Oh, those devilish details!

Jeanette Archer has a problem, and it’s a rather large one.

Until fairly recently, she had been doing pretty well: lionised by Jon Wedger and Shaun Attwood last year; shot into the public eye with her support of Wilfred Wong and friends, who stand accused of conspiracy to kidnap a child; and all the while, building a loyal army of devoted followers, who hang on her every word.

What could possibly go wrong, you ask?

Well, she has run into the problem which ultimately faces just about anyone who attempts to construct elaborate stories of Satanic ritual abuse out of thin air: sooner or later, the details will come back to bite you.

As we mentioned recently, Archer has told multiple whoppers during the past year, but we have done a bit of research, and have come across the Big Lie which goes to the very heart of her story. (And it might just explain why two police investigations ended with the cops throwing up their hands and telling Jeanette to get on with her life.)

Buckle up, kids, it’s about to get bumpy.

Names redacted to protect the privacy of innocent family members

It came to our attention last week that ‘Archer’ was not Jeanette’s original surname. She was born Jeanette Crawley, the middle of three girls, in Luton in 1967. Her father and paternal grandparents were all born in Bedfordshire; her mother came from Edmonton, in Essex.

In January 1963, Jeanette’s parents married in Wandsworth, where her older sister was born in 1964. Shortly afterward they moved back to Luton, her father’s home town, where they had Jeanette in 1967, and her younger sister in 1969.

At some point during the 1970s, her parents’ marriage ended, and in 1980 her mother moved to Hounslow and remarried, to a man with the surname Archer. Jeanette and her sisters seem to have taken on their stepfather’s surname at this point or shortly afterward. We don’t know for certain when they began attending secondary school—either in Luton or Hounslow—but we do know that in their secondary school in Hounslow, they were using the surname “Archer”.

We don’t know how long that marriage lasted, but eight years later, when Jeanette was 21, mum remarried once more, again in Hounslow, to a Mr Swift. This was Mr Swift’s second marriage, and he had four children of his own, all adults by the time he remarried.

With us so far?

Okay, now let’s go back to Archer’s interview with Attwood, which first aired on 29 June 2020.

Here’s a snippet of their conversation, starting at about 00:05:20:

Archer:  I would say my father was taught, maybe, to put rage into those situations. Because it was part of—part of Satanic ritual abuse is to keep instilling that fear. So I think—because it was his father, my grandfather, that ran the show, I think this was maybe just something he’d just learned to do. …

Attwood: When you say that your grandfather was running the show, what do you mean by that?

Archer: So my grandfather was the head of this cult. 

Attwood: Did the cult have a name or anything?

Archer: Not that I know of. … So he was definitely the top dog. You know, the man in charge, that everybody obeyed. Wouldn’t dare disobey. 

So, to be very clear, Archer names her father’s father as the head honcho of the Cult with No Name. Throughout the past year, she has repeatedly stated that he was the Big Kahuna, and that all the other adults in the cult did his bidding.

Only one problem: Archer’s paternal grandfather died in 1955, 12 years before Archer was born.

At first we wondered whether she might have accidentally misspoken, and named the wrong grandfather…but no: she is quite clear that she’s talking about her father’s father.

Later in that interview, she confirms that she might have forgotten to check that one little detail before she started spreading lies about her family telling her incredibly interesting story.

At 00:47:10, she describes the Surrey police coming to her house to let her know that they were not planning to continue investigating her allegations:

Archer: …And they gave me the most ridiculous reasons, and walked away. Actually their leaving comment was, ‘You need to draw a line under this’. 

Attwood: What were the reasons they gave you?

Archer: That my grandfather didn’t have a driving licence, so how could he possibly drive children around from one venue to another?

Attwood: So they’re saying you can’t drive if you don’t have a driver’s licence. You’re incapable of driving. 

Archer: Exactly. Like he would have cared about that. 

(Fair point: dead people don’t usually worry too much about driving licences.)

Archer: They also said that I’d got his date of death wrong, when I’d said to them right at the beginning, when they asked me to do a family tree, I’ve no idea when he died. 

Jeanette, we think we see where you went wrong.

Had she bothered to put together a proper family tree, poor Jeanette might have realised that dear old Grandad Crawley couldn’t possibly have been the villain of the piece, as he was, how shall we say, otherwise occupied. [Cue the celestial harps—Ed.]

But! we hear you say…maybe she really meant her other grandad, her stepfather’s father? Maybe she just got her grandfathers mixed up?

Ah, but you forget: Jeanette has stated she was molested practically from birth. She says her first memory was of her father sexually abusing her when she was but a babe in arms, and that he learned this behaviour from his own father. She was very emphatic on this point.

We know that her parents, the Crawleys, were married at the time the abuse was alleged to have begun, because Jeanette’s younger sister was born when she was two years old, and her mother didn’t remarry until Jeanette was 13. Oh, plus her parents show up on the electoral register in Luton until the mid-1970s, by which time, according to Jeanette, her torture at the hands of her deceased grandfather was drawing to a close.

Now, will any of this information—which can be independently verified—discourage Jeanette’s Army?

Pshaw! Of course it won’t.

As we all know, this is not about rational thought or logical argument, and like Fox Mulder, Archer’s crowd “wants to believe”.

However, it does give the rest of us something to think about. Such as “exactly how twisted does a person have to be to invent a fantasy childhood of torture and abuse, then sell it to a pair of gullible slack-jawed idiots in videos full of simpering self-contradiction, in order to claw her way to the top of the SRA-Pushers Club, UK Division”?

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Edited 24 May 2021: An earlier version of this post contained an incorrect version of Archer’s family tree, showing her father as deceased. This has been corrected. Sorry for any confusion.

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