Common stealth games
Half a million children are abused in the UK every year, last year’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) reported. That’s an average of 62 cases a day. Never mind that though. Bend a knee for the new king in silk sashes on the gilded throne, whose trusted advisers liked to rape underage boys in uniform, sick children and corpses.

Two of Charles III’s key role models were prolific child sex offenders. Both Jimmy Savile and his friend, Charles’ great uncle Louis Mountbatten are deceased, but their respective and linked legacies of organised crime are emblematic of the ever-entitled British Empire, whose survival is owed largely to its supreme penchant for guiltless covert exploitation of children and other vulnerable, disempowered groups.

Let’s have a closer look at the persisting powerful paedophile rings that belie the foundations of the Royal Family, with respect to the fact that information has been strategically silenced, scattered, muddied and manipulated. We all know about Andrew, but they predate him. It’s very convenient to focus on a specific example, but proliferation is part of the problem. He is enabled, supported and protected by an established system that he inherited.

Trying to understand the global narrative of child sexual abuse is like trying to untangle the pyramid scheme that its co-conspirators have designed. Child victims are left chasing the parts of their souls that were taken from them and hidden in places far beyond the reach of their conscious capacity. Bystanders are equally groomed through the operant conditions of reward and punishment to buy in to the playbook. Adhere to the status quo of the commonwealth realms and you might just be awarded a knighthood. Betray your masters and you could wind up sleeping with the fishes.

Loose lips sink ships
Louis Mountbatten was a member of the British Royal Navy, like his great nephew Andrew Windsor. In 1979, Mountbatten was blown up aboard his fishing boat off the Irish coast of Mullaghmore after the IRA allegedly detonated a radio-activated bomb, but more about that later.

One of the 20th Century’s biggest frauds was Ghislaine Maxwell’s father. Rupert Murdoch’s former arch nemesis, Robert Maxwell was a multinational media mogul, decorated British Military World War II soldier, one-time Labour MP, and MI6, Mossad and Soviet informant who owed ₤763,000,000 in debt at the time his body was found at the bottom of the ocean between the Canary isles of Tenerife and Gran Canaria, adrift from his super-yacht Lady Ghislaine on 5 November 1991. After one botched autopsy by an inexperienced team of Spanish pathologists and a second performed at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv, the cause of death was ruled to be a heart attack, although many believe he was murdered because his dubious finances had rendered him a hazard in intelligence circles. The same has been said of Jeffrey E. Epstein. In both cases, a contributing factor to their demise was not so much the grandiosity or recklessness of their illegal activities, but their tendency to boast about them.

In John Preston’s 2021 biography Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell, the author writes that Maxwell’s wife Betty, his children, and colleague then Mirror reporter John Jackson, joined the crew aboard Lady Ghislaine following the discovery of Maxwell’s corpse. Before Ghislaine departed, John Jackson overheard her instructing the crew to do something immediately: “shred everything on this boat!”

Shortly after Robert Maxwell’s death, Ghislaine Maxwell began dating financier Jeffrey E. Epstein. In his November 2019 interview with BBC Newsnight, Andrew Windsor claims to have met Epstein back in 1999 through Ghislaine. Andrew became friends with Ghislaine while she was studying at Oxford in the early 1980s during his time in the Royal Navy. Over the course of their friendship Ghislaine was often a guest at Windsor Palace, once making four trips in and out in one day according to staff. Reported appearances of Andrew with Maxwell and Epstein reached a fever pitch during the period of 2000 into early 2001, leading up to one of the western world’s most publicised tragedies.

Bad blood ties
English investigative political reporter Vicky Ward has followed the mysterious dealings of Jeffrey Epstein since before he was a household name. In 2002, she travelled to Federal Medical Center in Massachusetts to interview one of Epstein’s former business partners, the late Steven Hoffenberg of Towers Financial, who was serving an 18-year prison sentence for a US$450 million pyramid scheme. Hoffenberg claims it was Epstein who orchestrated the scheme when the pair worked together in the late 1980s.

Hoffenberg explained Epstein’s illegal business model, which Epstein called, “playing the box”, speaking from lived experience as a victim of Epstein’s “perfect grift”. He had been so enamoured of Epstein when they worked together that he had paid his office space rent, not knowing at the time that Epstein was colluding with criminal prosecutors to frame him for their Ponzi scheme. The basis of Epstein’s scam was to gather incriminating information on his associates to cover himself in a blanket of blackmail while embezzling enormous funds and moving them offshore. Even if he got caught, Epstein’s two-factor insurance policy guaranteed that his victims could not locate their missing assets and that their reputation would be compromised if they tried.

Steven Hoffenberg also told Ward that Robert Maxwell had been a client of Jeffrey Epstein’s before he died. Epstein was helping Maxwell pay off his debt. Fall details not only Maxwell’s increasing poor health in the years leading up to his death, but a curious assuredness that he would be able to repay his debts, underscored by mounting paranoia. Owing Citibank, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and the Swiss Bank, he had attempted to use his corporation Mirror Group Newspaper’s pension funds to shore up other parts of the company to no avail. No matter what he did, he seemed to be haemorrhaging money.

Did Jeffrey Epstein also swindle Robert Maxwell, and by extension his investors, out of his fortune and sell him up the river?

Allegedly both Robert Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein were involved in illegal arms dealing, trafficking weapons mostly in and out of the Middle East. Maxwell’s yacht Lady Ghislaine was the unfinished project of Adnan Khashoggi’s brother. Maxwell supposedly acquired it through ‘Guinness Four’ business tycoon and convicted criminal Gerald Ronson CBE in the early 1980s, by Ronson’s account. The late Saudi weapons trader and renowned womaniser Adnan Khashoggi became acquainted with Jeffrey Epstein in 1981 through MI6 asset and British arms dealer Douglas Leese. That same year Epstein founded his own private wealth management enterprise Intercontinental Assets Group after a brief bumpy stint at New York investment banking firm Bear Stearns  in the 1970s.

Epstein launched his second private company J. E. Epstein & Co. in 1987 with Khashoggi as a star client. Incidentally, Donald Trump bought a yacht from Khashoggi in 1988, and was a guest aboard the Lady Ghislaine eight months before Maxwell died. Trump also tried to buy the New York Daily News in 1986 during his first attempted foray into politics, but Maxwell bested him five years later.

The United Kingdom is now the second biggest weapons dealer in the world. Two thirds of their arms exports have been sold to countries in the Middle East since 2010. The Crown has a lot riding on the trade of explosives. Child protection isn’t such a lucrative industry, or so I’ve been told.

Cons and Kompromartists 
The Russian espionage stratagem of ‘kompromat’ describes a stockpile of information, images and video content about a person that can be used for blackmail. Kompromat may be partly real, but is often doctored or entirely fabricated, and traded within a network of operatives working towards the same covert end. It was a favoured KGB technique used throughout the loosely termed ‘Cold War’ period of 1954 to 1991, however its origins predate the Second World War in Soviet secret police circles and it remains a cornerstone of informal political operations worldwide. It is one of the first incarnations of cybercrime.

When I reported Nicolaas Bester to Tasmania Police in April 2011, he was found with child sexual abuse material and a folder full of compromising material including photographs of topless students. According to Tasmania Police, Mr Bester had fulfilled the necessary requirements with the University of Tasmania to pursue a breast cancer research study, which was considered a sufficient defence. Never mind that some of the students were photographed without tops on, which is solicitation. Never mind that one or more of the students might have relatives in high places whose reputations were vulnerable.

The then-principal of St Michael’s Collegiate wrote in her 16-page statement that during his 19-year tenure he had used the school’s resources to run his own Amway business. Amway is a multilevel marketing pyramid scheme. It is an entry level grift.

Despite concerted attempts made by the state, security services, and the British press to hide the truth about Jimmy Savile throughout his life, after his death in 2011 an investigation conducted by the NSPCC found that he had abused at least 500 children in hospitals, homes and other locations, including the BBC, over 50 years, the youngest of whom was only two years old. His grift as a philanthropist covered a multitude of sins.

The Kingpin of Kincora
Louis Mountbatten, a friend of Savile’s, and Charles’ father figure, whom he admired “almost more than anybody else I know”, had “a perversion for young boys” and stands accused of abusing at least three underage boys out of Kincora as part of what Amnesty International has called “one of the biggest scandals of our age”.

Kincora boys home was a residential care facility established in 1958 in Belfast to provide shelter and care for vulnerable, neglected, homeless, and orphaned youth. After decades of multidirectional and documented obstruction, it is now widely understood to have been used as a honeytrap brothel for a powerful paedophile ring. It operated with the involvement of intelligence services, police, and the state.

The head housemaster was evangelical extremist-protestant paedophile priest and MI5 informant William McGrath, infamously known as ‘The Beast of Kincora’. Following a child sexual abuse scandal in 1980, Kincora closed down. In 1981, William McGrath and two other senior staffers, Joseph Mains and Raymond Stemple, were jailed for sexually abusing 11 of the boys.

In October 2022, Irishman and Kincora survivor Arthur Smyth waived his right to anonymity amid launching legal proceedings against several institutions. He alleges that Louis Mountbatten sexually abused him on two occasions at Kincora boys home during the 1970s.

The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves by historian Andrew Lownie contains two disclosures from male survivors who allege they were trafficked from Kincora to a residence of Mountbatten’s and a hotel in Northern Ireland to be sexually abused.

The first person who attempted to blow the whistle on the Kincora scandal was then Army Intelligence officer Collin Wallace. In 1973 he began briefing journalists about his knowledge of child sexual abuse at the institution. Fellow Army Intelligence officer, Brian Gemmell, presented a report of criminal activities at Kincora to a senior MI5 agent in 1975. In an interview given to the BBC, Gemmell said he was then ordered by the MI5 agent to stop investigating. Five years later, Collin Wallace was framed for manslaughter. After new evidence came to light in 1986, his conviction was quashed and he was awarded the equivalent of $56,000 in compensation. Margaret Thatcher was forced to apologise to the UK parliament and public for his wrongful incarceration in 1990.

There have been a number of inquiries into Kincora and the broader scourge of child sexual abuse within the dynastically structured society of the United Kingdom. The problem being that their investigative powers are deliberately limited within an echo chamber that never touches the upper echelons.

Kincora survivor Gary Hoy told the Guardian in 2015 that “the security services should not be allowed to hide the facts”. Speaking to BBC Radio in May 2016 following the launch of the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (HIA), fellow Kincora survivor Clint Massey said he was hopeful that the investigation would expose the true depths of the links between MI5 and Kincora. “There was a cover-up, there was state collusion in what was going on in Kincora. It should have been stopped, there were people who wanted to stop it. They were blocked.”

Collin Wallace criticised the HIA for failing to compel participation from MI6 and MI5. Despite his cooperative attitude, Mr Wallace claims he was not provided adequate time or supplied the documentation relevant to his evidence and thus declined to participate. In an extraordinary display of gaslight, the HIA stated, “Mr Wallace cannot be regarded as truthful in his accounts of what he knew about sexual abuse in Kincora or what he did with that knowledge in 1972—1974.”

Kincora was the front of a paedophile ring protected and surveilled by MI5. It functioned as a brothel as part of a honeytrap for acquiring blackmail. The boys were exploited, literally, as human bait. Staff and visiting politicians, paramilitaries, and other officials were given access to the forbidden fruit of underage boys for their sexual gratification at the home, thereby compromising positions.

While the offenders who directly perpetrated the physical assaults themselves should be apportioned the most blame at and around Kincora, the covert puppet masters who conspired to help design, orchestrate and later conceal the show from the shadows are also culpable. Kincora was a dirty apparatus of biochemical warfare. It capitalised on and manipulated the distortions of the human psyche—for political power, pleasure and profit—at the expense of boys, in state care no less.

Sitting ducks as subjects
Who could forget serial child sex offender Rolf Harris who painted the Elizabeth II in 2005 at Buckingham Palace and was knighted the following year? In July 2014, he was accused by over 40 women of abuse, and convicted of 12 counts of indecent assault against four girls between 1968 and 1986. His victims were as young as seven at the time of the offending. In 2015, he penned a song while in prison describing his survivors as “money grabbing woodworms” and “wenches”, which he threatened to record immediately upon release. He is now being sued by a woman who alleges he abused her when she was a 10-year-old foster child while on a performance camp in Victoria.

Apparently, commonwealth citizens have been asked to swear allegiance in both “heart” and “voice” to Charles III, our “undoubted” king on Coronation Day, this 6 May. As an advocate for child protection, who has extensive knowledge of his well-documented close ties to renowned child sex offenders, personally I dare to doubt him and the rest of his reputedly royal family and friends.

Our feudal commonwealth nations were built on dirt and dirt files. They were built on persisting bribery, blackmail and blatant brutality that has been cosmetically hidden behind a fantastical, manufactured illusion of order. It is — to put it bluntly — bullshit. To keep the buck flowing in Buckingham Palace, the last buck stops with innocent, faceless children, prisoners, people living with disabilities, low income earners, people of colour, migrants, refugees, ethnic communities and others whose lives are deemed dispensable. This is the economy of supposedly negotiable human rights. It is the capitalist reality of individuals viewed in terms of their market value in a cynical, clinical, cyclical system.

These atrocities have not been committed in ignorance. They have not been committed independently. They have been committed deliberately, in full view of those who have the resources and impetus to stop them, but chose not only to do the opposite, but to actively minimise, deny, edit or otherwise completely erase history.

They say it takes a village to raise a child. It also takes a village to protect a perpetrator. By virtue of their developing anatomy, physiology and social behaviours, children are not equal to adults. But as a community, and certainly as a nation, we do have agency. We have the power to assert our values and independence.

May we pledge to protect the sacred lives of kids, not the secrets and lies of kings.