Who Trolled Amber? - Hoaxed - Episode 5: The Healer

Episode Date: September 4, 2023

Alexi and his producer fly to Morocco to confront Abraham Christie - and learn dark secrets about his past.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.

ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show 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 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. as well as strong language and graphic violence. When Ella Draper stopped taking my calls this summer, I turned my attention to her former partner, Abraham Christie, the man that she'd met in early 2014, just a few months before her children made those allegations about satanic abuse. Abraham's really the only other person who can answer my big question. Why did this all happen?

I wanted to find him to ask him that, but also, to be honest, I was infuriated. Infuriated that he's been living beyond justice for years now, despite what we know he did to Ella's children. The police missed their chance to arrest Abraham in 2014, and now, eight years later, he seems to have got away scot-free. Ladies and gentlemen, we're very delighted to welcome you to Marrakesh. The local time here is now 9.30. So, in late July, in the middle of the hottest summer in years,

Gemma and I find ourselves on a 5am budget flight to Morocco. From all of us on board, we would like to wish you a good stay and for those who are returning, welcome home. With its ancient alleyways and unmarked streets, Marrakesh is the perfect place for someone to hide. Marrakesh is the perfect place for someone to hide. So when we get off the plane, we're not sure if we're going to be able to track Abraham down, whether this is all going to be a wasted trip.

But we have to try. From Tortoise, I'm Alexi Mostras, and this is Hoaxed, Episode 5, The Healer. For the past few weeks, we've worked with our colleague Xavier Greenwood to triangulate Abraham's whereabouts. Here's what we know. We know he lives in a riad somewhere in an area of Marrakesh called Sidi bin Sliman. It's in the old part of the city, known as the Medina. We know he lives really near a mosque.

On Abraham's social media, there are photos taken from the balcony of his Riyadh that show the mosque in the background. It's got this distinctive triangular-shaped roof. And we know he hangs out with a young guy whose name we think is Zachariah. We know he hangs out with a young guy whose name we think is Zachariah. From the Instagram photos, we can see that he and Abraham travel together. They might even live together. Pictures show them both drinking hemp juice and holding these huge marijuana plants.

We send all of this information to our fixer, Nadia, just a few days before we fly. By the way, Nadia's not her real name. We've changed it to protect her identity. I mean, based on the documents you sent me, pictures, I've been asking first people who are from the Medina, close to this Riyadh, in Bini Sliman. A fixer is someone who helps out journalists on the ground. In situations like this, they're absolutely critical. Gemma and I could spend weeks wandering around Marrakesh and find nothing, whereas Nadia, she knows Morocco inside out.

From the moment she receives our dossier on Abraham, Nadia's been making calls to her contacts in Marrakesh, asking if they've ever come across this older British guy, Skinny, who sells hemp juice. And she gets results. So I find out that he's not very known there, but he has a kind of private circle. He's known as someone who's healing people through seeds, through cannabis. Nadia's found people who've come across Abraham in Marrakesh. And I found that someone told me, this is not Abraham, his name is Abraham, and he's from UK.

And amazingly, one of her friends has actually met him, or at least someone who sounds very similar. You found that he is here? Yeah, he is here. He is in Raqesh. He apparently don't look like the pictures. He's older. So your close friend, let me see if I can get this right, your close friend met Abraham? Yep.

Directly? Yeah, directly. And how are you sure he's the same guy that we're looking for? Because before to show my friend the picture you sent me, he was describing this guy, this tiny, skinny, brown-skinned guy that could be aggressive. The way he talks is aggressive. Well, that certainly sounds like Abraham.

Small, skinny, aggressive. Ella's family court judgment in 2015 revealed that Abraham had a long criminal background, in and out of prison for drug offences and violence. In 2014, he'd even received a police caution for assaulting his teenage son. So when Nadia describes this skinny, aggressive guy, it feels like we're on the right track. Right, so let's talk stages. So stage one, is he still here? Yeah.

If he is still here, stage two is where exactly? And then stage three is how are we going to meet him? But first of all, I think we should meet my friend because he can talk about his own experience with Abraham. So, let's see, if you just pop those on for me. At the end of our first day in Marrakesh, our fixer persuades her friend to talk to us. He's nervous, so we meet him away from his usual hangouts,

at this pretty weird expat bar, a place with low ceilings and leather sofas, and, as you can hear, a stereo playing non-stop Elvis. We've re-pitched the friend's voice to protect his identity. So basically, we are trying to find this guy, Abraham Christie. And if I just start by playing you this video of Abraham Christie, you can tell me what you think, whether you've seen this guy before. I play a video I've found of Abraham looking super lean for a man in his 60s in a courtyard of what looks like a Riyadh.

Abraham's topless and he's skipping with one of those ropes that boxers train with. He's pretty good too. At this video he looks like super fit. But like last time when I met him, he wasn't like this. He wasn't that fit. So who is the guy in the video that you've just seen? He's one of the dealers that I'm getting like weed from, but like he's not, he's saying that he's not a dealer, he's a healer. And you know this guy by what name?

By Abraham. Bingo. It's definitely Abraham. And even better, Nadia's friend says that he's actually visited Abraham's Riyadh in person. He went there to buy some weed. Abraham doesn't sell weed in small amounts, mind you. According to Nadia's friend, the minimum you can buy is 100 euros. When you want to, like, do a consultation at his place and then buy the weed and everything, he's telling you that he's super expensive. This all reminds me slightly of that scene in Pulp Fiction,

the Quentin Tarantino classic, where Vincent Vega, the main character, goes to buy some heroin from his dealer. The dealer offers him something called Madman. It's the best of the best. And this is essentially where Abraham seems to have positioned himself, a dealer selling the most expensive weed, Madman quality weed,

to discerning clientele in Marrakesh. The first time I met him at his riad and I was super impressed because he's a super interesting guy. Nadia's friend seems almost charmed by Abraham, something I wasn't expecting to be honest. He's super cultivated, even the way how he looks. Why did you find him so interesting? You see the guy, he reads a lot of books in his life. He must travel a lot around the world. This was a different side to the violent bully who I'd read about in the family court judgment or the police

investigation report. A side of Abraham that perhaps explains why Ella was attracted to him. And it tallies with what other people told me too. Someone who knows Abraham from back in the 90s described him as this weird mix of mystical savant and hardened criminal. A man obsessed by chemistry and literature, whose favourite book is Dune, the epic science fiction novel from the 1960s. Back in the UK, Abraham sold hemp juice smoothies on an East London market store. He promoted them as potions which could heal all sorts of ailments. And he boasted that he had an honorary doctorate in nutrition, whatever that means.

And it seems like, in Morocco, he's playing up to this side of his personality, the mystical savant. Abraham sells cannabis, but he's a healer, not a dealer. Then, just before we stop the recording, Nadia's friend mentions a detail from his meeting with Abraham that kind of stuns me.

A single disturbing detail that I've come across again and again and again in this investigation. Because the first time when I saw him, he was wearing also like at least two and a half or three kilos of silver. Silver jewellery? Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of necklaces, a lot of rings and stuff like that. But like the one that attracted me so much,

it was the one with the pendant as a spoon, a big spoon. A big spoon round the neck. It's like, I can say, 10 centimetres. A spoon that you use in your kitchen to eat with. Abraham wears a large silver spoon around his neck. It's a detail that was deeply unsettling to me. Because when Ella's children first made their allegations to the police in September 2014, they said their father and the other cult members hit them with spoons.

and the other cult members hit them with spoons. If we say it hurts or if we cry or make a sound, they'll give us spoon licks. Spoon licks? What does that mean? So you get spoons and then they hit us, hit us, hit us on the head. Later on, they admit it's actually Abraham who hits them with spoons. So, but he gave us... He didn't hurt us, but he got spoons and gave us not hard, hard licks. He gave us the soft licks.

Who did? Abraham. We need to go back for a moment, back a decade or so, because long before Ella's children spoke to the police, Abraham faced similar accusations of violence against him, violence that allegedly included hitting children with spoons. In the 1990s, long before he got together with Ella, Abraham had been married to a woman who we'll call Cindy.

Abraham has his own children with Cindy and was also a stepfather to her kids from a previous partner. For years, what happened during that relationship remained behind closed doors. remained behind closed doors. Then, in the summer of 2015, a few months after the hoax had started, one of those stepchildren posts a message on the anti-hoax blog run by Karen Irving, the mystery novelist from Canada. It's a message to the conspiracy theorists,

saying, don't believe this stuff, saying, I know AB and what he's capable of. AB is her name for Abraham, by the way. We've asked an actor to voice up her messages. Just a warning, it's a bit upsetting. This little girl is not lying. He did the same to me and my family. AB is an evil man with no feelings. When you cry, he licks you more. She posted again a few weeks later. and sisters and made my brother lie to social services back in the 90s, saying that my dad was an abuser, which was a lie. He destroyed our lives, took all my mother's money, and this

disgusts me that he's doing this all over again. According to the stepdaughter, Abraham forced one of his stepchildren to make up allegations of sexual abuse against their real father. And this was years before Hampstead. Seven years after that message was posted, this summer in fact, Abraham gets into a huge fight with his former family on Instagram. It seems like he's fallen out with Cindy over the Moroccan Riyadh. It's a place they own together and Cindy, but not Abraham, wants to sell. On Instagram, Abraham publicly accuses Cindy of being a witch, of using a Ouija board, and most seriously, of covering up the sexual abuse of her children.

The children rise to her defense. They counter Abraham's posts with allegations of their own. Again, this is an actor. You're a narcissist. I don't expect you to own up to your actions. You beat me numerous times at Finsbury Road. I remember as children we had to go into protective housing as you battered our mother. He accuses Abraham of physical abuse. Just to make the world aware, this man beat me, my siblings and my mum for years. Broken ribs, beaten so bad that we were unable to sit down for days. If we didn't agree with him, he would lash out. I realised to make him stop, just say what he wanted to hear. After investigating this story for months,

that one line from Abraham's stepson still haunts me. To make him stop, just say what he wanted to hear. At the end of September, just as we're putting this episode together, some members of Abraham's former family get in touch. They've heard the first episodes of the podcast, and they want to give me more details about his alleged abuse. 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. The former family members told me that Abraham hit Cindy over the head with the back of a knife, hit her with metal bars, dug his fingers into her eyes and into the eyes of her children,

slapped her children in the face and twisted their ears and made them write statements to social workers, falsified statements about sexual abuse. And the allegation that chilled me most was that Abraham hit Cindy repeatedly over the head with a big silver spoon. I should be clear, I wasn't able to fully verify what the family told me. I've seen one official document which does refer to Abraham's violence towards his ex-wife, but it's not comprehensive.

Then again, evidence is often hard to get in cases of alleged domestic abuse. Sometimes documentation just doesn't exist. Abraham has called all the allegations relating to his stepchildren and to his former partner evil lies. He admits online to disciplining his children, smacking them, but denies that he ever abused them as violently as they allege. To me, hearing all this in the last few weeks, it makes it even more astonishing that the police failed even to question Abraham before he fled the country in February 2015. After all, Ella's kids had told the police the previous September that he'd hit them repeatedly, including with spoons. And here I am now, discovering that he allegedly did exactly the same thing to a former partner, and to her children too.

It wouldn't have taken much for the police to talk to Abraham's former family, to dig just a little bit deeper, but they seem to have missed their chance completely. Just before we flew to Morocco, I message one of Abraham's stepchildren to tell him what we're planning. The reply, if I'm honest, puts me on edge. He comes across very charming and is well educated. Be careful when approaching him. He can be very violent.

This was the first warning that I got about Abraham. And the second one? While I'm sitting in that Elvis-playing bar, talking to Nadia's friend. Would you be able to show us where the Riyadh is? The Riyadh, I really don't know, but... To do what? To do what? You want to meet him? Yeah.

Do you think he'll give us an interview? For sure, no. As I told you, it's not safe for you. When we ask Nadia's friend if he'd take us to Abraham's Riyadh, he gets cagey. He also says it's too dangerous to go there. And then he stops answering our calls. So the only option is to get out onto the streets and try and find

Abraham's Riyadh myself. It's really important that I find Abraham, that I speak to him, because he's not just a grifter. He's not even just an alleged domestic abuser. He's the architect of this enormous lie. And he's in the Medina, hiding from scrutiny, maybe even hiding from the police. Gemma and I trawl the narrow alleyways, trying to find that distinctive mosque, or anything that might tell us where Abraham's Riyadh is. that might tell us where Abraham's Riyadh is. So, it's been quite a frustrating day.

We started off by moving from our hotel on the outskirts into the Medina itself, into a Riyadh in the Medina, because we wanted to be close to where we knew Abraham was. And then, in the morning, we went on a hunt for Abraham's Riyadh. We had these pictures and we were trying to identify it from the ground, but that wasn't working. It was just a rabbit warren of streets. So we tried to get close and then go up and see what we could see from the rooftops of another Riyadh. And we think that we've got really close, but close isn't good enough. We couldn't find it. By the next evening, Gemma and I had pretty much given up

all hope of finding Abraham's Riyadh. And then we get a breakthrough. Did I mention that fixes are really important? Well, there is no way this would have happened without Nadia. So she sent us an update. Yeah. Okay, so she sent a map. And it says I'm at Abraham place now. She's at Abraham's place right now. She's just sent a photo. That's it. Oh my god, that's what we've been looking for. Shit. She's there. She's actually inside. It looks like it. Nadia is inside Abraham's

with Zacharia, the young guy who is Abraham's gatekeeper. This was totally unexpected. The day before, we discovered a bar that Zachariah hangs out in. The plan was for Nadia to go there and somehow convince Zach to give her the exact address of the Riyadh, enabling us to go there later and confront Abraham. What we weren't expecting was for her to go there without us, alone. Is Abraham there? It doesn't say.

It doesn't say. So when we get her text, we're excited, but we're also worried. Because we haven't talked about what happens if something goes wrong. What happens if Abraham turns up and gets violent? Hey. Hi. Come in. Have you got news?

I lost everything. Yeah. I disappeared for like three hours, four. How long have you been gone? And so we're relieved when a few hours later, Nadia returns. Yeah, it's been a very long, long afternoon. Tell me what happened. OK, so...

She describes a dirty place, somewhere where it looks like people have been squatting, clothes everywhere. And there's something about the Riyadh that put her on edge. You feel a presence, you know? You feel a presence, you feel uncomfortable when you are in it. I mean, you can feel there's a suspicious place to be, you know? You feel uncomfortable being there.

I felt like at any moment during a conversation with Zachariah, somebody can pop up behind my back and grab me or something, you know? Nadia felt Abraham's presence all around her, but he wasn't there. Did he say where he was? He said he was out of the country, that means Morocco, and he said he is in the UK. Wow.

Shit. So we've spent all this time in Morocco trying to find Abraham and he's actually in the UK. Potentially round the corner from us in North London. So it's our last day in Morocco. We're about to go back to the UK and it feels like we got so close to tracking down this guy that we've been looking for literally for months now.

We found his Riyadh. We were in his Riyadh, but he's not there. And it's so frustrating. It feels like he's slipped through our fingers. But it is really interesting that he's in the UK, because if he is in the UK, that means the police are much closer to him and much more able, potentially, to take action against him than if he was somewhere hidden in an alleyway in Marrakesh.

So maybe this isn't the end of the story at all, so much as the beginning of a new chapter. isn't the end of the story at all, so much as the beginning of a new chapter. I'd missed the chance to confront Abraham in Marrakesh, but I knew that if he was in the UK, that was a really big deal. And I had one more card to play. Because I'd come back from Morocco with a really valuable piece of information, a piece of intelligence that I'm not even sure the police have, Abraham's Moroccan phone number. Hello, ass that Abraham Christie?

Hello? Next week, on the final episode of Hoaxed, I come full circle and put Ella under the microscope. How much credibility do you give to the narrative that Ella was coercively controlled by Abraham? I don't really think that's true. And I finally speak to Abraham. You're a disingenuous little bugger you are. You've got something on your mind. ask it, Alexis. Hoaxed was brought to you by me, Alexi Mostras, Gemma Newby,

Immy Harper, and Xavier Greenwood. Sound design was by Eloise Whitmore. Special thanks in this episode to actors Annabelle Grace and Joshua Riley. Our executive producer is Basha Cummings.