The ‘Fake’ Elm Guest House List.

This is absolutely, certainly, definitely, the last time that we’re going to do a post on this… I hope!

Alun Roberts  very *kindly* included me in this twitter exchange with someone claiming to be Margaret Jervis.

Margaret is a former journalist with Social Work Today but now she is a fact checker. I did try to explain privately to Margaret but without much luck.

So this post is to clear up any possible confusion about the ‘list’ or should I say the ‘lists’ because the Mary Moss docs have a number of lists.

On Aug 24th Chris Fay wrote ‘Elm Guest House. Mary Moss Files – Clarification’ in which he wrote:

There are only 3 of the documents that I wanted to put some context and clarification to…

…Document 6. It was drawn to my attention that some people though it was a list of abusers. I only want to clarify absolutely that this is a list of VICTIMS that should never have been made public. They are victims!!

Document 103. This is a list of police officers who carried out the raid. It again was drawn to my attention that some people thought these names were involved in abuse at Grafton or EGH. They were NOT. See my previous post.

Documents 104/6. This is a list of names I scribbled down from the registers, whilst the person I was with was talking to Carol. This was the very first time we had acess to them. They were just names and include by the way, victims!  As you can see from later docs we did go on to identify many of the abusers and also the aliases that were used, not just for the Guest House but also the use of the “facilities”.

Margaret Jervis has chosen to describe this as a “confession” forced on Chris Fay by the Metropolitan Police. Let’s be clear, the Met did not ‘force’ Chris to write anything, nor did they even request that Chris clarify anything. It is difficult to understand how Margaret, “30 years in the field”, would make such a mistake and the twisting of facts and the emotive language she uses might lead some to question her agenda.

Anyway, I think Chris has already clearly explained those documents but when most people think of ‘the list’ they have a different document in mind and although Chris has clearly indicated which documents he was talking about, I’m worried that Margaret Jervis’s comments on twitter might lead to further confusion.

So, I would like to clarify about Document 63, you all know the one, the one with the ‘big’ names…

That list was written by Chris Fay while interviewing Carole Kasir in the NAYPIC office a few months before she died.

I’m assuming that when Margaret Jervis refers to a ‘fake’ list she is referring to this one. Regardless, it is likely that anyone who read the twitter exchange would assume it was that one.

‘Fake’ is rather a pejorative word. It suggests that it is not genuine, that it purports to be something that it is not, that it is deliberately designed to mislead.

To begin with, this list was written over 20 years ago and was never meant to be in the public domain . It is a contemporaneous record of an interview that Chris Fay had with Carole Kasir. So, plainly it was never written to deceive people 23 years later.

Is it accurate ?

No. One of the first discussions I had with Chris Fay back in January concerned that list and he immediately told me that it was inaccurate. He explained to me that even as he was interviewing Carole Kasir he felt that he was being misled and that he felt that Carole was telling him what she thought he wanted to hear.

The list is what it is. It does not purport to be anything it is not, it is a contemporaneous record of an interview and it was not written to be put in the public domain, it is a private note. By no definition of the word could it possibly be described as a ‘fake’.

So, why does this wordsmith of 30 years use that pejorative term ?

There is more, the documents that Mary Moss put online is only a small fraction of those seized by the police. There is another list. This list followed a NAYPIC investigation and some people on the first list, the public one, were eliminated. One name eliminated after talking to the children involved and others was that of a person who has been famous for decades, for fear of associating that person further in this I can not say his name.

BBC Newsnight have a copy of that list. Is it accurate? I don’t know because I’ve never seen it but it is certainly more accurate than the public list.

Margaret, I think it is only fair to give you the right to reply if you wish.