Belleville woman played role in delivering ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy
Ontario writer’s article helped spread fake news story linked to shooting at Washington eatery
Following the spread of fake news and “Pizzagate” — which inspired a violent incident in a Washington, D.C., eatery and may even have affected the course of the U.S. election — leads to at least one surprising destination: the home of a writer in Belleville, Ont.
Stefanie MacWilliams, a stay-at-home mother and contributor to the website Planet Free Will, wrote an article last month that took off on social media. In it she recounted a man’s claims about a politically connected pedophile ring housed at the Comet Ping Pong pizza parlour in the U.S. capital.
On Sunday, less than three weeks after MacWilliams’ article was published, Edgar Welch was arrested after a rifle was discharged in the restaurant. He later said he wanted only to investigate the claims.
“I kind of wanted to put out the information that was there with the statement I’m not accusing anyone of anything, there’s no concrete evidence of anything,” MacWilliams said Wednesday, adding that her readers were very interested in the story.
Among the claims are allegations that aides to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton were involved in a child prostitution ring hidden in mysterious tunnels beneath the pizzeria.
Planet Free Will was among the websites recently called out by the New York Times for sharing fake news.
“I really have no regrets and it’s honestly really grown our audience.” STEFANIE MACWILLIAMS CONTRIBUTOR TO ‘PLANET FREE WILL’ WEBSITE
“I was personally a little bit insulted,” said MacWilliams of the label, adding, “Fake news has become used as this ridiculous term . . . it’s the new ‘conspiracy theorist.’ ”
MacWilliams’ article describes journalist Jack Posobiec livestreaming his theories from Comet Ping Pong itself until staff asked him to leave. She writes, “We must stress that there is as yet no concrete evidence of any wrongdoing,” but adds, “it is certainly odd that Jack Posobiec was kicked out this evening.”
MacWilliams, 24, began writing for the website earlier this year and is one of its three contributors, along with owner and editor Joe Jankowski, a self-described libertarian who started the website in January as a hobby.
“I would pretty much describe it as a conservative-leaning and libertarian-leaning news website,” said Jankowski, a 25-year-old who works in entertainment and lives in Pennsylvania.
The conspiracy theory — stemming from creative interpretation of wellconnected Washington political players’ emails, made public by WikiLeaks — abounds on websites such as 4 Chan and Reddit. MacWilliams said she doesn’t believe or disbelieve the theory, but said, “What I’ve been calling for is the media to treat us fairly and to stop smearing us with the fake-news label.”
Despite the fallout of Pizzagate (as it’s come to be known) that resulted in an armed man entering Comet Ping Pong in search of alleged child sex slaves, MacWilliams said she has no regrets.
“I really have no regrets and it’s honestly really grown our audience,” she said.
James Alefantis, the owner of Comet Ping Pong, felt differently. In a statement on the restaurant’s Facebook page on Monday, he wrote, “I hope that those involved in fanning these flames will take a moment to contemplate what happened here (Sunday), and stop promoting these falsehoods right away.”
The story of Pizzagate is about what is fake and what is real. It’s a tale of a scandal that never was and of a fear that has spread through channels that did not even exist until recently.
Pizzagate — the belief that code words and satanic symbols point to a sordid underground along an ordinary retail strip in the nation’s capital — is possible only because science has produced the most powerful tools ever invented to find and disseminate information.
What brought Welch to the District of Columbia on Sunday was a choking mix of rumour, political nastiness, technological change and the intoxicating thrill that can come from running down a mystery.
His actions in one of Washington’s wealthiest neighbourhoods reminded Americans that last month’s election did not quite conclude the strangest political season in the nation’s history. Welch did not shoot anyone in the disturbance, but he delivered a troubling message about the shattering of trust in a troubled time.
On Oct. 28, FBI director James Comey told Congress that he was reopening the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state. New emails had been found on a computer belonging to disgraced former New York congressman Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. Two days later, someone tweeting under the handle @DavidGoldbergNY cited rumours that the new emails “point to a pedophilia ring and @HillaryClinton is at the centre.” The rumour was retweeted more than 6,000 times.
The notion quickly moved to other social-media platforms, including 4chan and Reddit, mostly through anonymous or pseudonymous posts. On the far-right site Infowars, talkshow host Alex Jones repeatedly suggested that Clinton was involved in a child sex ring and that her campaign chairman, John Podesta, indulged in satanic rituals.
“When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped, I have zero fear standing up against her,” Jones said in a YouTube video posted on Nov. 4. “Yeah, you heard me right. Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children. I just can’t hold back the truth anymore.”
According to YouTube, that video has been viewed more than 427,000 times.
Over the next couple of days, the wild accusations against Clinton gradually merged with a new raft of allegations stemming from Wiki- Leaks’ release of Podesta’s emails. Those emails showed that Podesta occasionally dined at Comet Ping Pong.
On Nov. 7, #pizzagate first appeared on Twitter. Over the next several weeks, it would be tweeted and retweeted hundreds or thousands of times each day.
An oddly disproportionate share of the tweets about Pizzagate appear to have come from, of all places, the Czech Republic, Cyprus and Vietnam, said Jonathan Albright, an assistant professor of media analytics at Elon University in North Carolina. In some cases, the most avid retweeters appeared to be bots, programs designed to amplify certain news and information.
“What bots are doing is really getting this thing trending on Twitter,” Albright said. “These bots are providing the online crowds that are providing legitimacy.”
On the Friday before the election, Alefantis, who owns two restaurants on the same block in northwest Washington, noticed something odd in his Instagram feed: a stream of comments calling him a pedophile.
Upset, Alefantis told some of his young employees at Comet Ping Pong about the hateful comments and they poked around online. They found rapidly burgeoning discussions on Reddit, 4chan and Instagram about a purported child sex ring operating out of their restaurant.
In the final days before the election, other shopkeepers on the block began to receive threatening phone calls and disturbing emails. Strangers from faraway places demanded to know about symbols on their shop windows or photos on their walls.
Across from Comet, at the French bistro Terasol, co-owner Sabrina Ousmaal noticed a disturbing Google review of her restaurant that alleged that Terasol, too, was involved in a plot to abuse children.
Then, more online comments appeared, focusing on a photo on Terasol’s website that showed Ousmaal and her daughter posing with Clinton, who had eaten there several years earlier. The Internet sleuths also fixated on a heart logo that appeared on the restaurant’s site as part of a fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which Ousmaal, a cancer survivor, has supported for years.
“These maniacs thought that was a symbol of child pornography,” said her husband and business partner, Alan Moin. “It’s crazy.”
The family removed the symbol from their site, but the online comments adapted to the new reality: Terasol must be hiding something. The anonymous calls increased.
Alefantis and other merchants were mystified: Where was this all coming from? Can’t anyone make it stop? The merchants approached Facebook and Twitter and asked that disparaging, fictitious comments about them be removed. The shopkeepers said the replies they got advised them to block individual users who were harassing them.
The owner of 4chan, Hiroyuki Nishimura, said in an email to the Post that “Pizzagate reminds me that a country indicated (there were) stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and many people and countries were deceived. It is same old story.”
Nishimura, a Japanese Internet entrepreneur, said the rumours about Comet could be false: “Some people, who believe they do something good, may be deceived by false information.” But, he said, their motive was good; they “did it for saving children.”
On Connecticut Avenue, the hate calls and death threats kept mounting. Surely, the shopkeepers thought, this will all go away after the election. For a few days after Donald Trump’s victory, a relative calm returned to Comet. But along the block, merchants were hearing from all manner of strange callers. At Besta Pizza, owner Abdel Hammad got an urgent message from the company that maintains his website. A reviewer alleged that his shop’s simple, pizza-shaped logo was a symbol of child pornography. Hammad, an Egyptian immigrant who voted for Trump, was stunned. “It’s a slice of pizza,” he said. Hammad removed the image from his site but could not afford more than $2,000 to pay for new signs out front. “Why did you change the website?!” anonymous callers screamed at him on the phone.
“We’re going to put a bullet in your head,” one threatened.
Down the block, at Politics and Prose Bookstore, employees noticed tweets and other online posts that included them on a list of stores linked by underground tunnels that do not exist.
On Nov. 16, Jack Posobiec, a former Navy Reserve intelligence officer who had spent much of the previous year as a leader of a pro-Trump grassroots organization, decided he’d had enough of just reading tweets and blog posts about the pizza place in his city.
Posobiec, 31, had never eaten at Comet; he had never even heard of the place until he started reading about it on conservative, anti-government media sites.
Now, with Trump elected, he read the posts more closely. Any story that accused Clinton, John Podesta and Brock of nefarious deeds deserved some investigation, he thought. He believed the Clinton campaign was “full of secrecy and deception.”
It seemed reasonable to Posobiec that Podesta might have organized a sex ring in cahoots with Brock. But the only part of the scenario that was real was that Podesta had been known to eat pizza at Comet.
Posobiec said he was curious and confused. He and a friend decided to go have some pizza. They walked into Comet eight days after the election, sat down and ordered. Posobiec got the garlic knots. His friend got a beer. But they were not just hanging out. Posobiec was using his phone to broadcast his evening at Comet on Periscope, an app that allows users to stream video live.
Posobiec said he never made any disturbance inside Comet, but the restaurant’s managers saw him take his camera into a back room where a child’s birthday party was underway. It did not seem appropriate for a child’s party to be broadcast on a stranger’s Periscope feed. The manager asked two D.C. police officers who happened to be across the street to assist.
Posobiec and his friend “were gently refused service and asked to leave,” said a person familiar with the restaurant’s decision.
On Twitter, the hashtag #pizzagate peaked in the hours after Posobiec’s video appeared.
Earlier this fall, in Salisbury, N.C., Edgar Maddison Welch saw some friends doing drugs and he started preaching at them, aggressively.
Danielle Tillman, 23, was the best friend of Welch’s girlfriend. She said she had just taken acid when Welch got upset, chanting Jesus’ name at her. “He grabbed my hand and got in my face and was like, ‘Let the demons out of her,’ ” Tillman recalled. “It was super weird.”
Friends say Welch, 28, in recent months grew far more outwardly religious. “He sees himself as someone who is a protector,” said his friend Charles Dobson, 28. “He is just a thrill-seeking guy.”
On his Facebook page, Welch has posted biblical verses and psalms, some related to the end of days, along with photos of his two children.
A few years ago, Welch told a longtime friend and former roommate, Dane Granberry, about stories he had read online describing miles of secret tunnels under the Denver airport. Welch, who had also been fascinated by conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks having been staged by the United States, had become obsessed with the tunnels idea and spent long hours reading articles, watching videos and searching for details.
“He’s into doing his own research,” Granberry said. “I don’t think he has very much faith in the media, but none of us do.” Granberry said her friend needed to see things for himself. He showed up at Comet on Sunday about 3 p.m.
Gareth Wade, 47, and Doug Clarke, 50, were sitting down for pizza and beer when a server told them that someone had walked in with a gun. As Welch passed by their table, he told them to vacate the building. They rushed out.
Outside, dozens of D.C. police officers swarmed the area, evacuating businesses and blocking off streets. A police helicopter circled overhead.
Inside Comet, Welch, armed with a Colt AR-15 assault rifle, a .38-calibre Colt revolver and a folding knife, fired his gun two or three times, police said. Welch, dressed in jeans, a T-shirt and a hooded sweatshirt, remained inside for about 45 minutes, searching for underground vaults or hidden rooms, police said.
At least one gunshot broke off a lock to a door. It led not to hidden sex workers but to a computer room. The bullet damaged a computer tower.
Finally, Welch responded to police calls for him to leave the building and surrender. He put his AR-15 on top of a beer keg and his revolver on a table. He came out with his hands up, following police commands to walk backward toward them.
Welch was handcuffed, and Sgt. Benjamin Firehock asked him why he had done it. Welch said, according to the arrest affidavit, “that he had read online that the Comet restaurant was harbouring child sex slaves and that he wanted to see for himself if they were there. (Welch) stated that he was armed to help rescue them. (Welch) surrendered peacefully when he found no evidence that underage children were being harboured in the restaurant.”
Within hours of Welch’s arrest, online conspiracy theorists had already decided that he was not one of them. Some suggested he was a “false flag,” a government plant — an enemy of their cause — who had been used in an elaborate plot to conceal the truth.
Comet Ping Pong reopened Tuesday night; the crowd was large and supportive.
Starting in early November, MacWilliams noticed that stories based on the Podesta emails were making waves. A friend “who knows I’m interested in politics and shares conspiracy things with me” sent MacWilliams stories about Comet Ping Pong. Then she happened upon Posobiec’s live stream from Comet. This, she decided, was a story. She told the Pizzagate tale in a YouTube video, on Twitter and on Planet Free Will.
In the third paragraph of her story, MacWilliams wrote that “we must stress that there is as yet no concrete evidence of any wrongdoing.” She thought she was being quite responsible.
She had read Internet chatter about strange happenings and code words, and she thought this needed investigation.
MacWilliams’s story spread via social media. She became part of what she called a “worldwide citizen investigation” of Pizzagate.
When she saw Reddit and Twitter react to the conspiracy theory, respectively shutting down a discussion forum and suspending the accounts of some users, she worried that a coverup was underway. “As soon as you tell people they can’t talk about something, they’re going to talk about it a whole lot more,” she said.
MacWilliams calls herself a journalist, but she does not try to be “100 per cent accurate,” either. She believes the beauty of the Internet is that people can crowdsource the truth. Eventually, what is real will emerge, she said.
Pizzagate, she said, is “two worlds clashing. People don’t trust the mainstream media anymore, but it’s true that people shouldn’t take the alternative media as truth, either.” The lack of stories about Pizzagate in the mainstream press meant that the back channels of the Internet would step into the breach.
MacWilliams remains caught up in the thrill of the chase. “There is a camaraderie to it,” she said. “It is like sitting around with your friends saying, ‘What really happened to JFK?’ It is like a giant game, especially nowadays when you can crowdsource thousands of emails and figure out what’s going on. It’s like a real-life Kennedy assassination where all the stuff is at your fingertips, and it’s happening today.” With files from Azzura Lalani
“I was personally a little bit insulted. Fake news has become used as this ridiculous term . . . it’s the new ‘conspiracy theorist.’ ” STEFANIE MACWILLIAMS PLANET FREE WILL CONTRIBUTOR