At the end of April 2023, a video from a French TV channel went viral on RuNet, allegedly talking about a British pedophile network that included dozens of politicians, journalists and artists. It is reported that they were revealed only recently. We checked whether this story is true.
Publications with a viral video lasting 1 minute 22 seconds spread the most on Telegram. Most popular version of the post sounds like this: “French television talks about a British scandal: a huge network of pedophiles - 76 politicians, 43 artists and 35 journalists. 100,000 children were involved." Also, the authors of the recordings often add: “And at this very time in Brussels a resolution is being adopted on the “genocide” of Ukrainian children rescued from the combat zone from Ukrainian shells!” Sometimes in posts like this you can see and the phrase “Until Gates and the WHO he controls have completed their dirty work, pedophilia remains a crime,” which probably refers to false messages that WHO has excluded the diagnosis of pedophilia from the new edition of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). Besides, meets and another clarification: “There is not a word about this in the media yet,” and this despite the fact that a little earlier in the same posts they talked about French television.
Similar publications are posted in the Telegram channels of publications “Staff Correspondent"(105,000 views at the time of writing this analysis) and "Ukraine.ru"(92,000), actor and TV presenter Oscar Kucera (43,000), and Voblya (161,000), "Special Operation Z"(85,000), "Truth and cats"(79,000), "World conspiracy" (52,000), "Coincidence"(52,000), Nina Vatt 🇷🇺 (30,000), "First Kharkov" (23,000) and "Antichips | Live news channel"(21,000). The viral video was written about on the websites “Crimea news feed" And "Morning south", on Twitter (examples here, here And here) and in numerous public pages on VKontakte (here, here, here And here).
IN Strasbourg (and not at all in Brussels) April 27, 2023 Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE, the Council of Europe has no direct relation to the European Union, but Russian-speaking users often confused) accepted a resolution that condemned “the deportation and forced transfer of Ukrainian children and other civilians to the Russian Federation or to the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.” In this document reported, that the displacement of Ukrainian children under 17 years of age, as well as their “Russification”, indicate genocide.
Among all the publications we looked at for April, the earliest post is with a French video about British pedophiles appeared in a small Telegram channel "Banter [about hidden things]» (4400 subscribers) in the morning the day after the adoption of the PACE resolution. Judging by the content, this channel aggregates various conspiracy theories: for example, there wrote about the above excluding pedophilia from the ICD, as well as aspiration Bill Gates reduce the number population of the Earth with the help of vaccines. The post also claimed that the media had not covered the British pedophile scandal in any way.
However, a search using the keywords "Verified" turned up numerous news reports about the same incident. Thus, the French video talks about 1,400 suspects in pedophilia cases, including 76 politicians. They wrote about the same thing on May 20, 2015 BBC, Reuters, The Guardian And Le Parisien. These publications reported on the release of data obtained during Operation Hydrant, which was organized by the British National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC). As part of the operation, no investigations were carried out, but only information was collected from various departments. At that time, according to the police of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, 1,433 people were being investigated in connection with allegations of previous sexualized abuse of children, of whom 216 had already died, and 261 were listed as people occupying a “prominent public position”, and among them:
- 135 representatives of television, cinema and radio (probably by mistake in viral posts they were indicated as “35 journalists”);
- 76 politicians;
- 43 music industry representatives;
- 7 people from the world of sports.
Of the pedophilia allegations investigated, 666 involved 357 institutions where child sexual abuse was alleged to have occurred. Among them:
- 154 schools;
- 75 orphanages;
- 40 religious institutions;
- 14 medical institutions;
- 11 public institutions;
- 9 prisons;
- 9 sports complexes;
- 28 other institutions, including military units and guest houses;
- another 17 institutions are marked as unknown.
The head of the NPCC's child protection operation, Simon Bailey, spoke about the forecast that by the end of 2015 the police could get more than 110,000 reports of past child abuse, an increase of 71% since 2012. While the number of victims is unknown, it is likely to be in the thousands, Bailey said. “These numbers make you wonder: Are more crimes being committed?” - he added.
Since at the end of April 2023 the French video sold out and in foreign languages, fact checkers from foreign projects drew attention to it, including Facta, Reuters And Logically. They determined that the original video was May 21, 2015 posted on YouTube the French TV channel CNews (until 2017 it was called i-Tele, which is reflected in the logo in the upper left corner of the screen). The caption for the video states that the crimes described would presumably have been committed between the 1970s and 1990s.
Already in 2020 Bailey statedthat British police had uncovered an "epidemic" of pedophilia that took place in the 1970s and 1980s. According to data published in The Guardian, since the start of Operation Hydrant, 7,000 suspects of sexualized child abuse have been identified, 11,346 reports have been received from 9,343 victims, and 35% of the reports (4,024) have resulted in convictions, and 6% (719) have resulted in acquittals. Some statements dated back to the 1940s. Of the alleged crimes, 47% (5,284) were not investigated by the police, in more than a third of these cases due to the death of the suspect, and in a fifth the suspects could not be identified.
Thus, the events described in the viral video took place not in 2023, but in 2015. The sexual crimes against children in question were committed over several decades back in the 20th century. In addition, the publications spoke of 35 suspected journalists and 100,000 victims, although such data were not reported in the police materials.
Cover photo: screenshot “Verified” / video @CNEWSofficiel
Mostly not true
- Is it true that 108 Disney employees were arrested in the United States on suspicion of pedophilia and human trafficking?
- Is it true that Mel Gibson called the Hollywood elite "pedophiles who drink the blood of babies"?
- Is it true that the ICC prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Putin in exchange for the release of his pedophile brother?
- Is it true that in Spain the minister proposed legalizing pedophilia?
- Is it true that UN experts recommended legalizing pedophilia?
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