I’m often introduced to new topics in the fringe world by ways that people find my writing. So I was especially interested when a spike in searches for the name “Somerset Belenoff” brought increased traffic to my piece on the “Rothschild human hunting lodge” hoax. The name wasn’t familiar to me, so the search traffic couldn’t have been because of the content of the piece. Was it embedded in a tweet? A comment?

And most importantly, who is Somerset Belenoff, and why are people searching for him/her?

Well, the answer to the first question is easy. The search traffic comes from a comment on the piece, by “2CrayCray” that goes [sic] “Conspiracy is Truth: And how do we know you arent a plant or paid informant working for somerset belenoff or her stooges the Rothchilds? How will you expose this eveil i ask you? Of course you wont because you are working with THEM. you are probly also a reptellion lizard and a cannable.”

That, in turn, was a response to a comment by “conspiracy is truth these days” that reads: “BS article written by a Rothschild, you debunked nothing and now I will continue to expose this evil.”

A lot going on in these two comments. Evil, lizards, cannibals, paid shills, the whole thing. But neither actually answer the question of who this person is. So I went to the Library of Alexandria that modern times has given us: Google. And I didn’t get what I wanted – because a search only brings up a bit over 300 hits, total.

The top few hits are for a website called WhoIsSomersetBelenoff.com, which goes to a dead link. A cached version of that site is available, however, and gives some relevant information that starts to open up the mystery a bit.

According to this, Ms. Belenoff is “Countess of Banbury and Arran” and is also”the third cousin of Queen Elizabeth II” as well as “current head of the Wettin World Governing Council” and “Chief Executive Officer of the World Security Office.” Beyond that, other cached pages reveal that she’s a high ranking member of the Illuminati, either runs or owns the entirety of the Bohemian Grove property, “is likely responsible for the execution of dozens of Illuminati,” is the great-grand daughter of Rasputin, single-handedly brought down the Soviet Union, travels with immunity to the highest centers of power, and ordered Barack Obama to have Gadaffi assassinated.

In fact, no less than Vladimir Putin has called her the most beautiful woman in the world and was quoted saying “I fear only three things in this world: Lady Belenoff, Illness and death, in that order.” Oh, and she also inspired the lyrics to “Stairway to Heaven,” her daughter Karina Belenoff openly runs a cannibal restaurant in Los Angeles called Hollydale with a website called PeopleAreMeat.com, and the British royal court is forbidden from saying her name aloud.

So clearly this is a heavy hitter, right?

Well, sure. Except none of this stuff is real. There is no “Banbury and Arran,” and while Queen Elizabeth does have a third cousin, it’s not “Somerset Belenoff,” but her own husband Phillip, distantly related through Queen Victoria. The “Wettin World Governing Council” doesn’t appear to exist, nor does the “World Security Office.” Both have now-defunct websites, and the “employees” who work for it don’t exist online other than stock photos and sparsely populated LinkedIn pages that appear to be fake. The Putin quote has no attribution, and the “Stairway to Heaven” thing appears to begin and end with an anonymous claim on the site SongFacts. There is obviously no cannibal restaurant in Los Angeles, or anywhere in the US, and the “restaurant’s” site has gone private. They do have a phone number, but it appears to be linked to a credit card scam.

Basically, I can’t find any evidence that this person is real. Now, maybe she is all those things and they’re just really well hidden. But from what I can tell, the name exists entirely in conspiracies.

So who made it up, why, and when? I have no answers to any of that. The first instance I can find of the name online is in a 2017 comment on a right wing clogosphere site called “Culture of Life News.” I can’t tell who owns “WhoIsSomersetBelenoff.com” other than it being registered last April, and administered by a Florida company called Perfect Privacy that administers many other sites. Most of the other sites associated with whatever this is have gone down or are protected, and were only created in the last year. Belenoff has very little footprint on other conspiracy research sites outside of a few stray threads on GodLikeProductions or 8chan. And she’s not even part of the QAnon iconography. Not yet, anyway.

So is this someone trying and failing to get a conspiracy theory going? Is it yet another online game? The unhinged ravings of someone desperately in need of mental health care? I have no idea, and at this point, I’m not inclined to look further. The footprint is too small, and the fakery too obvious.

But there is one interesting aspect to this that related to other conspiracy theories. The fringe community thrives on secret knowledge, and one element of this is the idea that there’s always a more powerful and more well-hidden entity pulling the strings of the powerful entities that already run the world. Hence the QAnon fervor over the “Payseur” family, for which the ultra-rich Rothschilds only work as agents.

In reality, there is no such family, and it was created out of thin air in Fritz Springmeier’s 1996 book “Bloodlines of the Illuminati.” But it’s comforting for these people to believe that they’ve been clued in on something so powerful and evil that the media will do anything to suppress its existence.

So maybe Somerset Belenoff is an attempt do that: find the string-pullers of the string-pullers and bring them to light. Or maybe it’s just a goof. Either way, people are looking for info on her. And that’s the first step to people simply making up the info they want to find.

1/14/20 edit: Apparently, WhoIsSomersetBelenoff.com is back up and running.