Sick troll Sabine McNeill who accused mothers in Hampstead of running a satanic child abuse ring is still pleading her innocence and has compared her ‘suffering’ to Jesus Christ as she said she ‘cannot accept the verdict’.
Two young siblings aged eight and nine accused parents – including their own father – and teachers at their North London primary school of being a part of a satanic paedophile ring involving horrendous ritual abuse in 2015.
Their mother, Ella Draper, shared the false accusations online and Sabine McNeill – a virulent conspiracy theorist, since dubbed Britain’s worst online troll – released videos of the children making these accusations online, alongside personal details of 175 people allegedly involved.
It went viral and led to death threats, harassment and abuse against the falsely accused parents, which four mothers have spoken out about in Channel 4’s new documentary Accused: The Hampstead Hoax.
McNeill, Draper’s unqualified ‘legal adviser’, was one of the central figures in attempting to legitimise the conspiracy. She was put on trial for stalking, harassment and breaching a restraining order and was jailed for nine years in 2018, of which she served four.
The German-born pensioner, who has since fled to Germany, said: ‘I didn’t accept any of the charges, I didn’t accept the verdict, I cannot accept the verdict. All I can do is suffer. Suffer it, like Jesus Christ did.’
McNeill (pictured) was one of the central figures in attempting to legitimise the conspiracy. She was put on trial for stalking, harassment and breaching a restraining order and was jailed for nine years in 2018, of which she served four
Sabine McNeill is a virulent conspiracy theorist, since dubbed Britain’s worst online troll
The children’s mother, Ella Draper (pictured), and her supporters – among them McNeill – released a document online listing all the people accused of being a part of this ring, which led to death threats, harassment and abuse
The mothers worked together on a campaign to get the police to act; first by getting their names taken down from the internet and then in prosecuting McNeill.
McNeill was labelled an ‘arrogant, malicious, evil and manipulative woman’ by the sentencing judge, who jailed her for nine years, the longest sentence ever handed down in a UK court for these offences.
‘I will never get my head around how this woman [McNeill] became so obsessed with our children,’ one of the falsely accused mothers said.
Draper shared the class list with McNeill, who turned it into an elaborate document adding made-up sexual preference for each child, the documentary alleges.
McNeill is confronted about the pain she caused to the four mothers in the documentary, but she maintains her stance that ‘they are abusers’.
When she was asked how she knows this, McNeill said that they were named in the initial allegations by the children, but when pressed about these allegations being false, she shook her head and said: ‘I’m sorry. I can’t cope with that’.
McNeill also said that ‘truth is an individual experience, what’s true for you might not be true for me’. She claimed people had a need to believe these satanic cult claims.
One of the mothers at the heart of the documentary also revealed the sickening moment she received emails from paedophiles asking to meet her young daughter after being falsely accused of running satanic child sex cult.
‘Alice’, who is going by an alias to protect the identity of her children, said she received an email from someone who said they liked her ‘daughter’s profile’ – the entry on the class list posted by McNeill – posted online, which highlighted her child in red as one that ‘likes to have sex’.
‘It was an explosion of my world,’ Alice said.
During the height of the harassment her family suffered, Alice said she received an email from someone who said they liked her ‘daughter’s profile’ posted online
‘Alice’, played by an actor in the new Channel 4 documentary Accused: The Hampstead Hoax
The sender of the email told Alice that ‘they would like me to bring my daughter and meet up with them. So I was getting emails from paedophiles, believing what they had heard about my daughter.
‘I literally ran to the bathroom and threw up everywhere.’
‘I think the lowest point for me was when my daughter’s photo was taken from my Google account. I blame myself so much, because I totally forgot that that account even existed.
‘And the realisation, that they know what she looks like – my world came crashing down, because I had nothing left to cling on to at that point.’
The satanist cult allegations against Alice and the other parents were found to be baseless but the conspiracy theory caught fire online after Draper uploaded a video calling out a conspiracy on the part of the police to drop the investigation.
Draper and her partner Abraham Christie had manipulated her two children into making these false claims in the first place, which Abigail and her brother Joseph (as they are called in the documentary) later recanted.
After the names, addresses and phone numbers of the parents, school staff and pupils identified as being involved were published online, they were inundated with death threats.
The parents were contacted by vigilantes saying they would snatch their children to take them to safety. Equally horrifyingly, paedophiles would ask about their children’s sexual preferences.
It was, as another mother named as ‘Anna’ recalls, ‘like being under siege’.
In the documentary, Alice and three other mothers at the centre of these disturbing allegations speak about what they’ve been through for the first time via audio interviews, which are lip-synced on screen by actors as the women wish to remain anonymous to protect their now grown-up children.
Ultimately, it would take the determined and extraordinary efforts of four mothers in particular, who, working until the small hours, month in month out, meticulously gathered evidence that would lead to the prosecution of two of the most vocal online conspiracy theorists.
‘For years we had to keep this dignified silence, because we were trying to build a legal case and we didn’t want to jeopardise that,’ says Anna. ‘Now, finally, we get to have our voice.’
The sender told Alice (played by an actress above) that ‘they would like me to bring my daughter and meet up with them. So I was getting emails from paedophiles, believing what they had heard about my daughter. I literally ran to the bathroom and threw up everywhere’
‘Anna’ is played by Kathryn McGarr in the series
For while the trolls who targeted them are quieter these days, they have not disappeared entirely: they are still out there, propagating their theories in dark corners of the internet.
‘They’re still there, trying to spread their poison,’ as Jenny, another of the mothers, puts it. The parents’ bewilderment remains palpable.
‘There are many curveballs in life that you can predict, whether it’s a terminal illness diagnosis or the death of a loved one — but being accused of being a satanic paedophile is not one of them,’ Anna says.
A mother of one, Anna had been happily married for 18 years and running a business with her husband, when, back in February 2015, she — along with some other parents of children in Year 5 at the Church of England affiliated primary they attended — received an email saying allegations had been made against the school.
‘It said they had been investigated by the police and that the case was closed,’ she recalls. ‘It begged more questions than it answered, so I went straight onto the internet.’
Within five minutes, Anna had found footage of the two siblings — one of whom, Abigail, was in her daughter’s class — alleging that an organised cult was based at the school which indulged in horrors from paedophilia to baby sacrifice.
‘She mentioned our daughter by name, saying she got paid for sex in sweets and naming myself and my husband as her abusers,’ Anna recalls. ‘It was like walking through the looking glass.’
‘They would call us satantists, shout down the phone that we were f***ing and killing babies; that we were evil,’ says Jenny.
Police told them to vary their routes home, and carry rape alarms, yet none of it was enough to shake the lingering menace.
Sarah, a lawyer in her 40s who also had a child in Abigail’s year, slept on her children’s bedroom floor for eight months until the family were able to move house.
‘Once our address was out there, I could not shake the thought that someone would come in and try to take them,’ she says.
‘Sarah’, played by Sarah Barlondo, on set for the Channel 4 documentary. Many of the real women in the story have chosen to remain anonymous
Some parents, like Alice, were contacted by paedophiles asking if they could hook up with their child because they ‘liked sex’. The police said their hands were tied.
‘They pretty much admitted it was beyond their knowledge,’ says Anna. ‘There was this feeling that it would blow over, but to us it felt organised and targeted.’
‘It was incredibly disappointing,’ adds Sarah. ‘We were quite clear that this was criminal activity. We even identified a list of up to 20 laws that were being broken. But no one would listen.’
Self-styled activist and blogger Rupert Wilson Quaintance, an American who had come to the UK a few months earlier, became obsessed with the case and threatened to ‘kick doors down’ and ‘draw blood’ from the parents.
He was jailed for nine months after being found guilty of putting people in fear of violence.
Draper and Christie fled the country in 2015. They’ve have been on the run ever since, believed to be in Spain.
Why they started the hoax is still a mystery. If it was part of Draper’s fight for custody against her ex-husband, it failed. After a period in care, Abigail and Joseph were reunited with their father.
