Jeffrey Epstein's Mermaids Connection.
When Barclays Bank became one of the most vocal corporate champions of Mermaids it linked the children's charity to a web of deception and Jeffrey Epstein's network of wealthy sex offenders.
In October 2021 Mumsnet, the online parenting site, received devastating news. It was being boycotted by one of the biggest financial firms on the planet. When Mumsnet’s commercial manager had approached a media buyer who placed ads for Barclays she was informed the bank was blacklisting her company and had been doing so for two years. Barclays would not be placing any ads. Not now. And not for the foreseeable.
For an online forum adored by thousands of ordinary, hard working mothers to be on any company’s blacklist seemed baffling enough. It was doubly so since Barclays had, as recently as 2016, been a huge supporter of Mumsnet; not only advertising on its website but sponsoring major events.
The reason for the volte-face the ad agency explained was the bank’s decision to enter an official “partnership” with the controversial trans charity Mermaids, becoming in the process one of its most vocal corporate sponsors.
Barclays began its partnership in 2016 not long after its last collaboration with Mumsnet. That event appears to have caught the eye of trans activists like Joss Prior. Prior’s online style has long been on the wrong side of unhinged. Sometimes violently so. When JK Rowling mentioned she’d received death threats after trans activists posted pictures of themselves outside her home, Prior’s response began with the not exactly empathetic line,
“Share the death threats you whinging cryarsing victim-playing fucking weirdo” ….
He once published a list of gender critical writers and suggested one response to them might be “two words cya ide”. In other words….cyanide. Charming.
Prior brought all his …diplomatic…. skills to bear against Mumsnet and many of its users who were, let’s say, not favourably disposed towards trans ideology. In particular they challenged Mermaids’ central claim that children can consent to the use of powerful drugs called puberty blockers that prevent their physical and mental maturation. Fancy that. Mothers wanting to protect kids.
Prior was in the forefront of the campaign that denounced Mumsnet as transphobic and targetted its advertisers and sponsors.
What communication there was between Barclays and Prior as well as other trans activists we may never know. What we do know is without bothering to approach the directors of Mumsnet to get their point of view the bank’s management sided with the unhinged and blacklisted Mumsnet. As its media buyer explained,
“Barclays partner with Mermaids and believe that working with Mumsnet would damage that partnership and discredit the work they do,”
Discredit Mermaids? Doesn’t Mermaids do that all on its own?
After Mumsnet’s owners discovered they were being boycotted they wrote to Barclays' top brass including its CEO Jes Staley pointing out they did not take a stance on Mermaids themselves and always removed any derogatory or insulting comments in chat groups.
They also reminded Barclays the idea of “gender identity” was contested; citing recent court judgments that upheld gender critical beliefs as protected in law. It was to no avail. As the ad agency made clear the bank’s decision, “has been mandated right from the top at group level.”
It’s hard now to trace the evolution of Barclays’ relationship with Mermaids which it once deemed so important it secretly blacklisted a firm who refused to applaud the charity’s work. The bank appears to have scrubbed the internet of any evidence of its much-vaunted partnership. Search for Mermaids on the bank’s website today and this is what comes up.
One minute Mermaids was a cherished partner. So admired it drove a boycott of a firm with a household name. Now it’s as if it never existed.
Stories like this can take a long time to research. That’s why if you are able to support my work with a paid subscription I’d be incredibly grateful. Paid subscriptions also help support my free work; like the thread I posted on Twitter/X last week about the failure of the head of the Conservative Education Society to declare the fact Mermaids was a client of his own PR firm. It’s paid subscriptions that meant I could take the time to write this humdinger of an exposé.
In the meantime…. fasten your seatbelt.
One of the few remaining references to the Barclays/Mermaids partnership online is from September 2018 when “Amy” celebrated his brave journey to cosplaying as a woman on the bank’s website. It’s still there if you can handle its undiluted ….authenticity.
The account by Amy of his journey- a twirl round his own cul de sac- contains a tiny reference to Mermaids which must have eluded Barclays’ Orwellian scrub. When Amy proudly admits Barclays’ LGBT+ Staff network ….Spectrum…. is “pushing the progressive agenda” he cites as evidence its backing for Mermaids.
The earliest reference to Mermaids from Barclays I could find is from the critical year of 2016 when Spectrum marked Transgender Day of Remembrance (hallowed be thy name) with a fundraiser ……for you know who.
This annual moan-fest was to become a fixture in the Barclays calendar. In 2017 the bank even added a panel discussion with Peter Tatchell. The invite spelled his name with only one ‘l’. Like a school child’s satchel. For some reason.
This too was a fundraiser for Mermaids. In various documents Barclays has boasted that Spectrum raises up to £300k a year for LGBT+ charities. That, of course, was quite separate from any other monies or help in kind offered to Mermaids by Barclays corporate HQ.
Apart from these tiny online scraps Barclays appears to have successfully erased evidence of its past relationship with Mermaids. On the other hand references to the bank continue to haunt the trans charity’s own website. Sad reminders of the good old days when bankers imagined advocating child-castration was a good look.
“Corporate involvement also helps endorse Mermaids as an established charity”, says one mention on the Mermaids site. As if the opinion of a global bank on sterilising teens should silence any concerns.
Why might Barclays be so keen to cleanse its timeline of its affair with Mermaids?
One obvious answer is the series of headline-grabbing scandals that have dogged the charity over the last four or five years, from the appointment of a paedophilia-defending trustee to it handing out advice to children to lie to their parents. Then there was its they/them digital engagement officer who posed for porn pics and got all sultry wultry in a skirt. As you do.
There is another reason though. One that, as far as I can see, has gone uncommented upon. Barclays almost certainly tried to erase all mention of its partnership with a lobby group currently being investigated by the Charity Commission for alleged child safeguarding failures because of a home-grown scandal of its own. A scandal that engulfed the very CEO who launched that partnership.
Meet Jes Staley, the man who felt so passionately about the importance of Mermaids he signed off a boycott of Mumsnet that was “mandated right from the top.”
This is the extraordinary story of how one of Britain’s biggest corporations ended up promoting a dodgy, child-harming charity. It’s a story with wider implications beyond Barclays since it is an almost perfect example of how businesses, awash with money, but laden with tainted reputations have adopted the pretensions of the LGBT+ lobby to deflect from their own moral failings.
The reason Barclays might be keen to avoid talking about a contentious children’s charity is that when Jes Staley was appointed he just happened to have had a three decades long friendship with everyone’s idea of a safeguarding champion….Jeffrey Epstein. He would also, it is alleged, keep communicating with the convicted sex offender right up to his death. While he was working with Barclays and pontificating about all things LGBT+. And no doubt while he was exchanging rings with Mermaids and getting all hot and bothered about obstreperous mums.
Barclays now says Staley lied to them and denied he was a close friend of the world’s most notorious paedophile. The bank also insists it knew nothing about their intense relationship. But while it’s undoubtedly true Staley wove a web of deception there were also plenty of warning signs there was something untoward; not least it was well-known in banking circles that Staley had made frequent visits to the paedophile’s Caribbean island, his townhouse in New York and his New Mexico ranch.
This is a jawdropping story; one that lays bare the intersection of LGBT ideology with the most disgusting and violently exploitative misogyny. It begins in 1999 when an ambitious young executive at JP Morgan in New York was introduced to an enigmatic financier who would in time become a byword for evil.