It might seem like QAnon has fizzled out since their warrior messiah, Donald Trump, lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden, but believers in a conspiracy of satanic, cannibalistic, child-trafficking elites didn’t just magically disappear. In 2022, a full two years after Trump lost, a Public Religion Research Institute survey indicated that an estimated one in five Americans still identified as QAnon believers. While the focus of many in the movement has pivoted easily from the Storm to the Steal, there are still those for whom the primary concern remains rescuing children from devil worshippers.
During the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and ’90s, network television and radio gave a nationwide platform for Satanic ritual abuse (SRA) rumors while organizations such as Cult Awareness Network allowed professionals and authors to share stories and what passed for research on cult activity. Today, activists and self-professed survivors of Satanic ritual abuse continue to be active through Facebook groups such as Supporting SRA Survivors, which is run by self-professed SRA survivor Jeanette Archer, or community projects such as Pacha House at Friends Institute in Birmingham, which on the surface purports to be “Providing space for seeding initiatives for holistic living locally+globally” but in actuality acts as a hub for SRA advocacy. In 2020, Pacha House petitioned the U.K. government and parliament to open an inquiry into Satanic ritual abuse. Both Supporting SRA Survivors and Pacha House promote the work of Jon Wedger, an ex-detective-turned-enterprising-SRA-activist whose Freedom Community “improve[s] the lives and futures of victims and survivors of child abuse” through monthly subscriptions and a merch store. Cha-ching!
There’s nothing wrong with grassroots activism; everyone has the right to agitate and spread the word about causes they care about, but Satanic ritual abuse is a groundless conspiracy theory that promotes misinformation and paranoia that some people act upon in dangerous and irrational ways. Let’s examine the claims and activities of both Archer and Wedger, since they’ve worked to make a name for themselves in the movement, and how they’ve mutually supported and promoted one another—not to mention a literal criminal actually guilty of kidnapping a child.
Jon Wedger, Cult Cop
According to Jon Wedger, he joined the Metropolitan Police Force in the early ’90s, eventually being assigned to the Belgravia Police Station in London’s West End before progressing “quickly into the CID (Criminal Investigations Department).” By the late ’90s he was “asked to front part of the Met’s effort into tracking down some of the transient paedophiles” until, again according to Wedger, he started getting “a bit too good” at what he was doing and was attracting the attention of higher-ups and people in power. In 2004, Wedger was assigned to a special investigation of an alleged pedophile ring, during which he claims to have discovered that not only were police aware of the trafficking, but at least one officer was actively providing the operation with inside information related to the investigation. After Wedger filed a report detailing his findings, he was summoned by a senior officer, who told him to “keep your mouth shut” or else he would be “thrown to the wolves.”
Despite this negative attention, in 2007 Wedger joined the Child Abuse Investigation Command in Haringey Borough, where he became involved in the infamous case of Peter Connelly. By 2014, Wedger filed a formal complaint against a senior officer and was served misconduct papers. By 2016, he says he was forced into early retirement after being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and placed under the care of an NHS mental health team. More specifically, Wedger claims the mental breakdown he suffered was the result of the bullying he received from his superiors trying to keep him quiet.
Now, I don’t doubt that Wedger’s story of police corruption might be true. It’s not unheard of for corrupt cops to take bribes, have dealings with the criminal underworld, or cover up the misconduct and mistakes of fellow officers. However, there’s a big leap from claiming there’s a coordinated effort by police to cover up corruption and claiming with respect to Satanic ritual abuse “This stuff is real” and “Shame on anyone who denigrates the existence of this ancient and endemic practice.” Likewise, it’s not unbelievable that Jon Wedger may have PTSD. In fact, given his career in law enforcement, it would be remarkable if he didn’t. However, it’s questionable whether Wedger’s trauma was more likely the result of harassment instead of cumulative PTSD (CPTSD), which is unfortunately quite common among first responders.
In 2018, Wedger started his own eponymous YouTube channel, which has since garnered over 39,000 subscribers. As the folks at the blog Hoaxtead Research point out, Wedger seems to have been inspired by Satanic ritual abuse activist Belinda McKenzie (whom I’ve written about previously) and established his own charity, the Jon Wedger Foundation, later rebranded as the Jon Wedger Freedom Community. While the website claims the Community’s mission “is to support, empower, and advocate for child abuse victims and survivors” and that every penny of donations and merch sales goes back into the project, it’s not clear what exactly that means. Both the website and Wedger’s YouTube channel seem to offer nothing but video after video of Wedger interviewing alleged Satanic ritual abuse survivors and fellow activists, including the next two individuals in our discussion—Jeanette Archer and Wilfred Wong.
‘Satanic Reptilian Queen’
Jeanette Archer got her start in Satanic ritual abuse activism after being interviewed by Jon Wedger on May 21, 2020. By 2021, she began organizing protests and public demonstrations, such as one held at Windsor Castle on October 21 against the “Satanic Reptilian Queen” and the rest of the Royal Family. Why Windsor Castle? “Today I have chosen to return to Windsor Castle to tell the world the truth about what goes on behind these walls and with our Royal Family,” Archer spoke as the crowd cheered. “As a child, uniformed police would come to my house and bring me here. … They would deliver me to the evil behind these gates. Queen Elizabeth is the head of the Freemasons, and the Freemasons are a shop front for Satanic Ritual Abuse.”
Archer’s accusations are merely recycled tropes that have long been staples of the Satanic ritual abuse community. She claims the conspiracy exists at all levels of society, so a coordinated effort exists to conceal and destroy any and all evidence. Archer claims elaborate tunnel systems exist beneath Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace all the way to Parliament for the covert trafficking of children, claims that echo the alleged tunnels beneath the infamous McMartin Preschool. While Archer insists you can “do your own research,” she also explicitly states that what she says are “fact, that comes from my memories.” Of course, decades of research by scientists such as Elizabeth Loftus and Richard McNally have demonstrated that memory is both fallible and malleable; memory is hardly fact. Then again, Archer also claims, “I was born with very powerful psychic abilities. … I spent a lot of time in [the hotel] Tavistock being tortured and MKUltra programmed,” so maybe her memory is, in fact, superhuman.
Image from Europe Reloaded. Available at https://www.europereloaded.com/survivor-jeanette-archer-speaks-out-about-satanic-ritual-abuse-of-children-video/
Besides being incredible (and that’s putting it mildly), there’s good reason not to believe Archer’s story about herself and the abuse she suffered. Back in 2021, the writer for Hoaxtead Research claimed to have uncovered that Jeanette Archer was actually born Jeanette Lyn Crawley and posted a redacted family tree demolishing one of her central claims. First, Jeanette maintains, “I was born into a very low-level, multigenerational Satanic cult family. … My grandfather was the one connected to the Elites. … My grandfather was a cleaner, the one who’d leave no trace. … He was their lackey, he was responsible for the babies on meat hooks and collecting their blood, the adrenochrome.” Alternatively, she claims her paternal grandfather was the mastermind, stating in a since removed 2020 interview, “So I think—because it was his father, my grandfather, that ran the show … So my grandfather was the head of this cult” (emphasis in the original).
The only problem is, according to the genealogy for Jeanette L. Crawley, her paternal grandfather died in 1955—twelve years before she was born. Granted, unless it can somehow be verified that Jeanette Crawley is indeed Jeanette Archer, we have to take this with a grain of salt. The Hoaxtead Research blog has been defunct for years, and as far as I can tell there’s no way to contact the person who ran the blog to ask them for their sources because they posted anonymously. However, using the dates they provided as well as the information that “Her father and paternal grandparents were all born in Bedfordshire; her mother came from Edmonton, in Essex. In January 1963, Jeanette’s parents married in Wandsworth,” I was able to check the England and Wales Civil Registration Birth Index from 1916–2007 as well as the England and Wales Registration Marriage Index from 1916–2005 and confirm that all the information Hoaxted Research presented was true—which, again, makes it really hard for her grandfather to have been running the cult if Jeanette Crawley and Jeanette Archer are the same person.
Jeanette Archer isn’t simply content to believe in Satanic ritual abuse conspiracies; her beliefs branch out and are tangled up with just about every other conspiracy theory you can think of. She’s referred to the mask mandates and vaccines for COVID-19 as the “plandemic,” she’s shared antisemitic posts on Facebook stating “Judaism is the Antichrist” and that “The same priesthood that murdered Jesus Christ exists today and it is controlling the United Nations from the Grand Lodge of Jerusalem. The entire world is being secretly controlled by the Rothschild dynasty, and its Synagogue of Satan is being led by its Sanhedrin council of 70 religious elders.” It’s not just Archer’s ideas that are dangerous but how she may act upon them. For example, on January 23, 2022, Thames Valley Police arrested both her and her boyfriend, Dominic Abbey, on “suspicion of conspiracy to murder.” Later, on February 8, she was arrested again “on suspicion of encouraging or assisting someone to committing suicide.”
Advocating violence against alleged satanists is bad, but it doesn’t end there. Jeanette Archer and others have explicitly advocated for kidnapping rescuing children and spiriting them away to safe houses:
We want to get safe spaces set up for SRA survivors … because now we’re exposing it on such a huge scale, the survivors are going to start having the courage to come forward, so they’re going to need safe places to come to. In the not so near future, there will be literal child rescues going on, so we’ve got to get fully set up to facilitate that, so after exposure comes the action, and the safe havens are the action to basically then start helping the victims and survivors as they come forward.
This leads us directly to Wilfred Wong, former nonpracticing barrister and Parliamentary lobbyist for the Jubilee Campaign, a Christian human rights group, and founder of the Coalition against Satanist Ritual Abuse (CASRA). Wong has been spinning the Satanic ritual abuse rumor mill longer than either Wedger or Archer, both of whom have interviewed him on their respective shows and lobbied for his release from prison.
Rescue Rangers or Stranger Danger?
On November 4, 2020, fifty-six-year-old Wilfred Wong and three others—sixty-nine-year-old getaway driver Edward “Ted” Stevenson; Edward’s sixty-seven-year-old wife, Janet Stevenson; and fifty-one-year-old Anke Hill—accosted an unidentified foster mother in an offsite parking bay. Wong drew a knife and threatened the woman while Hill grabbed the child. As the Daily Record reports:
The foster mum told the court: “Someone came round the back of me which is when I had to make a decision.
“He held a knife to my face and told me to let him Child A go.”
The foster mum, who had her own daughter in the car too, added: “I had to make a decision between my daughter’s life and Child A’s life and mine.”
Hill and Wong drove away and handed off Child A to Stevenson and his wife, who took off in the direction of their home in Sussex. The kidnappers drove hundreds of miles across the country before police intercepted the car and rescued the child. In total, seven individuals, including Wong, were arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit kidnapping.
Wong staunchly defended his actions, telling the court: “The family court system [has] been infiltrated by Satanists, as well as social services” and explaining to the jury “Ignorance about this subject is making it easier for SRA to flourish and making it harder for survivors to get support. Many survivors are disbelieved.” Why did they believe Child A was in danger? According to Janet Stevenson, she had seen drawings by Child A that “made her think” the child’s father was a Satanist. Let that sink in for a minute. They attempted to kidnap a child because they thought her dad was a Satanist based on drawings she made.
‘I Have Been Portrayed as a Satanist and a Paedophile—All of Which Is Untrue’
Satanic ritual abuse activists believe they are crusaders fighting against pure evil and that conviction drives them to justify their actions while they portray themselves as martyrs to a cause. As Janet Stevenson explained to the prosecutor during her trial, “People during the Second World War, who were trying to smuggle children out of concentration camps in suitcases or bags, put themselves at risk that they would be shot by the Gestapo. It was an offence but it was morally right because they were saving children.”
Simply put, at least some Satanic ritual abuse activists don’t care that they’re breaking the law because they believe what they’re doing is morally right even though it’s a crime. While it would be all too easy to laugh at Wedger, Archer, Wong, and others like them, the impact their beliefs and actions have on others is no laughing matter. The father of Child A, who was believed by Wong and his coconspirators to be a satanist, has said that he’s since suffered “malicious online trolling by friends of Wilfred Wong and his Satanic ritual abuse agenda” and that the kidnapping had had a “catastrophic effect” on his relationship with his son.
It’s not just the accused whose relationships suffer from these delusional beliefs. On Archer’s personal Facebook page, someone commented on one of her posts: “Jeanette these entities have infiltrated my family and are trying to keep them under mind control and separate them from me. Please pray for me. I could tell you so much that I’ve witnessed. They are completely evil. Reptilians and greys!”
Considering the numerous reports of people suffering psychotic breaks from reality and murdering their own family—such as the QAnon believer Matthew Coleman, who murdered his two children with a speargun—if we take this comment at face value it’s ominous. If this person sincerely believes their family has turned into inhuman monsters, there’s a very real chance they could hurt or even kill them. So, while it’s easy to dismiss Satanic ritual abuse activists as just a handful of crazies with little to no influence, it only takes one sufficiently motivated person to do something terrible.