Investigating the ‘Original Dirty 30’

One of the more startling comments which Angela Power-Disney made last week to interviewer Jason Goodman of “Crowdsourcing the Truth” was her revelation that at the inception of the Hampstead SRA hoax, a group of about 30 people had been involved in promoting the Hampstead Research blog run by “Jacqui Farmer”.

During that interview, Angela said, “The details are so complex on this case that I worked as part of a team of about 30 people that were in it for the long haul”.

We probably should not have been surprised at this. It turns out that she has made several references, veiled and not so veiled, to this inner sanctum group in the past, and yesterday the YouTube channel “Take That as Gospel” began posting a fascinating series of videos which corroborate and elaborate on Angela’s claim.

Getting to know Belinda

In the first video, above, “Take That as Gospel” sets the scene, with an interview with Mel Ve in which Angela describes her early relationship with Belinda McKenzie:

…[A]s I keep harping back, one, I believe the children, and two, I stayed in Belinda’s home for five days.

I’m the kind of person that asks difficult questions, I asked difficult questions including going all the way back to Iran Aid, and the money and so on, and based on five days face to face, and interacting around Hampstead for a year and a half, I find the lady’s biggest crime was intermittent naïveté.

And as Mel said, it’s better to be naïve and sometimes get things wrong than it is to just protect your public profile and do nothing. I actually am full of admiration for the lady. You know, I am. I am.

And I published online my findings from asking the direct questions about Iran Aid, and Belinda was very forthright with me about inheriting four million and allocating a million to make her dream come true, or making a difference in the world, and then having been overextended in that, possibly through naïveté, and having been hammered. And as a victim myself of an online smear campaign, I can empathise.

I think what we need to remember in this business ongoingly, is that things are not always as they seem.

Indeed, in the Hampstead SRA hoax, things have almost never been what they seemed, so points to Angela for accuracy on that one.

Down to brass tacks

In the second video, again speaking to Mel Ve, Angela begins to spell out the workings of the “Dirty 30” more fully.

Starting at about 01:20, Angela says,

Just to say that a researcher that’s temporarily resting, because we all need to catch our breath on this, Charlotte Alton Ward, Jacqui Farmer, Jacob Farmer, she’s many personas, although she’s never too shy to say ‘this is who I am’, she’s done jail time for whistle-blowing and campaigning in the past. [1]

She left the UK in order to safely broadcast from Brazil [2], and you know Iceland [3], and she actually did go there. She was a huge part of this campaign.

She ran a blog called Hampstead Research, which is what the troll opposition mimicked with their Hoaxtead Research site, in which in my opinion they tried to mimic the Hollie Greig outcome, which was to put it to bed as a hoax.

But we actually did go there in terms of forensic analysis. We had professionals volunteering their time globally. I mean these were professional court experts, university professors, forensic analysts and so on. The amount of evidence that we accrued was phenomenal.

Now she managed to broadcast safely for a year, and then did get hacked [4]. She did get credible death threats. Her wonderful husband, you know, supports her and supports her, and then he freaks out and says look, your life’s on the line. And they withdraw for a while. I’m hoping she comes back into the fray.

And we do have 90% of the evidence, at least, downloaded, so even though your perspective, and CCN’s perspective is we don’t need details, we just want to know if the children are okay, the evidence does exist, which not only corroborates, it magnifies and multiplies the children’s disclosures.

In typical Angela fashion, this is a mixture of fact and fiction. Let’s take the inaccuracies one at a time:

[1] she’s never too shy to say ‘this is who I am’, she’s done jail time for whistle-blowing and campaigning in the past.

We beg to differ. Jacqui Farmer was extremely reticent to identify herself.

She went to the trouble of electronically distorting her voice on her various videos, which made them resemble particularly awful examples of Vogon poetry. One of this blog’s first major group projects was to identify Jacqui Farmer as Charlotte Alton Ward, which we managed to do within a couple of months.

To our knowledge, although Jacqui/Charlotte committed criminal harassment as the author of her blog, she had never been arrested or imprisoned.

[2] She left the UK to broadcast from Brazil.

Untrue. She lived with her husband, Jacco de Boer, near Paramaribo in Suriname. Granted, Suriname shares a border with Brazil, so we’ll grant Angela half-points for guessing the correct continent.

[3] …and Iceland.

Not even close.

Abe and Ella, not Charlotte, had two blogs which were hosted by Orange, an Iceland-based company, but they did not live in Iceland; they were then, as they are now, in Spain. They used the Icelandic host because we complained to Wix, their original blog host, who responded and removed the blogs. But it was nothing to do with Charlotte Ward.

[4] She managed to broadcast safely for a year, and then did get hacked.

Not quite. Charlotte published her blog on WordPress.com, and it was removed by WordPress for violating the law in June 2015. She set up an new blog on a private host, which ran for a few more months, and then on Hallowe’en 2015, she stopped publishing. She did leave the blog up as a “resource”.

When we checked a couple of months later, we discovered that the entire blog had disappeared without a trace, even in web archive. This led us to believe that it might have been hacked, but we have never had confirmation of that one way or another.

Who was involved in the original group?

In addition to the obvious early members—Belinda and Sabine; Abraham and Ella; Charlotte Ward and Jacco de Boer; Brian Gerrish; Wesley P.P. Hall; blogger Henry Curteis; and of course Angela herself—Angela drops some tantalising hints:

But we actually did go there in terms of forensic analysis. We had professionals volunteering their time globally. I mean these were professional court experts, university professors, forensic analysts and so on. The amount of evidence that we accrued was phenomenal.

We have a pretty good idea who the “forensic analyst” was: we identified forensic linguist Essien Popoola as a member of the inner circle some time ago. Mr Popoola was involved with a university, but we don’t know whether he was a lecturer.

Could the “court expert” have been ex-police sergeant Ray Savage? So far as we know, he’s the only person involved in promoting the hoax who had any sort of quasi-legal background or contacts. We do know that he claimed to have sat with Ella Draper for three hours and interviewed her; this was probably after the children had been taken from her care, in autumn/early winter 2014.

“Take That as Gospel” suggests that Mel Ve and Alfred Lambremont-Webre were also among the original Dirty 30, and this does seem to fit, as both were very early promoters of the hoax.

Why the Original Dirty 30 should be concerned

Two of Angela’s statements to Mel in this video ought to send a chill into anyone who was involved at that time. First, she says, “The amount of evidence that we accrued was phenomenal”; and later follows up with “And we do have 90% of the evidence, at least, downloaded”.

Currently, then, much of what was downloaded by the “group of experts” (aka the hoax promotion cartel) is likely to be found on one of the three computers currently in the possession of police—one belonging to a person we cannot currently discuss; another belonging to Wesley Hall; and the third belonging to Angela herself.

We only have space here to look into the first two of “Take That as Gospel’s” video collection on this topic, but we highly recommend that interested readers watch the entire series, which contains footage that is new to many of us.

This could be about to get very interesting indeed.