“I’M Ella Gareeva Draper,” the woman says, speaking directly into the camera.
“I’m fighting for my own children. This has never ceased for the last seven years.”
6Mum Ella Draper claimed her children were horrifically abused by a satanic cult while at primary school in Hampstead, North London – pictured sunning herself in Spain
6Ella started dating Abraham Christie who made her children drink hemp smoothies and asked them to call him ‘Papa-hemp’Credit: Refer to Caption
6Abraham and Ella’s Hampstead hoax has left a trail of destruction and is still hurting peopleCredit: Tim StewartElla sounds educated and sensible. Which makes what the striking 50-year-old is saying — on videos placed on social media — sound all the more shocking.
Her two children, she claims, were horrifically abused by a satanic cult while still at primary school in Hampstead, North London, home to celebrities including actress Helena Bonham Carter.
Instead of investigating the cult, the police covered it up, Ella alleges.
She says: “Organised child abusers are above the levels of law enforcement suspicion.
“It’s time humanity puts an end to this industry.”
It is hard not to feel sympathy for Ella.
She says police corruption forced her to flee Britain in 2015, leaving her children in the hands of the cult.
She has not seen them since.
But as I was to find when investigating this story for my podcast, Hoaxed, almost nothing that comes out of Ella’s mouth is the truth.
She is at the centre of what I believe is Britain’s most serious online conspiracy.
A modern-day satanic panic that shows how quickly lies can spread online — and the failure of both the police and social media giants to crack down on them.
The Hampstead Hoax has left a trail of destruction and is still hurting people.
The children’s dad has been forced into hiding after being falsely targeted as a paedophile, and internet trolls have attacked dozens of other Hampstead families after their names appeared on a “list” of 175 alleged cult members compiled by Ella and posted online.
Babies’ skulls
It contains names, contact details, addresses and mobile phone numbers of parents, teachers and pupils at the pretty Hampstead school attended by Ella’s kids.
Vile accusations had been placed against some of the names, claiming they were Satanists who had sex with children and practised child sacrifice, drinking their victims’ blood and dancing with babies’ skulls.
One mother named was so stressed she struggled to sleep for four years.
Another said of her daughter: “On many occasions she has woken in the middle of the night in tears.
“We have received death threats by phone, email and social media.
“We have had to instruct our daughter not to answer the phone.”
So, how did it get to this point?
Ella’s story starts in the 1990s, when the Russian-born art-history-graduate-turned-yoga teacher got married to a wealthy English banker and moved to Hampstead.
After they split up a few years later Ella started a relationship with an actor called David*, and they had two children.
Yet by 2014 they were locked in an ugly custody battle, with allegations of violence on both sides.
Ella started dating a new man, Abraham Christie.
Abraham, now 66, believed hemp, the herb from which cannabis is derived, to be the giver of life.
He made Ella’s children drink hemp smoothies and asked them to call him “Papa-hemp”.
In July 2014, the family went on holiday to Morocco.
Ella and Abraham claim it was there that the children — then both under ten — told them about being abused by their father David, by teachers at their school and by fellow parents.
When they returned to London, the children repeated the allegations to police.
I’ve seen a video of their interviews, where they describe how the cult carried out horrors including baby sacrifice in the local church.
The police searched the church but, perhaps unsurprisingly, could not find a shred of evidence.
In mid-September, the police interviewed the children again — and this time they changed their story.
They told police the truth, that they had been pressured into lying by Ella and Abraham, that Abraham had kicked them, hit them on the head with a metal spoon and poured water over their heads so they couldn’t breathe until they said exactly what he wanted.
The police closed the investigation.
But, extraordinarily, they did not bring in Abraham for questioning, let alone arrest him on suspicion of child abuse.
The case then moved to the family courts, where a judge had to decide who would have custody of Ella and David’s children.
Ella chose to represent herself, meaning she got access to all the evidence, including videos of her kids being interviewed by the police and other sensitive material such as their medical reports.
At this point, Ella sought the help of Sabine McNeill, an informal legal adviser known as a McKenzie friend — a person who attends a trial as a non-professional helper or adviser to a litigant who does not have legal representation in court.
Conspiracy blogs
Sabine had long believed the family courts were corrupt.
She was convinced they “stole” thousands of children a year.
So when Sabine thought the judge in Ella’s case was going to take away her children, she decided to do something drastic.
In January 2015 she took Ella’s confidential material — the videos of the children’s police interviews, their medical reports — and put it all online.
She also published a list of supposed cult members named by Ella, and personal details of the 175 people she said were involved in the abuse.
The videos of the kids initially telling police that there was a cult were soon trending on conspiracy blogs across the US and Britain.
The family court judge was furious, sending police to Ella’s house to get an explanation why such sensitive data was now in the public domain.
After stalling, Ella ran into her back garden, climbed the fence and ran. The next day she fled to Spain, Abraham following a day later.
She hasn’t been back to the UK since.
Her children were taken into care then later returned to their dad.
A few days after the court case concluded, thanks to Sabine’s encouragement, dozens of angry protesters travelled to the Hampstead primary school and shouted , “Paedophiles!” and, “Murderers!” at parents and teachers.
One US blogger even flew to London especially, furiously threatening to “kick down doors”.
It did not matter that the family court judge issued a judgment in March 2015 saying, specifically, that there was no satanic cult. The hoax was growing and growing.
For those targeted, it was terrifying.
Luckily, there was a group prepared to fight back.
They included a parent on Ella’s list, a teacher from Birmingham and 64-year-old mystery writer Karen Irving, who lived 3,000 miles away in Ottawa, Canada.
In May 2015, this group started the blog Hoaxtead, a word play on Hamp-stead.
This had two main objectives — to get the social media giants to remove links to the children’s videos and to gather evidence against the hoaxers that could eventually be used to prosecute them in court.
The group reported to Google and other platforms thousands of links, asking them to remove videos of the children.
They also gathered evidence which they passed to the police.
Nine-year jail term
Thanks to these efforts, Sabine was put on trial in November 2018 for stalking and harassing the Hampstead parents for years.
In her sentencing remarks in 2019, Judge Sally Cahill KC said the case against Sabine was “one of the most serious cases of stalking and breach of a restraining order that there can be”.
Sabine was sentenced to nine years, the longest jail term handed down in UK courts for harassment and stalking.
This all happened before I started investigating the case last year.
By then, Sabine had served four years and been deported to her native Germany.
But neither Ella nor Abraham, the originators of the hoax, had faced any consequences for what they allegedly did to Ella’s children. Police seemed to have given up.
I felt this had to change, so I spent weeks tracking down Ella and Abraham, as well as digging into their pasts.
My investigation found out that Abraham was now living in Marrakesh, the main tourist city in Morocco.
When I went there to find him, he was not at home.
Two sources said he had flown back to the UK.
When the British police learnt that Abraham might be in London, they issued a new statement.
A spokesman stated: “Following new information coming to light in August 2022, officers have re-opened an investigation into child abuse which was reported to have taken place in Hampstead in 2014.”
It seemed that, after eight years of inactivity, at least now something was happening.
6Menace… Ella sought the help of Sabine McNeill, an informal legal adviser known as a McKenzie friend
6Ella used her YouTube channel to create a web of lies
6Hampstead, North London, is home to celebrities including Helena Bonham CarterCredit: GettyAnd Ella? After contacting her through another conspiracy theorist, I spoke to her for hours over a Zoom call.
At first she was friendly.
But the more I pushed her, the colder she became.
By the end, she cut off contact, threatening to take legal action against me.
After I contacted the social media companies for comments, they took down Ella’s and Abraham’s main accounts, cutting off a lot of their support.
But Ella is still posting videos, under new identities, and asking people to contribute to her “legal fund”.
And Abraham has managed to fly back to Marrakesh, avoiding arrest in the UK.
So on one level my efforts to bring accountability to the victims have failed.
And yet, for some of the hoax’s victims, the situation is not as bleak as it once was.
One told me: “Finally the social media companies have taken action and the police seem interested again.
“At last I can now sleep at night.”
*Name has been changed
Story Credit: thesun.co.uk