Accused: The Hampstead Paedophile Hoax reminds you that the internet is the greatest unregulated experiment ever conducted on humanity, and leads you inexorably to the conclusion that it might be time to call a halt to it. If animals were the subjects, we’d have done it long ago on ethical grounds.
The basic story is an ancient one: Accused is a documentary about a witch-hunt, but one enabled in terrifying ways by online connectivity. It begins in 2015, when a video is posted on social media of a nine-year-old girl, “Abigail”, and her eight-year-old brother “Joseph” claiming that a group of parents at their school were making them and their classmates “do sex” and adding details that are absolutely chilling to hear come out of children’s mouths. They say that this takes place in a big church nearby and – though they don’t use the term – what we would understand to be satanic rituals are involved.
The police investigate. It is found that the video was taken by the children’s mother, Ella Draper, who is involved in a bitter custody battle with the children’s father and who recently learned that there had been concerns raised at the school about her parenting, and her new boyfriend Abraham Christie while they were on holiday. Christie is a convicted criminal with links to conspiracy groups obsessed with the existence of child-killing, organ-harvesting satanists. The police carry out interviews at the school, search the church and school for evidence and find nothing. The case, for them, is closed. For the parents, and the four mothers interviewed here in particular, the nightmare has only just begun.
Because the video, of course, goes viral, attracting every kind of poison there is. Conspiracy theorists grab on to it as proof of outlandish beliefs of all kinds, from baby trafficking by social workers to cannibalistic satanists being embedded in every layer of British society. Anti-paedophile vigilante groups swarm round the story. People hurl endless abuse and death threats, and some become fixated on plans to kidnap the children to save them from their parents. Trolls stoke the fires at every turn. When Draper posts another video in support of her children’s claims, the children are removed from her care. There they withdraw their allegations and we hear audiotape of Christie’s relentless coaching of them, which a judge will later liken to “torture”. For the conspiracy theorists, of course, this is just a sign that the social workers and the legal establishment are as corrupt as suspected.
Things get unthinkably worse when Draper takes on a woman called Sabine McNeill as her legal adviser. McNeill begins a campaign of harassment against the parents that will eventually see her given a precedent-setting nine-year jail sentence. One of her first acts is to post online a full list of the details of everyone supposedly involved in the abuse – including all the children’s real names and addresses, the sex acts perpetrated against them and whether or not they “liked sex” or had to be drugged. To the death threats, abuse and kidnap plans are now added emails from paedophiles directly to the parents, asking to meet their children. Protesters begin gathering at the school and handing out leaflets around Hampstead.
The quartet of mothers (their words brilliantly lip-synced by actors, to preserve the last vestiges of privacy) who become most central to the story are the ones who, despairing of any proper police intervention – their main advice was to stop looking at things “only” happening online – begin investigating the people behind the life-destroying harassment themselves. Like the women effectively abandoned by the police and legal system in the Netflix documentary about cyberstalking, Can I Tell You a Secret?, they painstakingly amass evidence, track down perpetrators (“Alice” poses as a sympathiser to the cause online and infiltrates various groups), piece together the networks, force the police to reopen the case, and eventually secure McNeill’s and another activist’s convictions. All, as the final captions note, while holding down jobs and taking care of their families.
Accused is a study in many things: the inadequacy of our police and the dangerous lag between the laws we have and the laws we need in this blisteringly fast-moving world; the fathomless irrationality of which some humans are capable; what it is hard not to call the simple evil of others, and the courage some find to fight it. It is above all a study in why the truth matters, why facts must be disinterred, stated and cleaved to. We live in an age when reality is increasingly questioned, and Accused reminds us all to ask: who wants this? Who benefits from the undermining of facts, from the destabilisation of truth? And, above all, where is the internet’s off switch?
Accused: The Hampstead Paedophile Hoax is on Channel 4
