In recent months I have blogged several times about Jon Wedger, a self-described “police whistleblower” who says that he was bullied out of his job with the Metropolitan Police over his investigations into organised child abuse. Wedger’s initial claims were endorsed by Mike Penning MP and carried by the Sunday Express, and he recently appeared with Maggie Oliver, the police officer at the centre of exposing the Rochdale grooming gang.
Wedger has also made a number of videos with Bill Maloney, an “alternative media” activist who makes extravagant claims about organised “VIP child sex abuse”, and when Maloney’s questionable practices were brought to Wedger’s attention by the former pop-singer Brian Harvey Wedger’s response was to accuse Harvey of harassing him. Last month, he spoke at the Democrats and Veterans Party conference.
Perhaps inevitably, Wedger’s activism has gradually led him into the most sensational subject of Satanic Ritual Abuse; thus he recently made a video interview with Vicky Ash, a “Satanic Ritual Abuse survivor” associated with Wilfred Wong. Ash, who is in her fifties, claims that she was raised within a Satanic coven and subjected to ritual abuse from an early age, but that although police showed an initial interest in her allegations, officers then mysteriously became “poorly” or were taken off the case. Her case was also apparently taken up by Geoffrey Dickens; she says that they were interviewed for the BBC’s Panorama in the early 1990s, but that the tapes are now “lost”. She also refers to Dickens’s supposed “lost dossier”, which I discussed here.
At some point, Ash converted to Christianity, coming into contact with Dennis Wrigley and the Maranatha Community (previously blogged here). Her rhetoric is suffused with familiar evangelical tropes about the supposed influence of Satanism and malign occult influences: she warns against Halloween, suggests that Hollywood films such as Eyes Wide Shut are based on the reality of Satanism, and alludes to Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan as further evidence. (1) In her view, claims about Satanic Ritual Abuse are dismissed due to “fear”; nowhere is there an acknowledgement of false allegations during the 1980s and early 1990s.
In the same video, Wedger refers to Joan Coleman’s list of supposed VIP abusers (better known as the “RAINS list“), and to claims that former Prime Minister Edward Heath was involved in Satanic Ritual Abuse (2) – Wedger believes that this last point was proven by Wiltshire Police’s posthumous investigation into Heath, and that criticisms of Wiltshire’s Chief Constable Mike Veale are unwarranted “attacks”. (3) He also says that SRA is included in police training materials, the Orkney allegations in particular.
Wedger also commends Audrey Harper’s book Dance with the Devil, and tells Ash that he has spent time with a South African Catholic priest who lamented to him that unlike in Africa people in Britain do not understand the existence of “the darkness”.
Hoaxstead has more on Ash here. She has not disclosed the names of her parents or other family members, and “Ash” appears to be her married surname. As such, it is impossible to subject her claims to scrutiny.
Footnotes
1. Specifically, Ash refers to a Satanist in the Royal Marines – this would be Chris Cranmer, a member of the Church of Satan who was reported in the media in 2004.
2. According to the conspiracy theorist Robert Green, Heath was on the RAINS list because “five witnesses, all totally independent of each other, had provided, years ago, evidence of being sexually assaulted by Heath”. Wedger inflates this into the claim that each name on the list was only included because five people had named the person concerned.
3. Wedger claims to be in private contact with Veale.
Filed under: Uncategorized | 7 Comments »
