Child-abuse fantasists are not going away - Despite discredited claims of satanic rituals and VIP paedophile rings, there’s still a tendency to believe any accusers

JohnKimble111 · 2019-02-05T06:36:23+00:00

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The other day a fellow journalist sent me a very short video clip posted by a conspiracy theorist, sorry “independent investigator”, on his website. It showed a school playground and a window of the school before trailing off. The photographer was apparently investigating what he called the “Hampstead Cover Up case”. Soon, he suggested, he would have much more to say and show.

Though she knew of my interest in false allegations of satanic child abuse, what my colleague didn’t know is that I can see the place from which the video was taken from my doorstep. It’s a passage between a Church of England primary school and the church next door.

Three years ago the school and the church were subjected to a campaign of vilification and abuse arising out of a domestic dispute. The mother of two children (both pupils at the school) and the mother’s boyfriend concocted a story implicating the estranged father in a Satan-worshipping cult. The couple videoed the children who, under considerable pressure, obliged with an ever more baroque series of stories about baby murder, cannibalism and sexual abuse.

Prominent among those who decided to believe this toxic nonsense was a respectable septuagenarian called Sabine McNeill. She set herself up as a campaigner for the “truth” and armed with a website set about exposing the nonexistent conspiracy. She named names: parents and others supposedly involved in satanic crimes.

Three weeks ago McNeill was sentenced at Southwark crown court to nine years imprisonment for stalking and other offences. Judge Sally Cahill remarked on the effect on the families of McNeill’s actions. “For each of these families,” she said, “the effects have been huge. Their businesses and working lives have been disrupted and destroyed. Some have moved home, and others barricade themselves in those homes. The effects on the children are life-changing.” She then added a long, sorry list of such effects.

The meaning of the recently posted video was that it’s not over. Others have taken up where the imprisoned McNeill has been forced to leave off. I’ve seen one or two of them myself recently. But remember that McNeill was part of a relatively tiny group of people creating mayhem around a set of such utterly ludicrous allegations that no part of the established media ever gave them credence. Even so, the suffering they caused was prodigious.

In a settlement last week, the former Lib Dem MP John Hemming received damages and an apology from two people, a campaigner and a well-known investigative reporter, who had seemed to give credence online to allegations of serious sexual offences by Mr Hemming. The accusations had come from a woman called Esther Baker, who identified herself in 2015 as a serial victim of child sexual abuse in the 1980s and 90s.

Ms Baker had claimed that she was abused by a group of men, including a judge and a peer of the realm, in a wood in Staffordshire while police stood by. In a programme made for Australian TV, Ms Baker was shown photographs of people and asked to identify her abusers. Though viewers could not see who was identified it was soon known on the internet that one of them was Mr Hemming. At that point he went public with a denial.

After two years of investigation, police looking into Ms Baker’s accusations found insufficient evidence to charge Mr Hemming or anyone else. In fact I’m not at all clear that there was ever anything corroborating Ms Baker’s testimony. Meanwhile Mr Hemming was the recipient of significant abuse. Last February Declan Canning was convicted of sending threatening emails to Mr Hemming, accusing him of being a rapist and a paedophile.

By then Ms Baker — who denies being a fantasist — had gone on to claim that other episodes of abuse she had suffered as a child might have taken place in an apartment in London’s Dolphin Square. This was the main address which several others had already apparently identified as being the location for attacks by well-known public figures. Though investigated none of these allegations could be substantiated.

But how did it come about that, for the half decade following the Savile revelations, it was possible for almost any person to make an anonymous or even identifiable complaint of historic child abuse against a public figure, and be treated with automatic credulity? Ms Baker’s case was one of those cited by the MP Tom Watson (now deputy leader of the Labour Party) in the House of Commons during that time.

In the same period it seemed any publicity hound or conspiracy theorist could invent or recycle any old story concerning alleged “VIP abuse” and get it printed or aired. There were unchecked and ludicrous stories of gay paedophile orgies being held in the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the Conservative Party conference on the night before the 1984 IRA bombing, and involving a number of (conveniently dead) senior politicians.

There was the former regional journalist who suddenly discovered that he had been in possession of a damning dossier concerning child abuse by politicians but had been prevented by the security services from publicising it. Both stories were easily falsifiable but both were printed in British newspapers.

This hare ran for several years. It took real effort and guts on the part of some journalists and some of those falsely accused to put an end to what had become a witch-hunt. Guts, because to question the accounts of the various accusers out there was to be accused of being a defender of child abuse.

Today lessons need to be learnt, otherwise we will do this again. In March the public hearings into the “Westminster” segment of the omnibus Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) will be held. Among the “core participants” named to take part, despite an objection lodged a full year ago by John Hemming, is Esther Baker.

Part of the segment’s remit is to “consider evidence relating to allegations of child sexual abuse committed by persons of public prominence associated with Westminster and how these came to light . . .”

How indeed. Yet the greater rationale of the inquiry appears to be to examine how allegations were supposedly covered up — a bias that has enraged the representatives of the accused. Whereas what the IICSA could usefully consider is how and why so many have turned out to be false. And at what cost?

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