IICSA: Mary Moss responds to Jerome testimony

In a video posted 8 March, inexplicably in the “Comedy” category on YouTube, Chris Fay’s former colleague Mary Moss has made a brief personal statement refuting some of Thursday’s testimony by MET Commander Neil Jerome.

Mary Moss statement

In the video she states:

My name is Mary Moss. I was mentioned a lot yesterday during the Child Sexual Abuse inquiry into the Westminster allegations.

I met Carole Kasir in 1989 when she walked into my office. I was a London development officer at 20 Compton Terrace in N1 Islington, and she had seen me on the telly, and she said that she wanted me to represent her son, and her daughter, who she believed had been taken into care to cover up for some MPs being involved some parties that she’d had, and that she’d been treated unfairly, and they said that her son was abused, and he said he wasn’t.

And anyway, she got murdered not long after, she left with me some documents—the guest book, the signing-in book, receipts. Obviously they were protected under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act.

She was dead, it was a very frightening time for myself.

There was an advisor in our office who came in to discuss Melanie Klein House, Christopher Fay. I haven’t seen him since 1991, when I banned him from the NAYPIC offices following some information from the London Borough Grants Unit.

I have been wrongly associated with him in the Sexual Abuse Inquiry (sic).

I have notoriously worked for NAYPIC, I’m the commercial director of a flower shop, I set up two art galleries. I’m a professional, he’s a crook. I feel what Neil [Jerome] did yesterday was completely slanderous, and I went to the Child Abuse Inquiry (sic) to tell them that.

Okay. So they wouldn’t listen, they said put it in an email. No one else is listening. I’m fed up.

I just want a parliamentary budget for the kids, a pound a head per child in the country, and put an end to all this historical abuse, draw a line under it. As I say, it’s International Women’s Day, and what we need is to endorse the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and have an International Children’s Day, with parliamentary budget, by law. 

It’s incomprehensible to any sensible person that the Kasirs would have been found guilty of running a “disorderly house”, and yet still claim that their children had been removed from their care as part of a government cover-up of “some MPs being involved in some parties she’d had”. Would it not dawn on anyone who understood the nature of the guest house, that it would not have been a suitable environment for a child?

And yet Moss seems to imply that she believed Carole Kasir’s version of events.

While Kasir’s 1990 death was ruled a suicide—the inquest found that she had taken her own life as a result of an overdose of insulin, Jerome stated—Moss appears to believe the “murdered for what she knew” narrative.

As regards the documents which Moss said Kasir left with her, in his 7 March testimony, Commander Neil Jerome stated that in January 2013, Moss had published online a list of Elm Guest House attendees. The list allegedly included names of various celebrities and other prominent individuals from the 1980s.

As part of Operation Winter Key, police had asked Moss for access to the documents she claimed to hold, but she had refused. She did provide some of them to the BBC, who also refused to share them with police, as they had not received Moss’ permission to do so.

Subsequently, the police obtained a warrant to search Moss’ home, where they recovered substantial material, including a sauna appointments book and an appointments desk diary. They also seized about 40 boxes containing various handwritten notes, press clippings, and other materials.

However, they found nothing resembling the storied “Elm Guest House list”. Jerome said:

Clearly, there were notes and there were lists. But the provenance of that material could not be ascertained at all, and it was very unclear to the officers as to when those lists were generated and from what source material they were generated. So there is no evidence linking those to the earlier [1992] raid and the provenance of them was dubious.

In his written statement provided to the IICSA, Jerome wrote:

When the documents were reviewed by officers, there were suggestions that multiple people had attended the Elm Guest House at one time or another—but often without specific dates having been provided—and there were no specific allegations. …

From the material seized from Mary Moss, Operation Fairbank officers identified the following people as possibly having been connected with the Elm Guest House.

He responded in the affirmative to the IICSA lawyer, Mr O’Connor, who asked,

So, far from being an authoritative guest list, would it be fair to describe the documents as simply documents of uncertain provenance which, as you say, suggest the possibility that people may have attended Elm Guest House?

“That’s right, of uncertain origin”, Jerome said, “and certainly evidentially there’s no substance to them at all”.

O’Connor cited Chief Inspector Paul Settle’s prior IICSA evidence:

The first time I heard Harvey Proctor’s name mentioned to do with the Elm Guest House was on the infamous ‘guest list’ which proved to be a work of fiction created by Christopher Fay, Mary Moss, and Carole Kasir, the (now deceased) former owner of Elm Guest House. They put together a document purporting to be the guest room receipts for Elm Guest House. The guests were allegedly so high profile that they didn’t use their real names when checking in, but this dossier purported to tell the truth. The dossier was put online and spread on social media before the police were even made aware of its existence. I had met with Chris Fay during our research into the Elm Guest House allegations. … He was very evasive and certainly didn’t mention this dossier he had created. We only found out later, once Mary Moss put it on the internet. I found that behaviour rather duplicitous.

After investigating, it transpired that the names in the dossier were nothing more than a list of names of people who had been associated (in the media) or convicted of paedophilia, homosexuality, or any police officer who had had anything to do with the investigation. Despite the furore over the list initially, it was shown to have zero evidential value.

In her video, Moss states that she believes that Jerome’s IICSA evidence was slanderous, though she does not specify on the grounds for this allegation.

She is also adamant that while she is a “professional”, Fay is a “crook”; she claims to have severed their relationship in 1991. Given Fay’s unsavoury reputation, it’s not surprising that Moss would seek to distance herself from him now.

Mary Moss, 8 March 2019