A detail from John Hemming’s statement regarding the allegations made against him by Esther Baker:
It is bad enough to have false allegations made about yourself to the police, but to have a concerted campaign involving your political opponents and many others in public creates an environment in which it is reasonable to be concerned about ill founded vigilante attacks on your family and yourself.
…This sort of situation is inevitably an attack on my family not just myself. I am still in discussion with the police about some of the criminal incidents involving my family and myself during this process. Therefore I do not wish to make further comment on those at the moment.
I looked at the allegations and their context here. Baker accused Hemming, who until May 2015 was a Member of Parliament, of having abused her over an extended period in the late 1980s when she was child in settings that included woodland meetings involving police guards and VIPs. Staffordshire Police has now dropped the case due to lack of evidence.
Hemming was not named in the media until he chose to come forward with his statement last week; however, his name had been informally circulated by Baker and others long before then, and he was denounced at at least one public meeting. As such, his fears of physical attack (from “pitchfork-wavers”, to use his phrase from a follow-up quote in the Daily Mail) were very reasonable.
In particular, Hemming was publicly accused at a rally against child-sex abuse that took place on 27 June 2015 in the open air opposite Downing Street. Bill Maloney, an activist who has made a number of aggressive and accusatory videos on the subject of VIP abuse, asked the crowd:
What can you do when your Prime Minister is protecting 76 MPs that are being investigated? Not have been investigated, they are being investigated. So, I don’t want to name anyone but I fell out with [redacted] and John Hemmings [sic] seriously. You get the message? I’ve fallen out with them. Big time. (1)
Maloney accused David Cameron of being a “paedophile protector”, and he suggested that the refurbishments of Parliament and Buckingham Palace were being undertaken to destroy forensic evidence:
How can you start refurbishing a building that is a crime scene? How? 76 MPs. Then, just down the road, we’ve got Dolphin Square, where one Member of Parliament was having sex with a kid while another one was soaking him to death. Have you heard that one? That’s in the papers. Murder, torture, rituals.
This is a reference to an allegation made by Operation Midland’s “Nick”, who said that he “was raped over a bath-tub while my head was beneath the water” [UPDATE 2019: Nick can now be named as Carl Beech, and his claims have been found to have been fraudulent. More details here].
Maloney then referred to Baker:
Anyone see Esther a few weeks ago, on Sky? Esther yeah? She was being abused, Esther, in the forest. The forest is a very dangerous place to be taken to be abused, because you’re either going to wind up in the ground, but you know it’s going to be ritualistic.
Maloney also suggested that the deaths of Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi were also part of the cover up, because of what they knew: “A lot of their kids were educated in this country and they mixed with royalty”.
This was all received very enthusiastically by the crowd, and the event’s co-organiser, Chris Tuck, described him afterwards as “brilliant as always”.
This was not some marginal street-corner protest: Tuck is a member of the the Victims and Survivors’ Consultative Panel at the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, and she was interviewed in the studio of London Live the day before the rally, which had the formal name “Victims & Survivors Unite – Breaking The Cycle Of Abuse”. The event also very nearly had an MP in attendance: Nadine Dorries, who had just accused a deceased vicar of sex abuse, accepted an invitation from Tuck to speak, although she withdrew ahead of the event.
Footnote
1. A video is available online, but Maloney’s denunciations are so extravagant that I have chosen not to link to it. Hemming is often mistakenly referred to as “John Hemmings”. The Daily Mail article also came up with “John Henning”, although this has since been corrected.
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