Who are Todd and Clare Hammond, and why are they leveling false charges against Julian Assange?



That's the question following last week's bizarre news that the people behind the tiny online dating site ToddandClare.com abused their membership in a UN program to publicize a Bahamian sex crimes investigation into the WikiLeaks founder. Bahamian police said the investigation doesn't exist — and WikiLeaks subsequently released a trove of documents that, if genuine, show a Todd and Clare representative attempting to blackmail Assange.

The Hammonds are the ostensible founders of ToddandClare.com. After interjecting themselves into an international dialogue on the role of WikiLeaks in the US presidential election, they remain curiously silent and unreachable — despite the efforts of journalists, WikiLeaks investigators, and the Reddit hive mind. But there may be a good reason they're keeping such a low profile: Todd and Clare Hammond don't seem to exist.

Instead, the person behind Todd and Clare appears to be an English toymaker, cartoon director, novelist, and book publisher named Akintunde Sahara Reid-Kapo.

Neither a small army of obsessed internet sleuths nor WikiLeaks and BuzzFeed News has been able to produce photographs, or any information beyond a dead LinkedIn page, about Todd and Clare Hammond. Nexis searches in the three states associated with ToddandClare.com — California, where they claimed to live; Texas, where the website is registered; and Michigan, where they claim to have been childhood sweethearts — returned no results remotely resembling a married couple named Todd and Clare Hammond.



The only obviously real and google-able person associated with the website ToddandClare.com (other than a programmer named Scott Drotar and a few now-baffled contractors) is Noam Chomsky, the leftist icon and Foucault interlocutor, whose endorsement of the ToddandClare side project KATIA (an algorithm to weed sex offenders out of the site) was plastered all over ToddandClare. (The site has been down since last week "following a serious hack.")

Chomsky, for his part, seems similarly befuddled. In an email to BuzzFeed News, Chomsky said while it was possible he had endorsed the project, he had no recollection of doing so, "but that doesn’t prove much."

But his endorsement, genuine or not, may be the key to unlocking the mystery behind ToddandClare. Metadata from an undated PDF press release touting Chomsky’s endorsement appears to indicate the file initially listed its author as “Yamie Chess Ltd” when it was created in mid-May, but was then re-saved a couple of minutes later to list "T&C Network Solutions" (ToddandClare.com's corporate name) as its author.

According to its website, Yamie Chess is "a diversified applied mathematics company" that makes a special chess set and accompanying comics for children, and that, jarringly, also does "data analysis and statistical consulting" for "military clients." Though the company is now registered through a shell agent in Wyoming, the mailing address of its founder, Akintunde Sahara Reid Kapo, is 10685-B Hazelhurst Dr., Suite 14354, Houston, Texas 77043.

That's the same address and suite number as ToddandClare lists here.

This indicates that someone associated with, or having access to the software of, a toy and data analytics company called Yamie Chess, which shares or shared an office with ToddandClare, wrote a press release for the dating site.

Like ToddandClare, Yamie Chess enthusiastically claims endorsements from prestigious institutions and academics; its website says "Yamie Chess has been endorsed by America's best mathematicians." (It's actually not.) And like ToddandClare, it seems no one is eager to take credit for Yamie Chess. There is no staff listed on the Yamie Chess site, and the two employees listed on the Yamie Chess LinkedIn are remote contractors.

However, a 2014 Fox News article cites "Tunde Reid-Kapo" as the CEO of Yamie Chess. And on IMDB, Tunde Reid-Kapo is credited as the director and writer of "King Tigermore In Strawberry Fields," a short and amateurish cartoon promoting Yamie Chess, which played in a handful of film festivals around the US.

Reid-Kapo seems to have been born in England in 1984. He once owned a publishing company called Schiel and Denver, through which he published an "autobiographical" novella called My Autistic Waterlilly and a "personal declaration of independence" called Financial Existentialism. While running Schiel and Denver, Reid-Kapo signed up for the UN Global Compact — the voluntary organization that ToddandClare used to promote the phantom crime investigation against Assange. As this Medium post shows, Schiel and Denver shares a Google Analytics identifier with ToddandClare.com. And an internet archive search for Schieldenver.com shows that the site redirected to ToddandClare.com as recently as Sept. 27 of this year: