Hoax supporters react to Sabine McNeill sentence

It’s not as if this wasn’t wholly predictable: within minutes of the announcement of Sabine McNeill’s nine-year sentence being handed down, the first howls of rage were detected…all the way over in Greece.

Andy “Make Mine a Double” Devine was first out of the gate, slugging back the vino while expressing his outrage at Sabine’s sentence:

Hot on his heels was Angela Power-Disney, who was (almost) speechless with rage:

Not for long, though: within hours she’d thrown up a brief rant video which we won’t link here, as it violates the reporting restriction on Sabine’s trial. Suffice to say, she seemed a bit subdued—possibly having had a glimpse of her own future.

“Hello, RyanAir? Any flights to Lanzarote open?”

Neelu, meanwhile, was incoherent in her own special way: she erupted in the comments section of a Facebook post in which she’d urged people to attend Sabine’s sentencing.

Her response: “Bring back firing squads”. And you thought nine years was harsh?

Tim Veater was pretty exercised about Sabine’s sentence as well, and decided to express his annoyance by torturing all five of his readers with nausea-inducing font-size switches:

A new-to-us hoax promoter, Brian Willmot, got all teary-eyed about the good old days when Sabine used to expose “Satatinic Ritual Abuse & UK Government Child Snatching”:

Brian Gerrish piped up too, with a tweet indicating his intention to continue attempting to sell the false allegations for which Sabine has just been jailed:

Brian, of course, had a special place in the hoax, as Abe and Ella dragged the children off to be inspected by him in the week after they returned from Morocco. Either he had his doubts (unlikely) or felt the case was too hot to handle (less unlikely) at that time, but he made up for it when Sabine unleashed the videos in January/February 2015, and has been episodically braying about it ever since.

As Richard Bartholomew of Barths Notes pointed out yesterday, for those in the conspiracy milieu “the instinct is either to double-down or scrub the evidence, rather than to admit to having colluded in a terrible error that needs to be put right with a corrective repudiation”. 

It seems a foolish choice, as we’ve now seen that the police and courts have developed an appetite for dealing with the stalking and harassment which seem endemic to the conspiracy community.

Sabine’s trial has shown us that the harm done by those who wilfully spread lies about individuals and communities will no longer be ignored or minimised, and that hefty sentences will be imposed on those who use the internet as a weapon of terror.