were in the same cult as RD. Mr Draper is supposedly the cult financier, which would make sense since he works in the banking industry.

Kristie Sue further hammers the point home: Mr Draper and RD were totes deffo not only in the cult together, but they shared poor foolish Ella around, as a kind of cultic brood mare.

So let’s see if we’ve got this straight. Mr Draper met Ella in Moscow while she was getting her masters in art history, got her pregnant and they moved to the UK. Away from her family, in a foreign land, she gave birth to their son (redacted). Got it.

Things didn’t work out so Mr and Mrs Draper divorced and Ella was left to raise their son.

Mr Draper then sends his cult buddy RD to Ella to produce more children, thus child A and child G. Knowing full well that RD was in his cult, Mr Draper must have known how abusive and sadistic RD was.

(Redacted), Ella’s first son with Mr Draper, was a witness firsthand to RD’s abusive ways.

What’cha gonna do, Kristie Sue?

You can see Kristie Sue’s dilemma here.

Her entire premise—that the alleged cult operates through some kind of insane “buddy” system, whereby members pass unwitting sexual partners around to one another to breed children for the cult—has now been completely demolished. If Mr Draper wasn’t in the cult, then he couldn’t have passed Ella along to RD. He couldn’t have introduced his wife and son to the cult. He couldn’t have financed the cult.

And to make matters worse, It’s now becoming clear that Ella was motivated to “revise” the hoax storyline not only by the fact that people were beginning to ask her uncomfortable questions about her ability to notice a great honking tattoo in a very unusual, very obvious place.

It would seem that Ella and Abe have another, even more pressing reason to remove Mr Draper, his current wife, and Ella’s eldest son from their filthy narrative.

It’s the money that matters

It all boils down to cash, or the lack thereof.

You see, when Ella and Mr Draper split up, Ella was able to wangle a rather generous spousal maintenance agreement from her ex. Since she and RD never married, the court order which states that Mr Draper must “pay or cause to be paid” a certain amount to his ex-wife has never been varied.

At some point in the past year, we believe that Mr Draper grew tired of supporting a woman who is a) a fugitive from UK police, and b) a nasty bitch who has seen fit to splash the names of his wife, his son, and himself across the internet, complete with false allegations that he is part of a paedophile/cannibal cult.

And so he did what any right-thinking person would do: he cut her off. We suspect that he wouldn’t have been able to just stop paying her, as he’d have been in violation of his court order (which some people do take seriously, Ella notwithstanding). However, there are ways to ensure that the money could be “caused to be paid”, such as putting it into a holding account which Ella could only claim if she were to return to the UK.

Which she definitely doesn’t want to do. Something about outstanding arrest warrants, we believe.

The long and short of it: Ella and Abe are completely, 100% skint.

And as it turns out, the readers of this blog can claim some of the credit for this sad state of affairs. Remember all those crowd-funding sites you protested? Those were to have been Abe and Ella’s financial lifeboat. And you, naughty Hoaxtead researchers that you are, torpedoed it to the bottom of the sea. Well done, all of you!

How much for that recantation?

Basically, Ella and Abe are in a very tough spot. They are broke, living in Spain, and all their grand plans for turning their hoax into a never-ending money fountain have fallen through. What to do?

Well, there’s always Mr Draper. Perhaps if they’re nice enough to him, and recant the part of their story that involves him, he might be persuaded to go back to paying Ella’s monthly stipend….

At this point, if it’s a choice between sticking to their story and starving, it seems that Ella is willing to sing like a canary. So in this new, improved version of the hoax, Mr Draper is completely innocent, not a cult member at all. Nor is his wife, nor his son.

That was all just a big misunderstanding, terribly sorry about that.

Oh, you say Ella and Abe not only gave out Mr Draper’s family’s personal information, but also their phone numbers, email addresses, addresses, and places of work and study? And that as a result of this, Charlotte Ward and her team of flying monkeys sent out defamatory, harassing emails to 75 of Mr Draper’s investment banking colleagues? A mere bagatelle! You know how it gets: you start making shit up, one thing leads to another, and next thing you know you’re involved in criminal harassment! Could happen to anyone, really!

The fact that Ella has just pulled out the underpinnings of the hoax and shown up her faithful followers like Kristie Sue for the gullible fools they are is immaterial. What matters to Ella and Abe at this point is cold, hard cash. And since none is forthcoming from the hoax, fuck the hoax…or at least this part of it. Those who believe in it will just have to cope.

The problem is, of course, that the internet never forgets. What does it matter at this point that Ella retracts the chunk of the hoax involving her ex-husband and his family? That material is still out there, still easily found, still working its evil way into the lives of its victims.

Let’s put it this way: if you were Mr Draper right now, would you be willing to let bygones be bygones and start handing your hard-earned cash to Ella and Abe?

Neither would we.

And as one of our commenters pointed out yesterday, starvation seems to be good for Ella’s memory. One wonders what else she might feel compelled to remember, as the grim reality of utter destitution sinks in.