Who Trolled Amber? - Hoaxed - Episode 1: Secrets and lies

Episode Date: September 4, 2023

Two young children make horrific allegations in a London police station, lighting the fuse on the most serious British conspiracy theories in decades.Listen to the full series today. For the premium Tortoise listening experience, curated by our journalists, download the free Tortoise audio app. For early and ad-free access to all our investigative series and daily and weekly shows, subscribe to Tortoise+ on Apple Podcasts.If you’d like to further support slow journalism and help us build a different kind of newsroom, do consider donating to Tortoise at tortoisemedia.com/support-us. Your contributions allow us to investigate, campaign and explore, and to build a newsroom that is responsible and sustainable. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Thanks so much for listening to the Tortoise Investigates feed. This is Hoaxed, the story of the biggest conspiracy theory in Britain that you've probably never heard of. theory in Britain that you've probably never heard of. A modern day satanic panic and the next series that was reported by my colleague Alexei Mostras. It's an investigation into the victims whose lies were destroyed by a lie and the conspiracists who spread that lie all around the world. Just a quick note before we start. The following episode contains descriptions of sexual and physical abuse of children, as well as strong language and graphic violence. Hiya, before we start, I'd just like to tell you everyone who's here and tell you where we are. Is that alright?

My name's Steve and I'm a policeman and I work here at this police station. The other lady sitting there, her name's Cleo and she's a police lady. She works at this police station. Whatever you tell us in here, you're not in trouble, OK? So as long as you tell us the truth, then there won't be any problems, OK? As a reporter, I spend my life trying to break stories,

trying to uncover the truth and bring it into the light. I know that sounds a bit high and mighty, but it's not meant to be. And it's not like I'm always successful, not even close. Powerful people or big corporations with expensive lawyers can bring a story to a shuddering halt. But success or not, the basic dynamic is always the same. I'm the guy trying to find a way around the obstacles, trying to get the story out.

But this story, this story is different. If it was up to me, this story would never have been made public. In my classroom, they've got this little door at the back, right at the back of the classroom. They've got a little door and it's just a little tiny little room. It's all stuffed with sweets, prizes, especially to pay the children with sweets to do sex to them. Have you seen Stranger Things,

the Netflix show where there's a parallel world called The Upside Down, where everything is the horrifying opposite to how it should be? Investigating this story for the last few months, I've often felt like I'm in the upside down, because I'd prefer not to be making this podcast at all. We were so scared and terrified when he found out about it. Because the first time he said, right, somebody's touching you. And then we just gave up and we just said, my dad. Let me explain what you're listening to. I need to give it some context

because it's way too disturbing to be played in isolation. These voices that you're hearing, they belong to two British children aged seven and nine. These kids are being interviewed in a North London police station about alleged abuse. Do you know those spaghetti spoons? Yeah. Those metal ones. If I cry, he hits me on the head with it. Abuse carried out by their father and by others too. They hit me. They do all kind of stuff.

Who's that? Who hit you? My dad, all the teachers, my dad's friends. The children are filmed, standard procedure for a police interview, which means that I can see them taking turns to tell their story, each of them choosing to sit on the same corner of a tatty purple sofa that, in that grainy police footage, almost seems to swallow them up. And a lot of these teachers were at the... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And OK. And also the parents are involved too, touching and sex. Even though I've heard these tapes dozens of times by now, something inside me still recoils when I hear these children speak. It's too private, too sensitive. And believe me when I say that we've debated, gone back and forth and back and forth on how much of this material to play.

We've consulted lawyers, we've also altered the kids' voices to make sure that they can't be identified. But the reason I am playing you this footage, carefully selected parts of these tapes, isn't because of what the children said, it's because of what happened next. Their testimony didn't stay within the walls of this North London police station, where it should have done, where it would have been protected and kept private. Instead, it was repackaged and recast and made into something much, much bigger. Eight years after the kids spoke to the police, their videos are all over the internet,

used as evidence of a cover-up that taps into our darkest fears. It's not a question of belief. It is a fact. The only doubt occurs because you don't want to imagine that people can be as horrible as this. It's time. It's time for the good guys to win and the bad and dark times to end. From Tortoise, I'm Alexi Mostras, and this is Hoaxed.

Episode 1, Secrets and Lies. This story has taken me to three continents, from the Houses of Parliament to the Medina in Marrakesh. But it all starts in a North London suburb, with a mother. The mother of those two children you just heard talking to police. Can you just start off by introducing yourself? I'm Ella Gariva, a.k.a. Draper, former Draper. I just went back to my maiden name. And I'm the mother of the two children from the Hampstead case.

Ella Gariva was born in Russia. She's a yoga teacher and a nutritionist who came to the UK in 1998. I met my husband in Moscow. He was in financial consultancy. And he's got an offer of a job to move back to London. He had a pretty good job and we were OK financially. We were not like rich people by any means, but we were right. She's a vegan. She meditates.

She believes in alternative remedies. Especially optimum nutritional therapy. This is my specialisation, accelerated rejuvenation. Wow, what does that mean? Reversing the process of ageing and helping, giving the body the tools to self-repair with the help of nutrition, with the help of various exercises as well. For most of her career, Ella has taught a particularly brutal kind of yoga called Bikram. Imagine exercising for 90 minutes

in a sauna and you've got the idea. I did it once, never again. But Ella, she's more hardcore, and she found a steady stream of clients in Hampstead, the area in North London where she eventually settled. Hampstead is a leafy and very posh suburb, famous for its heath, a beautiful and wild common less than four miles away from the centre of the city. My time in London was amazing, although I felt a little bit depressed because of the lack of the sun and I didn't know many people at the time. My marriage at the end of the day didn't last long. By 2003, Ella had split from her first husband and was living with a handsome actor called Ricky. Ella had two more children with Ricky, a boy and a girl. By the time our story starts in 2014,

they were smiling kids with mops of blonde hair. I can picture Ella in this period, teaching Bikram, drinking smoothies, going for walks on the heath. A tabloid newspaper might have called her a yummy mummy, but appearances can be deceptive. By 2014, Ella's relationship with Ricky had broken down entirely. For years, there had been blazing rows, police complaints, even allegations of violence on both sides. And at this point, I started to think about leaving the UK with the children.

Right. Ella was trying to take the kids back home to Russia, coming from him in a very distorted situation. And they were coming in quite a distorted condition after school. Distorted is a word Ella uses a lot to describe how her children behaved around this time. And actually, it's a pretty good word for everything that happens in this story. Everybody noticed that something wasn't quite right with the children. In a way, they're very bright, well brought up, polite, educated children. However, there is an edge to them.

They would, out of nowhere, break into violence, either between themselves or could be against me. It's only later, of course, I learned that this is what the father was, either between themselves or could be against me. It's only later, of course, I learned that this is what the father was encouraging them to do, to physically hurt each other. And then, in April 2014, Ella met a new partner, a man called Abraham Christie. And this meeting was a moment that would change both their lives. How did you meet? Tell me a bit about that. I actually been invited together with the children. We went to the chocolate ceremony.

What's that? It was like a party, a little party of people who like vegan, vegetarians. And it was like, well, instead of meeting and drinking alcohol, it was a chocolate tasting party. Nice. And Abraham was there. Abraham was from a place called Tottenham in North London. It's actually not far from Hampstead, but Tottenham is rougher, way less wealthy. Abraham, like Ella, was into alternative lifestyles and wellness. He was into raw food. Abraham's small, but he's tough. In pictures, you can see how his strict diet seemed to work. He's in his 50s, but he looks wiry, like a lightweight boxer. There's not an ounce of fat on him. And how did you guys

get talking? We were introduced through a friend of mine, and we got on because he's very knowledgeable in the nutrition area, so I found it quite interesting what he got to say, and

besides, you know, the juicing of fresh hemp, the hemp seeds, this is the first time Mokanova learned about that as well. Abraham believed that hemp juice, basically smoothies made from crushing cannabis plants, was literally the elixir of life. He's always talking about this sort of stuff online. So what I'm telling you is that exogenous cannabinoids,

they may stimulate the endocannabinoid system interaction, but they cannot maintain the selectivity of our own endogenous cannabinoids. I would say that I actually adopted it myself. I could see the value of the hemp seed nutrition, what Abraham was offering. When I'm speaking to Ella about all this, you can hear that maybe, just a little bit, I'm out of my depth. And just to be clear, again, another really stupid question there's no relationship between hemp food seeds on the one hand and marijuana consumption on the other hand you cannot smoke it even if you want it i mean you don't get high because the content of thc is uh it's almost non-existent people either

sprinkle it on their food on their salads but, but what we do, we soak it and actually blend it and make milk out of it. You can go to the YouTube and find plenty of recipes there. Sure, I'll check it out. So Ella and Abe get chatting at this raw chocolate party. I've seen pictures on Facebook. It's pretty out there, lots of tie-dye trousers and flowing dresses. If you've ever watched the British comedy Peep Show, there's a scene where Mark, the straight-laced main character, finds himself at a hippie dance class called Rainbow Rhythms. It's Mark's own personal horror show.

And Ella and Abraham's chocolate party, it reminds me a lot of that. I've got to check my own prejudices here, because I'm a bit like Mark. I'm really not into this wellness stuff. To me, it's a world open to abuse and misinformation. A snake oil mix of unfounded claims and clever Instagram marketing. But you only have to look at Gwyneth Paltrow's empire to realise that millions of people disagree.

Ella and Abraham were firmly in the pro-wellness camp, so it wasn't surprising that they had an instant connection. And before long, they'd started a relationship. Abraham moved into Ella's flat and quickly became part of the children's lives. Now, Ella was already raising her kids as vegans, but when Abraham came on the scene, the family diet became even stricter. He started making them all hemp smoothies, even for the kids, and banned any food that wasn't raw. And the children, they started calling him Papa Hemp.

Papa Hemp, he's a dad now. What's he like as a man? Well, I mean, obviously he's quite a controversial figure, I would say, and quite an eccentric. He's quite an expressive character, but I wouldn't say there is anything sinister about him. You know, I found him quite an interesting person to communicate with, very knowledgeable. He was quite good with the children, quite fair. He made a good impression for me, although I could see he's quite eccentric in his behaviour

and his expressions, I would say. What does that mean, eccentric? Well, he's the person who probably wouldn't, kind of doesn't follow all the norms of the society. In July 2014, just a few months after they got together, Ella, Abraham and her two kids went away on a family holiday to Morocco. It's the defining moment in Ella's story. Because it was there, during that fateful summer,

that the kids first made their allegations of systematic abuse. Everything kind of became obvious, what happened back then, earlier on. So all of a sudden my answers started to find their questions. Ella's children started speaking about things they said had been going on for years. Abuse perpetrated by their father, their teachers and their father's friends. The children claimed that their abusers were operating out of their primary school and the neighbouring church. of their primary school and the neighbouring church. And this abuse that the children are describing,

it not only happened in the school years, it happened actually much earlier, and it's been going on in what I would describe as a pitiful ring, with making movies of the children being abused and with elements of snuff movie making as well. Not only were they saying that their dad was a paedophile, but that he was the head of a paedophile ring operating in Hampstead, involved in the ritualistic murder of infants. And we got our own church, too, so because they do that...

Because after, as I said, we kill babies, we drink their blood, we eat them. And then they get a special... The knife they use for cutting the baby's head off. Because our dad, he forces me and... to do it. But because we can't, we're not strong enough to cut the baby's head off. He does us to hold an eye, and he puts his hand at the top of our hand, and he helps us to cut the baby's head off.

Because he's learning, he's teaching me and **** so when we're older to do it to our own children. I guess, for a parent, if you believe that even a kernel of this is true, it's your worst nightmare. Your children telling you that they're being hurt, not just by a

family member, but by an organised group of abusers. But for Ella, her nightmare didn't end there. Am I right in thinking that on the 11th of September, was that the last time that you were with your children? Yes, that was the last time I was with my children.

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ACAST.com When you hear Ella, it's hard not to take her seriously. She's educated. She's got a master's degree. She's precise. She's analytical. She also comes across as vulnerable. She sounds like any mum who's been wrenched away from her kids

and is desperate to get them back. On the face of it, the kids were saying things which seemed unbelievable, far-fetched, basically impossible. A satanic paedophile cult operating in the heart of Hampstead? Come on. But then again, horrible, unbelievable things do happen to children. You only need to look at the Jimmy Savile scandal to realise that some nightmares do come true.

So when Ella recounts what her children told her, she sounds genuinely believable. But here's the truth. Almost everything that comes out of Ella's mouth is a lie. Her children were being abused, but it wasn't by their father or by a satanic cult. Tanin cult. First of all, I wasn't there so I need you to explain in as much detail everything that happened. Is that okay? Yes.

And if there's something that I ask you and you don't understand, please tell me. Just say that I'm not sure what you're asking. And that might go the other way as well, OK? Is that all right? Things move pretty quickly after the Morocco holiday. Ella and Abraham and the kids fly back on 3 September 2014. And on the plane and on the way to the airport, I said, listen, we've got to record, we've got to make some video recording of that. Because so far I was only making written notes of disclosure.

And this is where these short videos came from. They're literally maybe two, three minutes each. As Ella says, she starts recording videos of the kids on her phone. She says it was to gather evidence. But I've seen these videos, and to be honest, they are very hard to watch. The kids look tired, tense. They've got dark circles under their eyes and what look like bruises on their foreheads.

And they're asked to repeat their story in detail over and over again. About the Satanic cult operating in their school, about their dad being the chief paedophile, about other children who supposedly enjoyed taking part in the abuse. I could play you these videos, but I won't. I think it would cross a line. The kids aren't in a safe place. They're being asked leading questions. In fact, the only time that you'll hear the children in this podcast is from those police interviews, where at least they're speaking to a trained professional. The first thing Ella and Abraham do when they arrive back from Morocco is to take the children to see Abraham's brother-in-law, a man called Jean Clement.

He's a special constable, a kind of volunteer police officer. Jean Clement records the encounter and on the tape you can hear the kids telling him about the abuse. But you can also hear a voice looming over them, pressing them into answers. Abraham. Now stare at me while you've got the cup in your mouth. Now stare at me... Is it a lie? Is it a lie?

We do not have time for lies. The following morning, Jean Clement calls Scotland Yard and hands over the recordings he's made. But he hands over something else too. A list that Ella has put together of alleged abusers, members of the Hampstead cult, about 175 people in total. Later that day, the children are taken to Barnet Police Station to be interviewed by an officer called DC Steve Martin. He's the guy with a steady voice you can hear gently

questioning the children. Over the next few days, there's a frenzy of activity. On the 8th of September, the children go on a drive with police officers to identify some of the addresses on Ella's list. They can't. On the 10th of September, the police search the church, looking for the secret rooms and the drawers where the children say dead babies are kept. They find nothing. And then, on the 11th of September,

one of the children tells DC Martin something that changes the tenor of the entire investigation, redirecting the focus away from their father and on to Abraham, Papa Hemp. Just to warn you, what you hear next is really quite upsetting. It's the kids describing physical abuse. So, and there were two ways he helped you tell the truth? Yes.

The first way he said about a spoon, the second one was water. Yes, but water torture. What is water torture? I don't understand it. So, like, he gets big jugs of warm water. Warm water, yeah. And then he tells us to stay on our knees. Stay on your knees. And then he just drops the water on us.

So, like, he pours the water on us in one hole, go like that. At this point, the police take the children away from Ella and place them in temporary care to protect them. And one week later, in their final interview with Steve Martin, they recant. So, the stuff that happened in the church and the swimming pool at school, did any of that really happen? No, it was all made up.

How did you think about, like, because you told me about all, like, they all dance around with baby skulls. How did you think of that idea? Because he went like this, they dance around with baby skulls in the church, don't they? That's what Abraham told me. And I said, no they don't. And he said, yes they do, stop lying. He was a little rat, that's what he told me. Oh, okay. So can I make sure... So your dad's never done anything you don't like?

He's fine and he's a good... OK. You made this up because...? Because of Abraham, because he keep on hitting me. He's telling me... What do you mean, keep on hitting you? Well, he keeps on, like, saying, like, like, I'm going to not live with them, he's going to dig a hole in the field and dig me into it and then just leave me there until I die,

until I drown because they're going to put water on top of me. And then after I got too scared. And where did all this happen? Morocco. Did it happen in England at all? No, it was in Morocco. All in Morocco? Yes. On 20th September, just 15 days after it all starts,

the police investigation is closed. A recording of no crime is made. No crime by the children's father. No crime by any of the other 175 people on Ella's list. But also, and this is astonishing to me, no crime committed by Ella or by Abraham. Abraham isn't even brought in for questioning. The kids had given a detailed account

about how they were physically coaxed and pressured into making up a brutal story. But the police didn't seem to care. The fact that Abraham apparently had only beaten the kids up in Morocco, outside the UK, seemed to be enough justification for the police to let things go. And so the investigation ends, just like that. And focus switches to the next question. What will happen to Ella's children? The local authority want them to live with Ricky, their father, but Ella doesn't want that at all. Ella doesn't want that at all. So she goes to court to fight for them.

And in doing so, she meets another person who will change her life and the life of this story. I often think about Ella and Abraham as two parts of a bomb, maybe ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, chemicals which are relatively stable on their own, but when they're mixed together, become incredibly volatile. Well, this third person takes that dangerous mix and she sets it on fire. Now, these activists got involved and they were from then on helping me in the court as a McKenzie friend. I was represented by the lawyers via legal aid. And I realized very quickly that those lawyers employed by the government are actually in cahoots with the other side and actually working against me.

They were not giving me good advice. So after several months of this, I got rid of two sets of lawyers. Then I was representing myself from then on. And at some point I found these people online, like so-called activists in this movement for child protection rights. Did they instantly kind of get behind you? Yeah, exactly, exactly.

These two ladies, one is Sabine McNeil and another one, Belinda McKenzie, who are helping me in the court with the court documents. Sabine McNeill is a 76-year-old German woman who, like Ella, came to the UK years ago. She's an interesting character. She worked as a scientist on the CERN nuclear project. She was one of the first people to use the internet in the UK.

But by 2014, she'd become obsessed by the idea that Britain's family courts weren't acting in the best interests of parents. So she became something called a Mackenzie friend. A Mackenzie friend is a peculiar feature of the English legal system. They give advice to people who don't have lawyers and who are representing themselves in court. They don't have to be legally trained, but they often know their way around the complex legal procedures. And Ella needed exactly that sort of help. He contacted me very explicitly and asked for help and I introduced

her to all of my key contacts. And I wrote, I did all the paperwork for her. I had that many files from her. I accompanied her to court. When Ella's fight for her kids came before the High Court, Sabine was right there by her side. But she didn't just give advice. Sabine launched a PR campaign for Ella, drumming up interest in the children's story outside the courts. This isn't something you would normally do at all, especially in the middle of a private family court case. private family court case. My measure of success was that I had 16,000 signatures for the petition to return the two whistleblower kids to their Russian family. That, I think it was just a couple of months. But a petition is nothing compared to what Sabine did next. When Ella

sacked her lawyers, she was given all the confidential material, the kids' police interviews, their medical reports, the statements by the local authority, and Ella shared all this with Sabine. In early February, just six months after Ella's kids had spoken to the police, as the judge prepared to decide their fate, Sabine did something unprecedented. to decide their fate, Sabine did something unprecedented. There was a moment when confidential material like the kids' police interviews, I think,

was leaked online or somehow managed to find its way online. Somehow, I published a petition directed at Theresa May, who was then Home Secretary. That was the petition and that's what I published. So the links to the videos were in the petition? Yeah. I had written the position statement for the High Court judge, Anna Palfley, either you return the kids or we go online. And Ella was in court inside with Belinda, came out saying the Dutch has no intention of returning the children. I said, OK, so we go online. All that intimate material, including Ella's list of 175 supposed child abusers,

Sabine put it all online. The judge quickly tried to contain it. She ordered Sabine to take down the material and threatened her with contempt of court. But it made no difference. It was too late. The material was out there, being reposted and republished, tweeted and Instagrammed over and over again. One blog which published the videos reported that it had 25 million hits in its first seven days. And that was the tip of the iceberg. The Hampstead case galvanised a generation of conspiracy theorists. There is satanic ritual abuse here. There is cannibalism here.

There are babies trafficked through Heathrow Airport and Gatwick Airport. He is apparently the head of a fucking pretty substantially sized, large satanic cult in North London. You're talking about baby eaters who cut off children's and babies' heads and fuck them and murder them? And brought violence ricocheting back into the community. As you've seen, people can be weaponised from countries thousands of miles away to physically come, armed with either a knife or a gun, to take up a cause. And you wipe me?

No, I can't. No, I can't. I can't remember exact words, but it was something on the lines of, your time is up. While the social media companies silently let the flames spread. Children saying we were raped by Satanists, oh, that doesn't violate our standards.

You might be thinking that this sounds like a fringe story, one that exists on the edges of the internet, out of harm's way. But you'd be wrong. We're living in a post-truth age, where conspiracy theories can spread like viruses and bleed through into the real world. One in seven Americans now believe that their government is controlled by Satan-worshipping paedophiles.

And if that sounds similar to this story, that's no accident. From the Salem witch hunts to the Satanic panic, from QAnon to Pizzagate, what I've discovered in this investigation is that we're talking about the same story. The same ancient fears of abuse and devil worship repurposed for each generation and now turbocharged by the internet. What happened in Hampstead then isn't just a conspiracy theory, it's the conspiracy theory. Oh, and another thing. The two people who started the Hampstead hoax, Ella and Abraham, People who started the hamster hoax, Ella and Abraham, they've never been held accountable, never been arrested, never even been questioned by police.

No one even knows where they are. So we're going to walk to Abraham's riet now. We've got a pin from the fixer so we know where it is. The walls are much closer together in this part of the medina, and everything feels like it's closing in. Well, until now. Hoaxed was brought to you by me, Alexi Mostras, Gemma Newby, Xavier Greenwood and Immy Harper. Sound design is by Eloise Whitmore. The executive producer is Basha Cummings.