Who Trolled Amber? - Hoaxed - Episode 2: Ella's list

Episode Date: September 4, 2023

Seized upon by conspiracy theorists, Ella’s list of alleged cult members spreads like wildfire across the Internet. Hampstead parents start receiving death threats and lives are torn apart.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.

You're invited to an immersive listening party led by Rishi Keshe Herway, the visionary behind the groundbreaking Song Exploder podcast and Netflix series. This unmissable evening features Herway and Toronto Symphony Orchestra music director Gustavo Gimeno in conversation. Together, they dissect the mesmerizing layers of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, followed by a complete soul-stirring rendition of the famously unnerving piece, Symphony Exploder. April 5th at Roy Thompson Hall. For tickets, visit tso.ca. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Hi, I'm Una Chaplin,

and I'm the host of a new podcast called Hollywood Exiles. It tells the story of how my grandfather, Charlie Chaplin, and many others were caught up in a campaign to root out communism in Hollywood. It's a story of glamour and scandal and political intrigue and a battle for the soul of the nation. Hollywood Exiles, from CBC Podcasts and the BBC World Service. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. ACAST.com 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. There's the police. There's the police, Ella. There's a world of police. There's a world of them outside, Ella. It's February 2015 and Ella Draper is due to appear in court. But actually, she's at home and the police are at her door. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, not speak English. I'm sorry, not speak English. Open the door, please.

No, don't open the door. I don't know. She's supposed to be giving evidence in a family law case to decide who will get custody of her children. Get a video camera on the front door. Get a video camera on the front door. Don't open it. The same children who, a few months earlier,

had told police that there was a satanic cult operating in the heart of Hampstead. But on the day that Ella is supposed to testify, she just doesn't turn up. What do you want and why? I need to speak to Ella. A lawyer who's helping Ella out stalls for time. Right, look, what is your lawful authority to be here

or to try and gain entry? I want to speak to Ella. He records the conversation on his phone. What about the proposal that I've made of an appointment? No, it's not an option at this time. We need to do it now. And as I say, unfortunately, if it comes to it, we would have to force entry into our lawful defense.

Speaking through the letterbox, the officers get increasingly frustrated. They tell the lawyer that they're here to ask Ella about harassment. Three weeks before, Sabine McNeil, Ella's unofficial legal advisor, leaked a huge amount of confidential material online, including videos of the children falsely alleging they'd been abused by their father. The videos had gone viral and the father started to get death threats. The judge issued an injunction against both Ella and Sabine, basically saying, take this material down now or face the consequences.

But both women ignored her. And now the police are at Ella's door. They're going to come in. They're going to come in. They're coming in, with or without permission. But by then, it's too late. Ella runs out into the back garden of her house, climbs over the fence into her neighbour's garden, climbs over two more fences, reaches the street and escapes.

The next day, she leaves the country. Abraham, her partner, the guy who'd forced the children into lying about the cult, he goes with her. They leave the children behind. Ella's escape doesn't stop the wheels of justice turning. On the 19th of March, seven months after the kids first spoke to the police, Judge Anna Poffley issues her judgment.

It's about as damning and upsetting a legal document as I've ever read. Ella loses custody of her children, but that's not the worst of it. Judge Poffley finds that Ella and Abraham put relentless pressure on the children to lie about their dad, to falsely name him as the head of a satanic cult. She refers to their actions, and I'm quoting verbatim here, as emotional and physical torture. She finds that Abraham pushed, punched and pinched the children during the Morocco holiday in the summer of 2014. Though he poured water over them as they kneeled semi-clothed and hit them on the head with metal spoons.

And Ella, she let it happen. When I read this judgment last year, back when I was first looking into this case, I remember feeling shock and also a real sense of confusion. How could this have happened? Ella seemed to be close to her children. Her Facebook profile is filled with pictures of the three of them together, hugging, smiling, like any normal family. I get how she hated Ricky, her former partner, how she hated him with every bone of her body. We know that they'd been fighting over the children for years, long after they'd broken up. These were really bad fights, sometimes with the police involved. Ella had also made several attempts before 2014 to get custody of

her kids. She wanted to take them to live with her in Russia, but Ricky wouldn't allow it. And I can almost see, if you're desperate to get your children away from their father, how someone at their wits' end might do something terrible, like make up false allegations of abuse. But conjuring up a story that would become one of Britain's most serious conspiracy theories? Where did that come from? Serious conspiracy theories? Where did that come from? Why would anyone coach their children into making up that sort of horrendous lie?

And eight years later, what does Ella believe now? Does she understand what she started? The innocence of her childhood has been completely ruined. My whole life has changed. I feel sick, devastated and heartbroken. It's destroyed my life. Violated my family and ruined our lives. From Tortoise, I'm Alexi Mostras, and this is Hoaxed. Episode 2, Ella's List.

In the weeks after Sabine posted the children's videos online, the blast from the Hampstead hoax ripped through the internet, travelling outwards at a million miles an hour. The story was picked up by sites like Infowars, the huge conspiracy site run by the US hoaxer Alex Jones, and promoted by Paul Joseph Watson, Jones's UK-based number two. An incredibly disturbing video which went viral over the weekend, shows two British children describing how they were allegedly forced to take part in satanic ceremonies,

which included sexual abuse and the ritualistic murder of babies. The kids' videos crisscrossed the UK and then jumped over the Atlantic to America, where they were promoted by dozens of alt-right radio stations and conspiracy websites. It's not an exaggeration to say that material relating to this case was viewed literally tens of millions of times. They are describing cutting the heads off of children, drinking the blood, dancing with skulls. You know, the thing with the tattoos, children, drinking the blood, dancing with skulls. You know, the thing with the tattoos,

those tattoos were in places a child should never see them. But then, just like a real bomb, this outward explosion reverses course and the shrapnel sucks back in towards Hampstead. And that's because when Ella handed over all those videos of her children to Sabine, she handed her another video too. A video of her reading out a list. A list of targets. The individuals involved. Reverend ****** at ****** church. Her teacher ******.

Teachers. Mr ******. Church. Head teacher. Teachers. Mr. Teachers who left the school to other schools to spread the cult but still come to the Satanist parties. I can see Ella sitting squarely in front of the camera, wearing a blue tracksuit. She looks poised, calm. Reading from a script, she slowly goes through name after name after name. Names that she says have been given to her by her children. Names of cult members. Twenty special families and their children include Mr. ****** and Mrs. *** and their daughter ***.

Ella also made an 11-page word document containing the same names as she read out on the video. I've seen this word document and I cannot believe how much detail is in it. Not only the names, addresses and emails of the cult members, but detailed descriptions of their supposed satanic practices. This parent helps smuggle in the babies. This parent rents a room out where the abuse took place.

This teacher runs a child prostitution business. It probably won't surprise you to hear that the internet absolutely lapsed this up. For the parents at Ella's kids' school, the fallout was almost immediate. They had my address, they had my phone number, they had all my email lists, and they also had the names of my children. This is Sam. Her daughter was in the same class as Ella's youngest. I remember my phone ringing and it had an American number on it.

I remember thinking, oh, who's that? And I answered the phone and this man with an American accent said something on the lines of, you should be ashamed of yourself. You're abusing young children. You're, you know, you're a paedophile. You're a murderer.

I remember as he was hurling all this abuse, actually not being able to get a word in, and he just hung up. So it was like, you're this, you're a killer, you're a child murderer, you're going to be sorry about this, your time's up. And then, boom, phone went dead. Sam was far from the only parent to get death threats in 2015. Pretty much everyone on Ella's list was called, emailed, threatened. We're talking phone calls at three o'clock in the morning, strangers asking you if you abused children, if your own child liked sex, if they could meet your child

for sex. For the parents on Ella's list, this was like an explosion ripping up their comfortable lives. And like me, they started asking, why? Why would anyone choose to set off a bomb in this lovely middle-class bubble called Hampstead? It was a bit like a fairy tale in that sense, that you're living in Hampstead, this lovely school, and it's really picturesque, and, you know, this really you're living in Hampstead, there's this lovely school and it's really picturesque, you know, this really beautiful part of old Hampstead.

There's something really lovely about it and you'd walk up the steps to get to the school and then you see this amazing church as well, which actually you can see from miles around because it's quite high up on the hill. Unless, I suppose, you were on the outside looking in. And how did Ella fit into all of that? Do you remember when you first met her?

I don't think she really did fit in. I think she probably was a little bit of a misfit in some way. She wasn't that sort of stereotypical mother that probably the rest of us were. Quite middle class, affluent. She never really striked me as being like some of the other mums. It was difficult to put your finger on it,

but there was just something a little bit different. Could Ella have been angry at something else apart from Ricky? Could she have named so many parents as members of the satanic cult because she felt excluded? Sam tells me about a birthday party she hosted for her daughter back in 2013, before Ella had gotten together with Abraham. There was quite a few children there, as you can imagine. It was the whole class. It was a disco.

Ella's son is invited and Ella turns up with both children, drops them off at the party and just as she's leaving, she tells Sam, oh, and by the way, they're vegan. You know, I remember just thinking, oh, my God, just looking over at the pizzas and the sausage rolls and packs of crisps and thinking this is like a nightmare. I do remember looking over and seeing them eating all this stuff that was basically not vegan. I'm thinking oh god you know I'm going to be in trouble. When Ella picks up her kids she's cross. It's obvious that they've strayed and she blames

Sam. Do you think that if she acted like that with other parents that she kind of felt isolated from the general kind of community of parents? I don't really think so. I think people always made a real effort because at the end of the day, her children were lovely and really popular. So I think, you know, I thought she was okay. I thought she kept herself to herself. So Ella was outside the Hampstead bubble. She seems to have been regarded as slightly separate, slightly odd by the other parents. And it's true that primary school parents can be really cliquey. But at the same time, it wasn't like this was a major deal. It wasn't like Sam was thinking,

oh my God, this woman is totally bananas. Later, however, her views hardened. Her behaviour changed quite considerably after she met Abraham. And did you have any interaction at all with Abraham Christie? Do you remember him? Yeah, I do remember him. It was a school sports day. Yeah.

And we were parents, you know, all there picnicking, watching the children. I remember it was a particularly hot day, a bit like bit like you know this hot summer we're having now and um ella was there and they were sunbathing um while you know the sports day was happening i just remember thinking it was a bit odd because she was there in a bikini and he arrived um and he had his shirt unbuttoned all the way down. It was like he was exposing his chest and it just felt completely inappropriate because it was like a school fun day. It's difficult to know what to do with this information. Going to a kids' sports day in an open shirt probably is inappropriate. But I wonder, is there an element of snobbishness here? Abraham is from Tottenham, worlds apart

from Hampstead, plus he's black in what, as Sam says, is a pretty white area. So maybe Abraham felt that the other parents disapproved of him and he was pushing back a little fuck you to the cliquey group. Then again, I've seen other photos of Abraham that I do think are inappropriate. There's one in particular that I'm thinking of, taken in Morocco in the summer of 2014, which shows him posing in a cannabis field, topless, holding some cannabis plants in his mouth. Ella is there too.

She's posing in a bikini. But what makes it uncomfortable is that I know that her children are there somewhere in the background. They're out of shot, but they must have been there because the photos were taken at the same time they were being coached to come up with the hoax. And that combination, cannabis, a lack of clothing, kids,

it all makes me feel a bit queasy. I thought there was something about him that made me feel uncomfortable and I always wondered whether he had actually influenced her. By this point Ella and Abraham had fled the country and Sabine McNeill, the woman who had leaked the videos, was running the show. It just got worse and worse and worse and worse and then videos were appearing on different websites and this class list was appearing all over the place. And she wasn't content with simply posting videos of the children. From the safety of her apartment in Germany,

she encouraged her followers to visit Hampstead in person. It was the first real sign for the parents that online threats could easily bleed over into the real world. And it happened in one place in particular, that fairytale village church right next to the children's school. Right, it's Sunday the 22nd of March 2015. We're just on the way down to Hampstead to pay a little visit to a certain vicar.

Naughty vicar. Naughty, naughty vicar. Dude. Church. The famous church where all the paedophilia goes off. And the dirty paedo clergyman. He's passing school. And the poor man here.

The pedo school. Yeah. See there's a group already up there waiting. I'm out. The church. Where the victim is. The pedo. Stop killing babies.

Stop killing children. Satanist. That one. Is she a Christian? She's a Satanist, yeah. Child killer. We were sat in church and the members of this group were in the church. I genuinely think that they believed all this stuff that these people were publishing and had come out of curiosity.

If you've seen the retraction, I don't know if you've seen the videos, but if you've seen *** retraction, you know there was no retraction there. It was actually child abuse. He was actually being abused by the interviewing officer. If it was an officer that interviewed him, he was playing with his mind. And then at the end of the church service, you know, when we all left the church to go home, they were all outside with banners. It was just nuts, in the middle of like, you know, Hampstead, outside the church. Stop killing babies! What's your children? They're fucking children! They're killing children! They're fucking children!

They're killing children! They're eating children! And I remember the priests leaving the church and they were following him and hounding him and holding placards saying murderer, you know, sex abuser, paedophile, all that kind of stuff. And it was at that time that I thought, oh, my God, what is going to happen? What is going to happen? What is going to happen? You know, is this now a safe place to live?

By now, there were three catalysts driving the hoax. The videos of the children, the list of perpetrators, and thirdly, on-the-ground organisers like Sabine, who were directing the protesters on what to say and where to go. She even made flyers headlined, Is Your Child Safe?, which she asked people to stick on cars in the area. It felt to me like it had all been completely engineered, that they had a clear set of rules, you know, don't touch anyone, don't cross the boundaries, you're in a public space, so you're allowed to do this. Touch anyone, don't cross the boundaries.

You're in a public space. So you're allowed to do this. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Hi, I'm Una Chaplin, and I'm the host of a new podcast called Hollywood Exiles. It tells the story of how my grandfather, Charlie Chaplin, and many others were caught up in a campaign to root out communism in Hollywood.

It's a story of glamour and scandal and political intrigue and a battle for the soul of a nation. Hollywood Exiles, from CBC Podcasts and the BBC World Service. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. ACAST.com To the people on Ella's list, this was the nightmare scenario. An army of cranks marshaled by someone who knew exactly what they were doing.

We totally got the impression that this had all been driven really purposefully by a couple of people who were almost like professional trolls. That's how it felt like to me. At one point it got quite frightening in that there was a Facebook and a lot on social media about there was one day in particular when there was meant to be an organised group to come. This is Michaela, another parent we spoke to

who also found her name and her family's name on Ella's list. And they were planning to storm the school to save the children who were on this list. And that was a really anxious day. 2,000 people apparently had signed up to say they were going to come to the school to take the children. Sabine started giving interviews to alt-right radio stations and the alternative media, people you've probably never heard of, but who have thousands of followers.

You're a hero. Tell us about the petition. Well, yes, we've hit 10,000 today. Fantastic. And there'll be more after this, you can be sure of it. And when this goes out on davidike.com headlines tomorrow, there'll be thousands more signed it. I've no doubt about it. You know, the brave new MPs who are speaking out against it. Have you had any

conversation with any of those, Sabine? Any of those two men? I did send an email to Simon Dunshaw. Can you guarantee my safe return to the country? And I didn't get a response. And I emailed Tom Watts now also. Belinda has emailed all of the MPs.

David Icke has just sent me a message. And he's asking, can you, first of all, let us have a link to the petition and it'll go on David Icke's website. So a lot more people are going to see it. Millions a day look at David's website, literally millions. And he asks, respectfully asks, could you let him have a copy of the medical report

and he could report that without mentioning the source? What do you think? Sure, I'm up for all crimes, right, let's put it this way. But nobody wants you to get into any more trouble, Emma. Crime is what has to be done. Sabine's role in promoting the hoax became so apparent that her name filtered through to the Hampstead parents. But it wasn't the only name they heard.

Did you kind of begin to get an idea of who the people were who were driving the hoax at all? Yeah. Sabine McNeill and Belinda McKenzie. Belinda McKenzie, Sabine's partner in crime. Belinda is the person who first made me realise that Sabine wasn't operating in a vacuum. That, in fact fact she was the gateway to something larger, a coordinated ecosystem of conspiracy theorists which have barely been reported on by the mainstream media. Belinda met Sabine a few years before the Hampstead hoax, outside the family courts, and they bonded over their mutual loathing of how the courts operate.

During Ella's hearing, Belinda stood outside court, giving interviews about the so-called whistleblower kids and acting as a kind of mother figure to Ella's supporters. This is very widespread. The children have said that it's not just one school, but it's several schools. In fact, in one of the videos, which, you know, if you get on my mailing list, I'll make sure that you get all the sort of the hot stuff.

You'll get the videos every day. If anybody wants to put their name on my mailing list, I will keep them updated because I don't even do things by Facebook and Twitter so much because I like things to circulate a little bit quietly. She always had a bag full of sandwiches that she'd give out to her followers and, you know, I think many people relied on her for financial support because she had a bit of money. This is Karen Irving. She's been following the Hampstead case obsessively almost from day one. Belinda McKenzie was the person who was in some ways supportive of most of the hoaxers, and in particular supportive financially

of Sabine McNeill, and who spread the word that Sabine was putting out amongst her friends in the conspiracy community. She'd been a conspiracy theorist for many years. Belinda's maiden name is Boswell. She's part of the famous Boswell family, a direct descendant of James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson, the English writer. Belinda grew up on a huge estate in North Buckinghamshire, and today she lives in a sprawling house in Highgate, right next to Hampstead. The house is known as the Highgate Hub because, so the legend goes, it's played host to pretty much every major conspiracy theorist to come to Britain in the last 20 years. The rumour was that there were seven doorbells.

I don't know what that was meant to represent, but I did hear that she had what amounted to a bunker in her basement where she would hide people when they came, if they were trying to escape the authorities who were trying to take their children from them. So we've just got off the tube at Highgate and we're a couple of minutes away from Belinda McKenzie's house. We're going to go round there. She's agreed to have a conversation with us. We've got all our recording equipment with us

in the hope that she'll give us an interview. But to be honest with you, I don't hold out much hope. This summer, my producer Gemma and I paid Belinda a visit. Her home does indeed have a bunker. It is indeed sprawling. She has several lodgers, one who was a concert pianist and who was giving online lessons while we were there. Belinda is charming.

She gave us a tour of the house and the never-ending garden. She brought us cakes and tea to enjoy, and we sat in the sunshine having a good old chat. It was a bit like visiting a kindly aunt. But every now and then, she slipped into conspiracy mode. She kept saying that paedophiles were everywhere, and she explained that she was a 9-11 truther, someone who believes 9-11 was orchestrated by the US government. Belinda insisted politely that our conversation this time was off the record, but she promised

us an interview the following week. And I noticed, as we were leaving, on a cabinet by the front door was a pile of newspapers called The Light, a conspiracy theory publication which I later found out had promoted Russian propaganda and called for journalists to be put on trial. That interview, by the way, I'm not sure whether Belinda was playing us from the start, but she always came up with another excuse. It never happened.

I find that interesting, though, because while Sabine is a gung-ho, screw-the-consequences, I'll-say-anything kind of person. Belinda is cleverer, more sly. I've been Mackenzie's friend a lot of the time I've shut up because I don't actually want to go to prison. And I certainly don't break my gag. But if I wasn't saying certain things, other people would. She reminds me of a kid I knew at school who would never do anything naughty,

but who would whisper to a mate, go on, you do it. But don't be fooled. This reticence hasn't stopped Belinda being involved in pretty much every conspiracy theory in the UK in the last two decades. If there's a protest about 9-11, or the BBC covering up child abuse, or the government covering up pretty much anything, Belinda will be there, in her navy blue trench coat, waving a placard and handing out sandwiches.

And what I discovered, when I dug a little deeper, is that Ella wasn't Belinda's first experience with a satanic hoax. A few years before, she got involved in the Holly Gregg case in Scotland. Holly was a Scottish woman with Down syndrome whose mother had alleged that she'd been sexually assaulted for 14 years, from when she was six years old. She gave the police the names of 22 men who had assaulted her. At the top of the list was Holly's father

and high-powered people in Scotland, including police officers. The police investigated but couldn't find any evidence that Holly's claims were true. But that didn't stop the case blowing up online. A group of campaigners calling themselves Holly's Army published all sorts of allegations, including the names of the suspects, as well as rumours about satanic rituals. They raised lots of money, attracted the support of some politicians

and successfully kept the case in the news for years. Belinda was a big part of Holly's Army. So when she teamed up with Sabine to help Ella, well, she already had a playbook to work from. I'm a police officer of 20 years. I had the opportunity of actually sitting with a mother, in this case, for three hours. Belinda knew that hoaxes were amplified by people in positions of authority. People like Ray Savage, a former detective sergeant at Sussex Police. I can absolutely tell you with my experience of interrogation over a 20-year period as a former detective sergeant, she was speaking 110% truth.

I know there's been no investigation, there's been no proper police statement taken from this woman because of the way she's been harassed. I also know that we have child abuse in this country to epidemic levels. The video was filmed outside the church in Hampstead on March 29, 2015, two weeks after the judge published her judgment in Ella's case. two weeks after the judge published her judgment in Ella's case. It's a wet day and Ray, a sensible-sounding former copper in his early 60s, is wearing a raincoat. He's standing with a small group of protesters. Belinda McKenzie is there. You can see her.

I was on Saturday sitting with a former MP from the Home Office who categorically stated to me that we've got now about one in ten children being abused. When I first saw this, I sent it to my producer, kind of astonished, because I think Ray sounds very persuasive, at least on the face of it. And the more I watched it, the more it became clear how much of the hoax, and other ho hoaxes are driven by people like this, people with veneers of authority. You know those scenes in crime dramas where a detective links up clues by putting bits of string against the wall? At that moment, that's how I was feeling.

At that moment, that's how I was feeling. By running a string from Sabine to Belinda, and then from Belinda to Ray, I was starting to map out the chief players in Conspiracy, Inc. In the centre are Sabine and Belinda, and I found that they were connected to a core circle of organised conspiracy theorists, with names like Brian Garish, Jackie Farmer, Angela Power Disney, Christine Sands and Matt Taylor.

And then a separate string links them to seemingly respectable figures like Ray and to John Wedger, another former senior police officer. And from there, well, you can connect those hoaxes to senior figures in the British Parliament, to senior figures in the National Health Service, to establishment journalists, to lawyers, and to a parliamentary lobbyist who was recently jailed for kidnapping a child. But I'll come to that.

Back in Hampstead, the parents on Ella's list were desperately trying to remove all the references to them online. It was a game of whack-a-mole. Every time a link was removed, three more would spring up. And it became quickly obvious that the police couldn't control all this online activity, that it was much more complicated than, you know, it was almost impossible to take these sites down because every time you took a site down, another one would emerge.

So it grew and grew and grew and grew and grew. More and more people were getting calls. I know one family tried to get all the links cleared and I think they got something like 40,000, 50,000 links and websites taken down. And within three days, they'd gone back up again. It just was continually there. I've spoken to a lot of parents, off the record and on,

and they all say that the police didn't do enough in the first year or so of the hoax. In spite of protests like the one outside the Hampstead church, the police's attitude seems to have been, ignore the trolls and they'll go away. Until perhaps this happened. If nobody else wants to do it, I'll go do it. I'll go over there myself. Give me a team of people, anybody. Let's just ride over to Hampstead and kick down doors and get some blood samples and try to find out if what

these kids are saying is true. Somebody needs to go in there with some gusto and vet this thing out and save these kids. In February 2015, Rupert Quaintance, an American guy from Virginia, posts a video promising to go to Hampstead and save the kids. Something terrible is going on in Hampstead. Why is this happening? Furthermore, why aren't we kicking down the doors to the schools, the churches? If you go look at the source material, you'll find out that these children are naming McDonald's and Starbucks where this stuff is happening. It's disgusting, it's despicable, it's deplorable.

Eight months later, more than a year after the hoax started, Rupert followed through on his pledge. In August 2016, he flies to London and a few days later posts a photograph of himself outside the kids' school on the first day of term. And he hints in a Facebook message that he's carrying something called a biscuit knife, a short, wide blade that can fit into the coin pocket of a pair of jeans. For the parents whose names were on Ella's list, this was terrifying.

The police are telling you, don't worry, these threats are only online. And then some guy, some lone operator, flies all the way from America, promising to kick down doors, and stands outside your children's school with a knife. Only Rupert Quaintance wasn't a lone operator. Far from it. Sabine and Belinda were paying for him to come to the UK in the summer of 2016.

Sabine had not only donated to his GoFundMe page, but had offered him a place to stay during his trip. Other conspiracy theorists, including Belinda, had given him thousands of dollars in funding. Rupert sought the help of Conspiracy Inc. and he had been rewarded. Rupert's visit to London doesn't occur in a vacuum. 2016 was a febrile year for satanic conspiracies. Four months after Rupert posed outside the children's school, a 28-year-old man from North Carolina called Edgar Madison Welch

arrived at a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C., and fired three shots into the restaurant. Police say that Welch told them that he showed up at the D.C. pizza restaurant to get to the bottom of what appears to bech told them that he showed up at the DC pizza restaurant to get to the bottom of what appears to be an utterly bogus story about child abuse promoted on the internet. How scary was the situation? Peter Robinson Pizza Gate, as that scandal was known, arose

from the belief widely perpetuated on the internet that the pizza shop was a front for satanic child abuse. Welch had read online that the restaurant was harbouring child sex slaves and he wanted to help. Welch and Rupert are essentially the same people. Paranoid young men driven into a frenzy by an internet lie. Pizzagate is widely regarded as the precursor to QAnon. And Hampstead? It's the precursor to both. That was when some of the Americans began using the Hampstead hoax as quote-unquote proof of satanic ritual abuse.

What I was learning was that the Hampstead hoax wasn't promoted by desperate individuals acting in isolation, but by a coordinated group of conspiracy theorists with experience and resources. It was an army. It was so fast and so big, and it just seemed to be like wildfire on the internet. Like every day there were, you know, dozens of new videos being put up. It was just crazy. It was like I had never seen anything like it. But this army was to have a formidable opponent. A group of resistance fighters made up of parents

on Ella's list and internet warriors thousands of miles away from each other who hated how the two Hampstead kids were being used as weapons in a wider war. This group decided to fight back, and it was them, much more than the police, that changed the course of the hoax completely. I was just outraged. I know it's hard enough being a parent. You don't need crazy people running after you and threatening to kidnap your child. To me, that was just like, this is not okay. This is really not okay. Next time on Hoaxed, I speak to Karen, a mystery novelist who spearheaded the fight back against

the hoaxers. I continue my search for Ella and Abraham. So I click on Hope Girl's blog and this woman has written a blog post containing a really, really recent video that Ella has put together. But in the blog she says, it just so happens that I live in the same town as Abraham. You find Hope Girl, you find Abraham Christie. And I managed to track down Sabine, the most important hoaxer of all. I'm sort of... I'm sort of wondering now whether I should, you know now whether I should regret having said yes to an interview.

It's just a pity. 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.