Ella’s strange cult activities re-examined

Angela Power-Disney does waffle on, doesn’t she? The other day she published three videos in which she “exposed” her erstwhile friend and fellow Hoaxtead mobster Tracey Morris—literally hours of Angela droning on about Tracey’s various shenanigans.

It’s Angie’s signature move, really: befriending somebody, singing their praises to the skies, and then turning on them and “outing” them on her blog, Facebook, YouTube, or all three. We’ve lost count (well, all of us but the Office Tapir, who remembers everything) of the number of people she’s done this to, but yesterday in our Comments section we were reminded of a particularly egregious instance: her repeated allegations against Ella Gareeva Draper, whom she accuses of having participated in the imaginary Hampstead cult, and of having made videos featuring herself sexually abusing a young child.

We have absolutely no love for Ella, but we reject Angela’s story, which she claims came to her via one of her usual “impeccable sources” who turned out not to actually have the goods. Surprise!

However, a conversation in yesterday’s Comments section reminded us that while Angela’s version of Ellagate was obviously fabricated, there are other well-documented reasons to suspect that Ella was involved in cult activities of one kind or another.

The Gold-Digger Academy

In October 2017 we noted that Ella was the admin of a group on “OK.RU”, a sort of Russian version of Facebook. The group was called “Ellochka the Cannibal”, a well-known Russian fictional character whose single-minded man-hunting proclivities made her the model for Russian “gold-digger academies”.

These schools teach attractive women all they need to know to attract and retain the attentions of wealthy men—so a poor art student, struggling to get by in Moscow, might meet a well-to-do financial expert and latch onto him, just for example.

As commenter Surreal Hustle pointed out, the “gold-digger academies” engage in some very nasty practices:

There is a post on this blog about Ella’s involvement with a “Man-Eater / Gold Digger Academy” and this raised many red flags for me as I have been researching these organisations for almost a decade. Many of them (in fact all of them that have some to my attention) are linked to extremely dangerous cults / sects that harvest collateral / compromat from followers early on in their involvement. The collateral usually takes the form of compromising photos or videos of transgressive sexual acts. This is exactly the same method used by the cult NXIVM, except that in NXIVM the women were told that collateral being collected to keep them in line. In the Gold-digger Academies (often called Goddess schools / Geisha schools / courtesan academies and the like) compromat is collected during “tantric initiations” that are portrayed as spiritual awakenings.

There have been reports in credible sections of the Russian press that, when the police raided these establishments they seized photographs and video films showing cult members sexually abusing children and engaging in sexual acts with animals.

So, just for the record, I do believe that it is possible that some compromising film or video of Ella exists, in fact, given her involvement in the Gold-Digger Academy it would be surprising and unusual if some compromising material on her does not exist. It would certainly consist of Ella engaging in a sexual act that would be considered transgressive and very shameful by most people. That is the whole point of the collection of such material. Such material would have been collected prior to Ella’s marriage to Mr Draper and would not have involved her own children as they had not been born back then.

This interests us, as we recall that in the early days of the Hampstead SRA hoax, Ella complained that RD had been “harassing” her by sending her “unwanted pornography” on her phone. This seemed very odd to us, as the former couple had been involved in a protracted and very bitter legal battle over RD’s access to the children.

Is it possible that the unwanted pornography in question might have been something which either RD or one of his friends dredged up online? We may never really know the answer to this, but it raises some disturbing possibilities.

Ella and the Supreme Master

We can be much more certain, though, of Ella’s involvement in a well-known cult: as Ydychyncachu Tracey pointed out yesterday, Ella was a devotee of the “Supreme Master” Ching Hai, who claims to have a direct pipeline to God (don’t they all?).

An article on DW.com states,

In just four years, vegan restaurant Loving Hut has opened more than 200 locations in the United States, Austria, Germany, Australia and South America, which makes it the biggest vegan chain worldwide. Its founder, known as Ching Hai, has more than 500,000 followers (by some counts up to 2 million) who believe she has direct conversations with God and call her Supreme Master.

With thousands of videos on YouTube showing spiritual lectures going back to the 1990s, Ching Hai preaches all over the world to acolytes of a meditation-based philosophy she has dubbed Quan Yin. Wearing colorful outfits and sitting on outlandish sets with one or two favored followers, Ching Hai mixes Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism and Islam to instruct her believers in how they can achieve higher levels of consciousness and also speak directly to God. She claims to be the next “master” following in the likes of Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed.

In the lectures, she also reminds her adherents that they should not be ashamed of making money, “people will make you feel guilty about making money…it’s none of their business.”

She also sometimes advocates something called breatharianism, which is a denial of food and water in favor of spiritual “sustenance.” The practice, sometimes associated with older religions, has been tied to numerous dehydration and starvation deaths.

In a 1999 article in The Independent, Ching Hai’s London recruitment drive was highlighted. At that time, alarm was expressed over her organisation’s control over members:

Fears are growing…that Ching Hai’s recruits have undergone changes in personality after being recruited at great speed. According to the Cult Information Centre, relatives of her followers are also worried by the large amounts of merchandise available to disciples and the money they can spend to be in the presence of their leader. Last week the sect gained 300 new British members during a course of 19 lectures where people crowded around desks to be “initiated” before being “immediately enlightened” by Ching Hai.

Recruits are interviewed and have to follow five rules including becoming vegetarian and meditating for two-and-a-half hours a day.

Visitors to Ella’s home prior to the Hampstead hoax have told us that her walls were plastered with posters featuring Ching Hai. And readers might recall that during the police interviews, the little girl mentioned that she was able to meditate for three hours per day, though she did not enjoy it and tried to find ways out of it.

Whether Ella’s involvement in Russia’s gold-digger academies led to incriminating material being posted online or not, she certainly did not seem averse to exposing her children to a bona fide cult which advocates some very strange practices.

Peculiar, then, that when it came time to accuse her ex-partner of the most heinous crimes possible, she chose to set them in the context of cults and cult behaviour. Then again, we suppose it’s easiest to talk about what one already knows.