Hampstead Hoax: The Mum Wrongly Accused of Being a Paedophile | This Morning

now a new documentary has told the Shocking True Story of parents and teachers at a British school who were wrongly accused of being part of a satanic pedophile count the parents were subsequently stalked threatened and abused by conspiracy theorists who believed the false allegations after the lies have been posted online I mean we both watched the documentary didn't we last night and we've talked and talked about it it's it's almost unbelievable one of the moms who is using the fake name Anna is here today alongside criminologist David Wilson good morning Anna morning thank you for having me morning thank you for coming on the show Okay so let's go back to nine years ago what happened on that day it was Thursday the 5th of February 2015 um my husband and I were working from home that day and around about 400 p.m. an email arrived into our inbox from the school stating that there had been some allegations made about the school but that had been investigated by the police um nothing else to report um and that um the case was closed so of course that kind of posed more questions than it answered and naturally it was like what allegations so I I went on to Google I very quickly found the nature of the allegations um and unfortunately for me um within about the next five minutes I became aware that there well I realized that it was connected to um two children in the school one of whom had been in um my daughter's class and I found very quickly um three videos that existed on online at that time and fortunately that video that I found um was of the daughter in question making a series of allegations um naming my daughter as also having been a child at the school that was being abused um sexually abused for sweets and the person that was um interviewing her in the video said and who is it that that's doing this to her and then she named myself and my husband so within 5 minutes of receiving the email from school I'd gone online found the allegations and then to my hor and your daughter at this stage was just nine she was nine yes there was a huge difference from an email coming from school saying there's been an accusation police investigat is nothing to then suddenly seeing what those allegations were I mean I can't begin to imagine how you felt watching the this child that you knew that was in your daughter's class firstly saying what they were saying but then accusing in you and your H husband and and your daughter of being in a similar situation yes I mean it was it was just one of those life changing heart stopping moments I mean the complete shock and I do remember later that night as I said in the document she sitting on the floor of my bedroom and saying to my husband we've been accused of being pedophiles and this just isn't going to go away you know all of that your life runs before your eyes and you know that you know there are groups of people that are going to believe this that there's no spoke Without fire that there were groups of people who you know like to hunt and trap pedophiles and you know I I knew right then that our lives were going to change so the police knew of these allegations and they contacted you and said look we need to come over and interview your daughter so you had to tell your daughter at the time about what had been said by her classmate I did um after I received the email from the school I phoned the school I I spoke to the Head mistress and she said I've been advised to um tell you to contact the police so I literally called the Poli police and said I don't quite know how to explain this but I've been accused of being a satanic pedophile and my daughter is um alleged to have been one of the abuse victims and the police operator put me on hold and then came back and said okay well the police are on their way to your house and I said but my daughter's here and she doesn't know anything about this and they said well you've got half an hour to tell her and I sat her down in the kitchen with my husband and said that one of her school friends had made some allegations and she burst into tears and said why is she saying these things about me and I said I don't know but the police want to speak to us so we I our family weren't afforded the luxury to separate her from that knowledge the police came to the house and they wanted to speak to all of us together so I I wasn't able to sort of separate her from the nature of what was going on yeah to protect her from it and in the end the police didn't really do anything about it there was a list that was published with names addresses photographs terrible statement just just awful I can't even imagine what that was like for you and the other moms so there was a group of you that got together and decided we need to almost infiltrate this system to know what's going on here yeah it was a tale of two halves I mean the the initial police officers you know didn't know what to do with this case it was it was online and and and the legislation it did exist but they were having trouble sort of dealing with it and and admitted they didn't quite know how to to do so um and after a number of years there were some unsuccessful prosecutions that collapsed and um other parents had been involved originally but then felt um that they'd lost confidence in the police and there were a small group of us that were still left I guess that felt that this was just so wrong and we couldn't Let It Drop and you know we went forward and we did a victim's right to review and we did manage to get sort of police officers and eventually the CPS you know to back us but we all dealt with things in different ways and yes there was you know um one of the moms ended up sort of being down the rabbit hole if if so to speak you get that from the documentary a lot absolutely and in fact you know i' I'd had a conversation in the early days with a a takedown company that is um the expert in removing sort of things from the internet and they had said to me at the very beginning you know it's like whack-a-mole you can try and take one thing down and then it will be it will pop back up on the internet somewhere else but they did say even to myself the way to to really deal with it is to get amongst them um and and that was kind of the Avenue that Alice took you know we all dealt with it in different ways um but that that was her um Avenue and actually we discovered that for there was you know we'd had so many people against us on the internet but there was also out there a a group of people you know a number of people that felt that it was really wrong as we did that children's addresses and names were across the internet so they came on board and it was it was a great comfort to know that there as for as many people that they were attacking Us online there was also people supporting us and Alice embedded herself in in with them and yes and did you get ever get any sense of why this had started what on Earth drove the parents of the children or the it was the mother wasn't it with her boyfriend of the children to make those accusations and then for this other woman Sabine MC Neil to actually get so involved and so Keen to sort of expose what she thought was going on in h yeah she wasn't even a trained lawyer I think you know their multi-million dollar question really as as to why they did what they did um all I can say is that Abraham Christie had a prior history of doing something very similar to his own family um so this was you know not new for him Ella I think when her children got taken into care perhaps she felt that parents and the people on the list of the accused had been complicit in um raising concerns and that was why um her children had been taken from her and that in some way we were all responsible yes um I think in making the allegations that she did did perhaps she thought that all of our children would also be taken into care in the same way that hers had terrible um David we're going to come to you yeah I mean it it's all fake it was proven not true and yet these conspiracy theories just get completely out of control on the internet they're so dangerous aren't they they absolutely are and the first thing to say though Captain Ben is How brave of Anna to come in and again share her story with us um the internet did not invent conspiracy theory conspiracy theories have been with us for centuries but what the internet has done is make those conspiracy theories stickier in other words the the the internet acts as an echo chamber people go onto the internet and they find likeminded people who believe likeminded things and what that tends to do is therefore normalize what is patently absurd it simply therefore escalates their beliefs that what they're saying what they're theorizing about is actually true so that's that's part of the context for this but I think the other thing to say and you were asking and Anna was talking about motivation there remember there are three main reasons why people begin to believe conspiracy theories and I know the first two of these words sound a bit academic but they're easily explained so the three things would be um epistemic existential and social epistemic simply means that when something Dreadful traumatic happens people want to find out why why has this happened and what they're looking for is certainty and so they go onto the internet and they look for certainty and so often conspiracy theories are certain whereas knowledge is often hedged by um you know perhaps maybe in most cases the the existential thing and then we're moving into why I think was what was motivating some of these people existentially people want to feel safe and secure in their world and then finally social people want to feel good about themselves so they want to feel good about what they're thinking and therefore they want to identify with a group who thinks similarly and as a consequence that means that uh they end up believing things which are patently untrue yes doesn't make it easy for you to hear that but how are how is your daughter cuz they're over 18 now and they other kids and how how are you day today now they they're all good thank you I mean yes you're correct all of the children are 18 19 they're all moving on with their lives they're all they're all doing well they're well adjusted they're all as they should be moving on with college and university and and how about you yes you know I think this will this will always be the fabric of our of Our Lives unfortunately um you know the the chat has sort of lessened over the years um but it's still there I think you know we've all learned to sort of live with it and and I think we've chosen now to to sort of tell our story we're very keen you know there's been a growing narrative over the recent years about the harm of social media yeah um and whether it's and we don't place oursel in the same category at all but whether it's Molly Russell's father or Ranna ja's you know family I just think you know that social media has to begin to take responsibility for matal it's hosting and what was so shocking for us is that you know we found it so hard to be able to take down those details social media would say to us um this does not breach our community standards even though you know there were real children whose whose names and addresses were on the internet so extraordinary you know well as David said your bravery coming in and sharing the story is is what we can absolutely commend and it's a big warning toot ofing and the documentary is on uh you can catch up on on Channel 4 it really is an extraord rewatch isn't it yeah thank you thanks thank you David as well thank you David

Channel: This Morning

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Keywords: This Morning, This Morning ITV, Holly Willoughby, Phillip Schofield, Alison Hammond, Dermot O'Leary, ITV, STV, Josie Gibson, Craig Doyle, Rylan, This Morning Funny Moments, This Morning Funniest Moments, This Morning Interviews, Alison Hammond Interviews

Id: zfkXHEChn8E

Length: 11min 39sec (699 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2024