Who originally released Finnbarr’s videos?

Over the weekend, one of our readers posed a question that we weren’t immediately able to answer. The reader wrote, “What puzzles me about the Finnbarr recording is how did it end up, unedited, published in a compilation of other videos of the children?”

We’d wondered this from time to time as well, and so we began poking around to see if we could discover where and when the video had been first published.

One of our researchers searched through the very long thread on the David Icke forum, one of the few surviving contemporaneous sources which documents the progress of the hoax almost from the beginning. The goal was to see where that video was first mentioned. As it turned out, there are references to the “Irish man” interviewing the children that date back to the first days following the release of the original videos by The Tap Blog.

And sure enough, when we looked at Sabine McNeill’s original email which attempted to blackmail then-Home Secretary Theresa May into forcing Mrs Justice Pauffley to return the children to Ella Draper, we found one of the Finnbarr videos listed amongst the rest, which had been recorded by Abe and Ella en route from Morocco to London. In hindsight, knowing what we now know about Finnbarr’s identity and his purpose in interviewing the children, this seems very odd indeed.

To review, Ella handed off her videos to Sabine in November or December 2014, on the understanding that Sabine and Belinda would be taking over her case as McKenzie friends after she sacked her legal team (twice, but who’s counting?). In late January, when it became obvious that Mrs Justice Pauffley wasn’t going to buy the hoax, and would probably keep the children safely in foster care rather than turn them over to their abusive mother, Sabine and Belinda decided that more drastic steps would be necessary.

Sabine wrote the fateful email to Theresa May, ending with the following:

The attached Position Statement was our offer NOT to expose this scandal in exchange of returning the children. Instead, Mrs Justice Pauffley ignored the issues that have been outstanding since Judge Mayer transferred the case to her on 23 December:

1. The justification for an Interim Care Order.
2. The discussion of a Non-Molestation Order.
3. The inequality of Contact.

Instead, the Judicial Review filed on 22 December 2014 is attempted to be stymied and two barristers have suggested that evidence should be destroyed! Furthermore, LB Barnet want to write not only to all interested parties that include 3 MEPs but also the mother’s list of witnesses.

In the wake of your efforts to make a National Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse happen, you will know how important it is for victims to be believed. Anybody who watches these privately taken videos is convinced. But the mother is supposed not to make use of them!

Can you maybe at least pretend to ensure that there is some proper procedure in any of the institutions mentioned?

Or maybe you can just ask the Executive Director of LB Barnet, Andrew Travers, to return the children with immediate effect?

In a fascinating twist, when we clicked on the embedded link in the above text (“these privately taken videos”), it led us to a Google Drive folder that looked like this: So it appears that for whatever reason, Sabine chose to leave the Google Drive files available to anyone who had the link; it’s no longer possible to click on the videos, but the structure of the Drive file is still intact.

However, this doesn’t answer the question of how Ella got the two Finnbarr videos in the first place.

Given that Finnbarr seemed to have been filming the children covertly—when he heard an adult approaching, he shoved his phone into his pocket without even taking time to turn it off—it seems unlikely that he would have just handed over the videos to Abe and Ella. Of course it’s not impossible that he did so, so it cannot be ruled out without further evidence.

Another possibility is that like Ella and Abe’s email to Brian Gerrish, Finnbarr’s videos were passed along via Bill Maloney, ultimately winding up in the hands of DC Steve Martin. This would be another possible explanation as to why Ella had copies of the videos, as they would have been part of her court bundle which her legal team handed over to her when she sacked them in December.

In any case, we know that Ella and Abe were furious with Sabine for making the videos public.

Could this be in part because the unedited version of the Finnbarr videos gives away too much of the show? As you might remember, it’s here that Abe confesses to being rattled to discover that DC Martin, who dealt with his assault on his teen-aged son, would now be in charge of the Hampstead SRA allegations case. And it’s also clear that Abe and Ella had been seriously considering leaving the country to avoid further police investigation, which they had never anticipated having to face.

Whether Finnbarr gave the videos directly to Abe and Ella, or Ella received them from her solicitors, though, the outcome was the same: Sabine took it upon herself to send them to Ms May, with a note to Henry Curteis: “TAP – watch these two very brave children describing the awful things being done to them by their father and others. If they were on Youtube, they’d go viral. Someone should upload them”.

Which he obligingly did, thus kicking off the Hampstead SRA hoax.