Brief: Digging up the Hampstead Hoax (w/Alexi Mostrous)
Matthew checks in with investigative journalist Alexi Mostrous on his fantastic work digging up the Hampstead Hoax.
Show Notes
Hoaxed — Tortoise Media
Re P and Q (Children: Care Proceedings: Fact Finding)
Jacqui Farmer's "Hampstead Research"
Charlotte Ward’s conspirituality.org About page
Hoaxtead Research
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Hello everybody, welcome to a Conspirituality Podcast Brief.
My name is Matthew Remsky, and today we have a short and sharp interview with Alexei Mostros, the lead investigator for the excellent podcast series Hoaxed by Tortoise Media.
Hoaxed covers a central event in the origin story of QAnon, but also tells us a lot about the world from which the main explicator of conspirituality came.
This would be Charlotte Ward, also known as Jackie Farmer.
I open my discussion with Alexi with a summary of the story.
Remember that you can find Derek, Julian, and I on Twitter, and that you can access hundreds of hours of bonus materials, including live stream discussions, at Patreon slash Conspirituality.
Listeners, we're going to insist that you binge hoaxed while I also yell spoiler alert for this episode, because I'm sitting down with the lead investigator of this docuseries, and we're going to jump in at the deep end after I give a little bit of a 101 overview.
Hoaxed covers the last and most significant satanic panic fever dream in the English-speaking world.
This is the Hampstead Hoax.
And I think it's crucial to understand this cursed story because its viral success went on to influence Pizzagate and then QAnon.
And it starts in 2014 when a Russian-born Bikram yoga teacher and vegan named Ella Draper in the throes of a bitter custody battle with her second British husband, claimed that he was physically and sexually abusing their two children as the leader of a satanic pedophile cult.
Draper was aided in her storytelling by her new partner, Abraham Christie, a charismatic vegan alternative medicine influencer specializing in hemp, who we go on to learn through the reporting in hoaxed, left a trail of abused children and stepchildren in his wake.
Now, the Met police got involved when Draper's children gave a dramatic and abject statement, which they soon retracted, admitting that Draper and Christie had coerced them.
Retraction aside, Draper and Christie's story was taken up by a tenacious and deranged cadre of extremely online conspiracy theorists who doxed over 170 Hampstead residents associated with the children's school, The local church, neighbors who had looked sideways at Ella, or people she had grudges against from years before.
And the claim was that all of them were satanic pedophiles, and the armpits of the internet responded with incessant harassment of those she had targeted.
And there was at least one serious case of physical stalking.
Now, the police did almost worse than nothing by allowing the original statements made by the children to be released, but a high court judge eventually jailed two of the conspiracy mongerers, determining that if anyone had abused the children, it was Draper and Christie.
The justice actually used the word torture to describe how they forced the children into lying.
Retraction aside, criminal convictions aside, the story still took off like wildfire throughout the conspiracy theory internet, spreading through David Icke's forum, seemingly validated by EU officials who gave one of the theorists a forum in Brussels, to eventually wind up on InfoWars.
One of the people who spread the Hampstead hoax with vigor from 2014 to 2015 was Jackie Farmer, the alias of the quasi-academic who coined the term that names our podcast.
Her name is Charlotte Ward.
Now, we knew a bunch of this story before, but now we can all see it quite clearly due to the Herculean efforts of Alexei Mostros, host and lead investigator of Hoaxed by Tortoise Media, Welcome to Conspirituality Podcast.
Thank you for taking the time.
It's great to be here, Matthew.
Thank you, and thanks for that really, really good summary of the case.
It's quite complex, so it's nice to hear that sort of summary because a lot of people miss out details, but that had everything.
Well, thank you for that.
I mean, you go into incredible detail in the actual series, but I'm glad that this 30,000-foot view suits.
I wanted to start by asking, did you come to this project with a working knowledge of the satanic panic circa the 1980s and 90s, or was that a history that you had to catch up on?
It was definitely something that I had to catch up on.
I mean, I was aware of it.
I'd heard the term satanic panic before, but I didn't really know anything about it.
I didn't know who it was targeting or where it came from or indeed why it took place.
So the historical context around that sort of hoax was quite new to me.
But then going in the other direction, Were you also aware when you started that the hoax was seminal to the contemporary explosion of satanic panic related conspiracy theories beginning with Pizzagate and following through to QAnon?
Well, kind of.
So one of the things that interested me about the story from a relatively early stage was the timeline in the sense that this This hoax happened prior to Pizzagate, a few months before, not too long before, and then prior to QAnon.
So I was really interested to kind of dig into this seemingly small British example of a satanic panic that seemed to predate These huge conspiracy movements that are still raging across the US.
But what I didn't understand at the beginning, and I guess what I still don't totally understand, is the relationship between the Hampstead hoax and Pizzagate, and whether there was a causal link.
And if there was, then how strong that causal link is.
I sense that the link isn't causal so much as meme related in the sense that you mentioned in the podcast that it makes it onto InfoWars.
It is disseminated through the David Icke Network as an example of some sort of proof that such things happen, that what's happening at Planet Ping Pong is, or what was it called?
The Pizzagate restaurant?
That was the pizza shop, yeah.
That obviously if we wanted sort of recent evidence for the fact that such things actually occur, then we just have to reach back a couple of years to Hampstead.
So, I guess if it's not causal, at least it sort of bolsters the epistemology of... It kind of reinforced it, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, the Conspiracy Inc.
crowd, as you call them, picked up the Hampstead hoax and they ran with it.
And they were able to do so in part because they had really efficient networks in place to encourage the viral spread of the story.
Tons of blogs, lots of forum connections.
Were you able to learn whether the hoaxers were also using the Chan networks, 4chan, 8chan, 8kun, which then later in 2018 directly gave rise to QAnon?
There were examples of it.
I didn't do any sort of analysis to determine exactly how much content were on the Chan networks, but there were examples of it.
And indeed, you know, I spoke to an expert who was studying wellness conspiracy theories in For a university.
And she had kind of got into these networks of wellness and anti-COVID vaccine conspiracy theorists.
And she said within those networks as well, the hamster conspiracy kind of was popping up.
So most of the propagation that I was looking at in terms of the main Propagators of the hoax occurred on mainstream social media channels, but there's quite a lot of evidence that that seeped into less prominent channels as well.
Some of those prominent actors, Sabine McNeil and Belinda McKenzie, for example, very prolific, very ardent, but they're also, you know, middle class, upper class women in their 70s, I think, both of them.
Did you get a sense of how they became extremely online?
Did they have adult sons at home with giving them tech help or how did that happen?
Yes, I mean it's really interesting how kind of proportionally many sort of middle-aged women there are in the Conspiracy Inc.
community, or at least the one I was looking at.
So, in terms of their internet savviness, Sabine McNeil has like a real, a really kind of almost impressive history in terms of the internet.
I think she set up in London in the 80s some sort of internet freedom network, kind of a precursor to WikiLeaks.
I think she was written about at the time as one of the first people to be using the internet on any kind of consistent basis.
So the fact that she is very internet savvy now doesn't surprise me, given her history.
I think with Belinda, I think She's less internet savvy, but it just goes to show that you don't need much to propagate hoaxes through major channels, at least.
Now, another very prolific spreader of the Hampstead hoax is somebody that you name-dropped, I think, in the second episode.
This is Jackie Farmer, and she goes on to become very important to us because We find out through Karen Irving's work primarily that she's also Charlotte Ward who is trying to make a name for herself in academia with a somewhat laundered version of some of the ideology that she's promoting as Jackie Farmer.
Now, how far did you look into her?
So this is all really interesting to me, because we had to pick and choose the conspiracy theorists to look into.
And we knew that Jackie Farmer, Charlotte Ward, whatever her name is, was very significant, like one of the kind of the top five, I would say.
But we just didn't have the kind of narrative space to properly look into her.
So I'm actually very interested to find out what you know about her, because she's not someone that we focused on.
Right, well, she was listed at the time, and still is, as an independent researcher.
I believe she has a master's degree.
She met David Voas, who's a well-published sociologist of religion and American, at a conference, maybe in 2011, I think, is what we reported.
And from there, they struck up a relationship over this theme and he agreed to give a kind of academic gloss to her ideas.
And then I think there were a number of things that he wasn't familiar with and that he let slide.
So, for instance, the paper actually references David Icke as a reasonable you know, sort of explicator of conspirituality, who's
actually claiming in, she quotes him as claiming, you know, this isn't, you know, this isn't
about anti-Semitism at all.
And that's a spurious claim or I don't know what the quote is.
But then on her sort of public facing website outside of the academic setting, she says,
and by the way, we got an academic journal to publish, you know, the fact that, you know,
conspirituality has nothing to do with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
So, she was very, very adept at playing both sides.
And really doing something that reminded me of, I think it's Sabine McNeil who was able to wind up at the EU, right?
Yeah.
You know, reaching for sources of sort of public validation from people that they would otherwise believe were trying to suppress the truth.
That's the paradox, right?
Is that, you know, There's a desire for academic acclaim, there's a desire for political validity, but at the same time, it's brokered with people that, at the same time, the conspiracy theorist is beholden to not trust.
It's very weird.
That's really interesting.
Now, when you were looking at these virtual networks, what else were they doing?
Because what we've studied, especially since the pandemic, is that new age yoga wellness Social media spaces and affiliate networks were already involved in selling products, many times in pyramid schemes or through MLM structures.
This was earlier, of course, and maybe some of that infrastructure isn't there, but Farmer and Ward, Draper and Christie, they would have had some sort of well-oiled pipeline between You know, satanic panic content and new age and wellness spaces.
But could you characterize what kind of internet economy this story entered into?
Like, what were they doing before?
I mean, also, other conspiracy theories, but was there also money to be made?
And were they doing that before?
I think that the majority of money that they made was through fake campaigns.
So they'd set up PayPal addresses and GoFundMe pages and tell their followers, oh, send us money because that'll help us expose this cover-up and free the children.
And I think that they actually made quite a lot of money out of that.
Not just Draper and Christie, but other people as well.
In terms of the pipeline into other branches of wellness conspiracies, that's a really interesting one because Abraham Christie in particular was obsessed by the idea of trauma-based mind control.
And the links between trauma-based mind control and processed or non-raw food.
And his contention was that raw food, and particularly raw hemp smoothies, could free children and adults from trauma-based mind control.
And he obviously had an economic interest in promoting that theory because he sold hemp smoothies himself.
But throughout this investigation, the main characters, or lots of them, have been I'm very interested in wellness, in raw food, in hemp and cannabis, in yoga, in everything that falls under the umbrella of natural remedies.
This is a bit of a pivot, but you say that Christie was incentivized to have this view because he was selling hemp products, but also there's a psychological incentive in terms of, you know, if we want to talk about trauma-based mind control, That's what he perpetrated on the children, according to the reporting.
Yeah.
And I'm wondering if you had the sense that, well, you know, if he was feeding the kids hemp at the same time that he was doing this thing that he's obsessed about, maybe it didn't count?
Did one thing sort of purify the other?
He thinks that the kids were subjected to trauma-based mind control by their abusers, by the Satanists.
And that he was freeing them by giving them the cannabis smoothies.
Now, obviously the terrible irony is if anyone was subjecting the kids to trauma-based mind control, it wasn't, it was him.
It was him.
This is what, okay, so maybe I'll ask you to speculate.
Do you believe that he believed the story?
I've been asking myself that a lot.
I think deep down he doesn't believe it because I think he must have been there when it was made up.
But I think that also it's so tied up with his own personality and his own identity now that I would be shocked if there was any point in his life when he recanted from those beliefs.
Yeah, there is a key moment where in your phone call with him, which is kind of extraordinary, a very high-pressured thing to listen to, that he admits that he didn't know any of the people that wound up on Ella's list.
She had come up with those names.
And he was willing to prosecute that list without having known them.
So, that's some evidence that he knows that something is coming from somewhere that he can't verify.
And he's willing to ride it anyway, but you also show, I mean, that he says that he loves her like he's loved no one else.
And that's an interesting factor as well, that perhaps, you know, if he was going to believe in something, it was going to be rooted in the strength of their, you know, their strange relationship.
Yeah.
You say repeatedly throughout the episodes that you're mystified as to why the Met didn't take action against Draper and Christie, especially after the High Court had established the strong likelihood that they had abused the children.
I don't even know if it's a likelihood.
It's a statement.
It's a finding on the balance of probability.
Yeah.
So what do you make of the neglect?
On the part of the police?
I think that it was a kind of psychological consequence of realizing that the underlying allegations weren't true.
So they were presented with these allegations of a satanic cult and then it quickly became obvious, not least because the children retracted their story, that it was all There was no basis to it.
So psychologically, I can see that at that point, you're thinking, okay, we shouldn't have even started looking at this.
We checked it out.
It's not true.
Case closed.
Moving on.
But I don't think that that's really good enough because even before the court case came out, the judgment came out, the kids were telling the police that they had been hit and assaulted by Abraham.
And it wouldn't have taken much for the police to then sort of try calling around a few people and establishing that Abraham had done that sort of thing before.
They actually knew that he'd been violent to children before that point, so they came up with some very kind of spurious reason why they wouldn't investigate further, which was that the alleged violence happened in Morocco rather than the UK.
But you can see how wrong they were by what their spokesman said after the judgment came out in March 2015.
2015. So the time was in September 2014 they decided case closed, the kids are
lying, we're not going to do anything. Then that allowed Abraham and Ella, gave
them space to flee the country.
In March 2015, the judge decided or ruled that the kids had most likely been assaulted by Abraham.
in Morocco. And at that point, a reporter phoned up the police and the police said,
oh yeah, we have launched an investigation into potential child abuse offenses. But nothing
had changed. What the police knew in September 2014...
They knew in March 2015.
So why did they decide to open the case in March and not four months before?
And if they had opened the case four months before, then maybe Abraham wouldn't be in Morocco.
Maybe he'd be in the UK right now.
And in addition, it seems to be a case in which the real fault line between in real life law enforcement and online awareness is exposed.
The police seem to feel as though, okay, physical evidence isn't present or it's going to be too difficult to corroborate or We just don't have enough and we're going to wipe our hands.
But really, there's a larger crime that's unfolding, seemingly outside of their jurisdiction, and it becomes very almost ironic that somebody like Karen Irving is able to crack so many aspects of this case.
While the Met is kind of, you know, shaking their hands.
And so I'm wondering about this coordination between, you know, real-world accusations and physical evidence and the resources it takes for the Met to say, oh, actually, we let the cat out of the bag here by not issuing, I don't know what they could have done, issued some sort of strong statement about, you know, the statements were retracted by the children.
It feels like, at this stage, the policing approach to the online aspects of this case is very naive.
Yeah, I think that's a fair criticism.
I mean, I think, you know, I kind of tried to be a bit careful in totally damning the police because they don't have many resources.
It's quite hard to appreciate how threatening an online hoax is going to be, or whether it's going to take off.
But certainly, after the first few weeks, it was obvious that it wasn't going to go away, and that people were getting death threats, and it was kind of exploding all over the forums, and people were organizing underground protests in and around Hampstead.
And at that point, I think that there's an argument for To be made that the Met should say okay well we do have laws against stalking and harassment and online and these are clearly being breached and we're a police force we need to do something about it and what seems to have happened is that the evidence gathering process that should normally have been carried out by police officers was actually carried out by
It's a combination of a few parents who were victims, who were unfairly labeled as pedophiles, and Karen Irving, this mystery novelist from Canada who kind of got involved almost by accident in the case, but then became a kind of central figure.
In terms of combating this tidal wave of misinformation that was gathering strength all the time.
Right.
You know, to wind up, I don't have so much of a question for you as kind of a statement of awe for you to respond to.
You know, if it is true that with the Hampstead hoax we really are talking about a prime catalyst for Pizzagate and QAnon, these are both outsized factors in the growth of the MAGA movement, And really, the transformation of global politics.
I don't want to make too much of this, but if this is true, is it as astonishing to you as it is to me that it really has its roots in a bitter custody dispute exacerbated by online trolls?
Yeah, I mean, I think it is astonishing.
Because, you know, this story should not have been This story should never have been made public.
It wasn't started in a Chan network.
It wasn't started by a hoaxer.
It was started by two people who had bitterly fallen out and who wanted to get back at each other.
But having said that, the subject of the hoax The paedophile element, the satanic element, the darkness of what was being alleged, that is something that has bubbled up throughout history, as far as I can see.
I suppose it's a little bit like A really bad storm coming in from nowhere.
You know, it's surprising in one context because it's so unusual.
But, you know, every 15 years or every 20 years or there will be such a storm.
