On the 21st of October, Jennifer Arcuri hosted a livestream via the encrypted messaging app Telegram to talk about Satanists in the UK government. The American entrepreneur, who rose to prominence in the UK over an alleged affair with Prime Minister Boris Johnson when he was mayor of London, announced that she’d had “a few requests to do some conspiracy discussions.”
“So… consider this the part of the discussion that goes ‘conspiracy’,” she said.
Before long Arcuri was making bizarre and wild claims to her apparently like-minded followers about Johnson and his wife Carrie.
“One of the journalists wrote [to] me out of the blue from nowhere, and he was like, ‘Jen, weren't you the one that told me, she was a Satanist, who sent me a picture of Carrie?’ And I said, ‘you know, I'm not going to comment on her specifically, but I encourage you to explore beyond this woman and look at how Satanism is actually, you know, surprisingly used in lots of ways in government’.”
The outlandish conversation is surprisingly in keeping with Arcuri’s recent online output.
Misinformation and extremism experts who reviewed Arcuri’s public statements for VICE World News said that she appeared to have been influenced by QAnon or QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theories. They said that Arcuri’s links to Johnson were significant as they gave her the opportunity to claim insider and intimate knowledge about the UK Prime Minister and the government.
Arcuri, 36, has been a public figure in the UK since it emerged she had received tens of thousands of pounds in public funds for her tech businesses Innotech, and been given access to foreign trade missions, when Johnson – then a close friend – had been mayor of London. This led to claims that Johnson had failed to declare potential conflicts of interest.
In one diary entry at the time Arcuri recalled Johnson telling her: “How can I be the thrust – the throttle – your mere footstep as you make your career? Tell me: how I can help you?”
Johnson was referred to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) in 2019. The watchdog held a nine-month inquiry before deciding not to launch a criminal investigation into the matter. The IOPC said that it would have been “wise” for Johnson to declare a potential conflict of interest but found no evidence that he had influenced the payments. The opposition Labour Party has urged the IOPC to reopen the investigation.
Arcuri later claimed that she had had a sexual relationship with Johnson between 2012 and 2016, during his second term of mayor of London and when he was married to his former wife Marina Wheeler. Since the alleged affair, Johnson has led the Leave campaign to victory in the Brexit referendum, become Prime Minister, divorced Wheeler, and married and had two children with Carrie Symonds – now Carrie Johnson. Johnson has not commented on the alleged affair but said earlier this year that he had acted with “honesty and integrity” in his relationship with Arcuri.
Arcuri, meanwhile, has turned on Johnson, calling him an “imposter parading around Number 10.”
When she hasn’t been spending her time as a thorn in Johnson’s side, Arcuri has been causing further controversy and getting deeper into conspiracy theories.
Last week, former BBC and GB News presenter Andrew Neil threatened to sue Arcuri after she tweeted claims wrongly linking Neil to dead paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
While the spat garnered some media attention, it went largely unnoticed that Arcuri had included the hashtags #itsOver and #ticktock when tweeting at Neil. These hashtags are associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory, and refer to a reckoning for elites, a kind of secular “end times”. For QAnon this reckoning was called “the storm”, when there would be a mass round up and execution of the cabal of paedophiles. For anti-vaxxers this has morphed into “Nuremberg 2.0”, when politicians who have forced vaccines on their populations will face trial for supposed breaches of the Nuremberg Code.
Even a cursory look at Arcuri’s Twitter account shows that she regularly promotes anti-vax and Satanist conspiracy theories, along with a belief in some kind of impending reckoning in the financial sector.
Since June Arcuri has also used her Telegram channel to regularly hold livestream discussions where participants discuss conspiracy theories.
Joe Ondrak, head of investigation for Logically, an organisation which combats online misinformation, said that Arcuri appears to now have a worldview heavily influenced by QAnon.
Arcuri, Ondrak said, “fits squarely in that bracket between COVID denialism vaccine hesitancy, big tech conspiracy, and specifically QAnon as well, most notably through her use of the tick tock hashtag which, weirdly enough has kind of died out with a lot of QAnon followers. They don't use that so much anymore, but she seems to be keeping it alive.”
“She talks about things like [a] global financial crash and weird things around banks. It goes beyond what would have been the limits of QAnon lore, to being the lens that QAnon established is now her viewpoint for a whole mess of different ideas.”
It certainly is a mess.
Her Twitter feed is a stream of COVID denialism and anti-vax sentiment. On the 12th of November a retweet from Arcuri’s account showed a video saying that COVID vaccinations are a “genocidal initiative” against young children, and that it is important to “deal with the issue”. “Damn right we do,” she commented. A tweet posted on her account on the 6th of December said, “Paid for shills, shilling paid for lies” in response to footage of someone encouraging people to get vaccinated on a daytime TV show. On the 3rd of December a tweet from her account said, “Stay distracted with ‘scariants’…. Meanwhile the IMF issued a warning about an economic collapse.”
Even more bizarrely, Satanism has been a theme of Arcuri’s Tweets. On the 11th of November, a tweet from her account asked “Who sees Satan?” in a picture of singer Adele and talk show host Oprah Winfrey. On the 5th of December her account retweeted a tweet saying that a picture of Satan can “clearly” be seen in an image of the front door of number 10 Downing Street. “All seems like they are pointing at themselves as satanists,” the Twitter user said. Arcuri wrote back, “‘Evil lives here.’ Whatever you chose to believe, the building and the people inside it, grow darker by the day. See it on display.”
It all points to a worldview heavily influenced by conspiracy theory. “What I think she's subscribed to is what I would tentatively describe as a nonspecific post-Q conspiracy,” said Ondrak. “There are a lot of hallmarks and a lot of inflections of what would be QAnon. But there's also there's not not really a great deal of focus there.”
Arcuri’s activity also raises questions about how these ideas spread online.
Ciarán O’Connor, a researcher for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue said, “Jennifer Arcuri's online activity is a good example of how QAnon and wider conspiracy theorists operate on social media platforms with some and no guidelines around problematic conspiratorial or misleading content. On Twitter, her feed is devoted to general claims about COVID-19, vaccines and posts that target politicians and elites – content that doesn't fall foul of Twitter's content guidelines, even if she has shared potentially threatening content in calling Boris Johnson a ‘traitor.’
“But on Telegram, it's clear that Arcuri is a promoter of QAnon. In numerous posts, such as this one, she directly references central QAnon material, such as a 'documentary' series Fall of the Cabal, and even goes so far as to link to online versions of the video series too, and she also regularly speaks of Satanic paedophilic elites in Hollywood, another core belief of QAnon.”
O’Connor said Arcuri’s large public profile gave her the potential to act as a gateway towards conspiracy theories or even as a QAnon influencer outright.
“By following and interacting with her online, users may unknowingly be exposed to QAnon content that they may have otherwise not encountered online and this highlights the risk that prominent public figures who become conspiracy promoters pose to the public in using their platform to share misleading, false and potentially harmful claims and content,” he said.
With 55,000 Twitter followers and over 6,000 subscribers on Telegram, Arcuri is a relatively small fish in conspiracy theory’s toxic lake.
But as someone who was once close to someone who has become the most powerful politician in the UK, she is well placed to garner more attention if she so wishes.
According to Ondrak, Arcuri “could really easily say, ‘well, you know, I knew Boris Johnson intimately, I saw the Adrenochrome shrine’. She could really go in on that and explode her profile if she wanted to.”
Arcuri did not respond directly when contacted via email by VICE World News about her promotion of conspiracy theories.
But a screenshot of our emailed questions were posted on her Telegram channel, alongside the question “What do you all think? Is it wise for me to be using my public platform to disseminate such a message?”
A message on the channel asked: “Shall I start posting these ignorant stupid emails every time someone wants to run a hit piece?”
One person responded to say, “I’d tell him that you have an army of supporters behind you and he can publish what he likes – there’s too much evidence available for us to know that you are speaking the truth.”
“I just hope this person, may even be in this chat, knows how serious I take his email,” Arcuri’s account responded, adding a flame emoji.
Arcuri tweeted a link to this article after it was published. "Thank you for highlighting the interest in my telegram channel," she wrote. "We grow daily.. but I’m sure it’s just the ‘conspiracy’ talk that resonates with people.”
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