Outed TV exec: ‘I definitely don’t run a sex cult’

After we exposed the secure website of a secret society, they disappeared from the internet. Now they’re back, but this time with a non-threatening Comic Sans rebranding and plenty to say.

James Cook

Associate Editor///http://www.kernelmag.com/features/report/6694/outed-tv-exec-i-definitely-dont-run-a-sex-cult/

Friday, 8 November 2013

Mark Hiley, the television executive responsible for a mysterious secure website that led to a trail of sex parties connected to London’s rich and famous, has publicly denied that he ever ran a “sex cult” in a bizarre statement on the fake society’s recently updated website.
Hiley scrambled to hide evidence of his involvement with a hoax 1,000-year-old secret sex society, The Secret Order of Libertines, after The Kernel reported Hiley’s involvement with convicted fraudster Edward Davenport.
We also revealed that Hiley falsely implicated Prince Wenzeslaus of Liechtenstein in sex cult parties using a fake Daily Mail article hosted at a domain he admitted he owned.
First to be removed from the internet following The Kernel’s revelations was a public photograph album on Hiley’s Facebook profile. Any images of inside 33 Portland Place, the mansion notorious for its hedonistic parties, and in which Hiley still resides, were either hidden or deleted.
His Facebook account now displays evidence of what Hiley describes as his “charity work in Africa”.

In the days following our investigation, the website of the Secret Order of Libertines was quickly removed. Neither the .com or .org domains loaded the secure log-in form or mysterious symbols we originally discovered.
But the Secret Order is back. This time the Society sports a less threatening colour scheme, a rebrand and an uncharacteristically loquacious attitude to its own affairs.

Gone is the black background with a white key symbol from the previous version of the site. Now we have a grey symbol on a white background. Gone are the page titles such as “terra” and “ostium”. Now we have “Home”. The elegant fonts of before are largely gone now, replaced with green Comic Sans.
The text on the new website claims that the site existed only to promote a single party which never secured funding. This differs from Mark Hiley’s previous insistence that The Secret Order Of Libertines was “a joke” created for a friend who runs sex parties.
The new website claims that the secure site that previously existed was nothing but a “spoof” for a “fancy dress” party that never took place. There is no reference to or explanation of the “outersanctum” subdomain discovered by The Kernel that is understood to have been used as a sign-up form for parties.

Photoshopped to perfection

To ensure visitors understand that The Secret Order Of Libertines was a party in 2009 that definitely never took place, the website has an interesting new logo. Someone has downloaded the key symbol that was falsely claimed to exist in the Vatican Secret Archives and has written some text next to it using a text editor program.
After taking a screenshot of their handiwork, the person responsible evidently realised that it wasn’t “2009 enough” so 2009 has been written next to it in dark green Comic Sans.

The amateur logo posted above was created on November 3. The site’s WHOIS record was changed on the same date.
Also on November 3, Mark Hiley sent a legal complaint to Google which means that our original article no longer appears in search results. The Kernel will of course seek to have this injunction lifted.

You’ll soon be able to view the full details of Hiley’s legal complaint over at Chilling Effects, a website run by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that endeavours to make legal complains and takedown requests as public as possible.
The new Secret Order Of Libertines website informs visitors that the domain is for sale. The Kernel tried to contact the Order using the webmaster email address listed, but Hiley has forgotten to enable that mailbox. Oops!