Shocked and moved me far more than I anticipated: Hoaxed reviewed

I shied away from conspiracy stuff during the Trump era. Not the theories themselves, but the huge volume of content proclaiming that we lived in a post-truth age of misinformation and conspiracy. It wasn’t that I disagreed with the idea that something like this was happening, or the idea that it was bad. It was more a certain tone these podcasts, essays and articles shared – almost a shared idiom and turn of phrase. People talked about ‘truth’ and ‘facts’ and ‘evidence’ with unwavering self-certainty. Buried in it somewhere was the assumption that if you expressed enough alarm and horror, and adopted a sufficiently serious voice, this would solve the problem of one in seven Americans believing whatever it was they turned out to believe that week.

It often felt as though no one was really attempting to change anyone’s mind, only to demarcate epistemic battlelines in a cultural war. Again, I don’t object to fighting that war. But I did object to the sense that an army deploying conventional weapons of social force – stigma, shame, exclusion and so on – believed that it was marching under the banner of persuasion, reason and evidence. Since, of course, the conspiracists do the same, it gave the two sides an unmerited symmetry. As Hoaxed demonstrates clearly, these malefactors think of themselves as righteous crusaders setting out to expose a lie. They can talk about facts in brave, trembling voices as well as anyone else can.

Hoaxed is three brilliantly researched and tightly told episodes – with a fourth to come, at the time of writing – that shocked and moved me far more than I anticipated. It’s the story of a lie, one that was born in malice and propagated by zealots to the righteously ignorant. The lie was that a group of teachers, parents and religious figures were running a satanist paedophile cult out of a school based in an affluent north London suburb. Let me spare you the suspense: there is wickedness here, but it involves only the routine evil of parental abuse, not schoolteachers drinking the blood of babies.

The story starts like a nightmare, with two children speaking to a police officer. We hear a recording of the interview. ‘In my classroom,’ says a child’s voice, ‘they’ve got this little door at the back.’ A little door that leads to a tiny room. ‘And it’s all stuffed with sweets, prizes. Especially to pay children with sweets to do sex with them. They hit me, they do all kind of stuff to me.’

‘Who’s they?’ asks the officer.

‘My dad. All the teachers. My dad’s friends,’ responds the child. ‘And the parents are involved too.’ The children’s mother gave the police a list of more than 150 names of alleged cult members. Within a week, the police had investigated, found nothing, and the children had said that they were coerced into telling the lie by their mother’s new boyfriend, using physical and emotional means.

When Ella Draper, the mother, lost custody of the children, she released all the videos of the fake confessions. (Why she was ever given this material, when she had evidently conspired in the abuse of her own children, is one of several baffling issues the show doesn’t touch.) Draper also released a recording of her reading all the names of the people she alleged were cult members. She then also released a Word document giving these innocent people’s names and addresses, alongside detailed, lunatic descriptions of their roles in the imaginary cult. You can imagine what happened next.

Or at least, I thought I could imagine what would happen next. I wasn’t prepared for the scale of the horror. The parents lived in fear that they would be attacked, or that their children would be kidnapped by a brainwashed vigilante. They moved houses, their children moved schools. Personal computers were hacked, private images of minors were shared online. These parents, terrified of the crusaders who were out to ‘protect’ their children, also began to receive messages from actual paedophiles, asking if they could have sex with their children. These people, needless to say, also had the children’s names, addresses and knew them by sight. One of Draper’s allies, an evangelical true-believer called Sabine, would spend years co-ordinating the harassment of these parents. She was eventually sentenced to nine years in jail.

Hoaxed is an impressive piece of journalism, one that keeps its moral balance on extremely slippery terrain. But like so much writing about conspiracies, it sometimes struggles to look directly at the bigger picture. In trembling voices, the true-believers explain during interviews that they are discussing a question of fact. They really believe this stuff. One in seven Americans believes it about their own government. I’m not saying it’s not a problem. I’m just saying I don’t know what on earth you could to do change it.