“I think we probably all feel that there is life before the 5th of February 2015, and life after,” says Anna.
“It was very much a seminal moment of our life. Before that, and then our life from that time on was never the same. You know, it has changed us all.”
Anna is not her real name, but her story is. Along with three others, she is speaking out for the first time about the horrific abuse she and her family suffered at the hands of social media trolls. The reason? An internet conspiracy theory gone wild.
A new Channel 4 documentary, Accused: The Hampstead Paedophile Hoax, aims to unpack the entire disturbing story: one that spans years, involves multiple online trolls and is still ongoing. The women don’t appear in the documentary for reasons of privacy and safety; instead, four actors lipsync to their words.
The Beginning
On February 5, 2015, a series of videos were posted on an obscure blog by a man named Abraham Christie.
Christie was a convicted criminal, and had long flirted with conspiracy theorists. He had filmed the two children (then aged 8 and 9) of his new partner, the Russian-born Ella Draper. She was a raw-food vegan and yoga enthusiast, who was in a parental custody dispute with her ex-husband.
On camera, the two children described the horrific sexual abuse they (and others at their local primary school) claimed to be suffering at the hands of a Satanic cult in their home area of Hampstead.
Who was behind it? The names came quickly: their own father was the cult’s mastermind, but members of the police, teachers and even the parents of other children at the school were responsible. All in all, said the children, 400 adults were involved in a Satanic paedophile ring that not only abused children, but shipped in babies from abroad (via DHL) in order to kill them.
“We do sex with the baby, sacrifice and eat the baby,” one of the children said on camera, “and drink the blood from it… we dance with the skulls.”
Naturally, uproar ensued. The police opened an investigation into the claims, but quickly found that the children’s stories were fabricated. According to Mrs Justice Pauffley, who ruled on the case, their claims were in fact the result of “relentless emotional and psychological pressure as well as significant physical abuse” at the hands of Christie.
The investigation was closed; the children went to live with their father; Ella Draper and Abraham Christie fled the country. But the story did not die.
Instead, the conspiracy theorists moved in. In addition to the videos (which included leaked footage of the children’s police interviews), more information started being posted online, as a horde of outraged netizens attempted to get the word out about the abuse they believed the authorities were participating in.
“I believe the children,” one wrote angrily; so did a woman named Sabine McNeill, an ex-computer scientist who took up Ella Draper’s cause. It was McNeill who got hold of a list of parents and children who had been implicated in the cult; it was McNeill who published it online.
The list
When Anna, Jenny, Alice and Sarah found out about its publication, their worlds imploded. The list included the addresses of their families – indeed, many families – and suddenly, they were a target for conspiracy theorists who wanted not only to harm them, but kidnap their children in the name of “saving” them from their own parents.
There was worse to come. “I got an email from someone that said they liked my daughter’s profile on the website where she’s highlighted in red and that they would like me to bring my daughter and meet up with them,” Alice explains in the documentary.
“So I was getting emails from paedophiles believing what they’d heard about my daughter. I literally ran to the bathroom and threw up everywhere.”
As the months continued, the abuse got worse. Parents started receiving threats; a drone was flown over the school and vigilantes started threatening to visit. The parents desperately tried to get their information taken offline, but authorities seemed stuck about how to proceed.
“Everybody was blindsided by it. It was really out there,” says Anna. “Whichever way we turned it seemed that the message was either, ‘we're still waiting to come up with the strategy and we'll let you know,’ like the local authority, or there was this feeling of nobody really knowing what to do.”
“I remember those early days,” adds Jenny. “We had the Camden school local education authority, Barnet local education, Camden police, Barnet Police. Microsoft were involved and Google were involved and the school and the social services from Camden, but it was just a frenzy. We were trying to contact our MPs, just trying to get anyone to help us. It was just mad.”
Meanwhile McNeill continued to post inflammatory comments and accusations online. “They would drink the blood of babies and then dance around wearing the skulls on parts of their bodies,” read one of her many online posts, which were disseminated on social media and which the parents fought to get taken down, along with their addresses and the names of their children.
“What was just gutting was we’d get an answer back from social media [platforms] and it would say, ‘This does not breach our community standard therefore, we're not going to remove it,’” says Anna.
“It was just like, ‘Oh my god.’ How can social media platforms justify keeping these children's names and addresses with all of these allegations against them [online]?”
Justice Sally Cahill, later passing sentence on McNeill, told her that “for the children they will never, as things stand at the moment, be able to go online and put in their own names without seeing the vile filth that you have peddled over a period of years.
“The allegations were of murder, cannibalism, satanism and sexual abuse. They could not be more serious or vile.”
The fightback
As months and then years passed, little headway was madeL though McNeill was served with several restraining orders preventing her from posting about the conspiracy theory, she continued to breach them. “The initial police team had been so ineffective and the first attempt to prosecute had collapsed,” Anna says.
“A lot of parents lost faith; you know, it taken a year to get Sabine first into court and then it hadn't gone forward and I think they just felt that there was no point.”
The four mums, though, kept fighting. As Jenny says, “The computers were burning 24/7.” Alice infiltrated conspiracy theory groups online to monitor their movements (this resulted in at least one would-be vigilante being arrested); the others continued to collect online evidence of Sabine’s trolling, while reporting tweets that named themselves and their children to social media regulation teams.
“We had real low moments, but giving up: no,” says Anna. “It was just so relentless though; it just kept coming and coming and Sabine kept breaching and kept breaching and it was just like, ‘Oh my god. We need to get her to stop.’ And the only way to do that was to continue.”
Sarah, Alice, Jenny and Anna spent years of their lives battling to remove up to four million malicious posts about themselves and their loved ones from the internet. Finally, in 2020, Sabine McNeill was sentenced to nine years in prison for relentlessly trolling the families at the heart of the story. And she wasn’t the only one. “There was a whole bunch of other [trolls]. The woman Jackie Farmer, I found that one really got to me,” says Jenny.
“She was employed to basically investigate the families. She was the one that was trawling through people's Facebook pages, taking down pictures of their kids, writing these really offensive articles… you know, just really nasty people, so there's quite a few of them that have crawled back under their rocks, for want of a better word.”
The horror has since died down, up to a point – the affected parents are still spotting and reporting malicious content, and Draper and Christie remain at large; they are believed to be in Spain.
“It’ll never be over,” says Alice, “but it’s a lot better”. Now the four women are taking their first steps towards speaking out about their ordeal, and what they believe needs to change.
“Looking into, it the system’s still failing. AI is just around the corner,” says Sarah. “Just imagine what's going to happen: the police and the legislation, it's all behind.
“We'd like there to be a system where [malicious content] can be removed in a wholesale fashion. I mean we spent nine years reporting stuff, but there's got to be a wholesale way of doing it. The technology is there, we know. We question whether the will and the intent is there.”
