Yesterday we talked about the “UK godmother” of Satanic ritual abuse claims, Valerie Sinason. We noted that in February 2000, following Jean La Fontaine’s solid debunking of the notion of SRA in the UK, The Guardian reported that Ms Sinason and her colleague at the Tavistock Clinic, Dr Robert Hale, mounted a counter-offensive: Fresh controversy…
Yesterday we discussed an often-overlooked group which has been victimised by those who promote the myth of “Satanic ritual abuse”: well-meaning, intelligent folk who have been taken in by promoters of SRA. In yesterday’s post we emphasised the ubiquitous training seminars, workshops, and even institutes of higher education which ran rampant in the 1980s and…
Here at Hoaxtead Research we’ve spent the better part of three years doing battle against various promoters of a particularly vicious and demonstrably false hoax involving allegations of Satanic ritual abuse against an entire school/church community. We’ve worked hard to research, analyse, and ultimately refute the claims of people like Abraham Christie and Ella Draper,…
Last week we discussed the “Fresh Start Foundation”, the SRA-promoting group which has sprung up in Scotland. One member of the FSF board of directors, Janine Rennie, objected to our take on the matter, and in particular our observations about another group she runs, Wellbeing Scotland (formerly Open Secret). The conversation she initiated has been…
We’ve talked before about some of Abraham Christie’s disturbing pseudo-scientific beliefs. For example, at one point he was insisting that fresh, raw, juiced hemp was an “ideal plant-based blood transfusion liquid” which could be substituted for blood transfusions in humans. He also subscribes to, and promotes, the dangerous fiction that the anal rape of very…
More news from the Neelu front: readers will recall that she had unwanted visitors on 9 January, when a team of police and bailiffs attended her home in order to evict her and her family. This came in the wake of last spring’s repossession order for having defaulted on the mortgage of her house. Neelu,…
Recently we’ve been discussing the “Fresh Start Foundation”, an organisation whose stated goal is to undermine the work of the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry, and whose harassment of adult sexual abuse survivors seems to indicate that they’re also keen to co-opt or oust the IICSA. It’s difficult to imagine why an organisation which is ostensibly…
Thanks to the reader who sent us the link to this completely engrossing podcast from the U.S.-based NPR radio programme, “This American Life”. It’s an hour long but well worth the time, in our opinion. We found that the episode, titled “Chip in My Brain”, resonated with our experiences of “true believer” troofers of the…
The other day, we incorrectly identified the author of the Spidercatweb blog (and the @calamiTcat Twitter feed, and the Cat Scot Facebook page) as Lesley Scott, wife of UK Column’s Scottish correspondent, David Scott. Our apologies to Mrs Scott, and to our readers, for the error. We’re now aware that “Cat Scot” is actually Catriona…
It was probably inevitable that yesterday’s post about the False Start Foundation’s harassing genuine survivors of child sexual abuse, while pushing their own “Satanic ritual abuse” agenda, would have provoked a bit of backlash. And sure enough, Cat Scot/CalamiTcat/Lesley Scott lashed back within hours. First on Facebook: …and then on her “Spidercatweb.blog” (whoa, would you…
