Stranger Than Fiction

Todd And Clare, Julian Assange And The Duchess Of Cornwall

In case you missed it, the short version of the ToddAndClare.com-Julian Assange-Wikileaks-Pedophile scandal is: 

the owners of a dating website called ToddAndClare.com contacted Julian Assange and offered him a million dollars if he’d do a commercial for them. Assange’s attorney turned them down and not long afterward Todd and Clare sent a letter to the United Nations. In their long, rambling letter (pretty good for dyslexics) they mentioned that Assange was under investigation in the Bahamas for online pedophiliac behavior.


Things got weirder…

It turns out there was no investigation in the Bahamas and the eye witness they named knew nothing about the incident or the people involved. The website toddandclare was supposed to have been created by a “dyslexic couple” who had brought together 3000 couples…but Todd and Clare Hammond don’t exist. It appeared the site was part of a plot to frame Assange as a pedophile and Russian spy.

Sleuths all across the internet began investigating. Connections from the toddandclare website were found to a couple other websites owned by Akintunde Sahara Reid-Kapo aka Tunde.

Tunde Reid-Kapo is the registered owner of SchielDenver.com and YamieChess.com. Schiel and Denver was a vanity book publishing business and Yamie Chess is a children’s chess game designed to help kids learn math while learning to play chess.

The YamieChess connection led some people to believe that Chess Grandmaster, Jennifer Shahade, could be involved since she promoted YamieChess. She was at GenCon with Tunde which was where Todd and Clare said they first met so people started thinking Shahade and Reid-Kapo were the real Todd and Clare. 

From there the conspiracy grew to involve Grandmaster, Garry Kasparov, because Shahade knows him and Kasparov is a well known Anti-Putin political activist.

While this sounds logical and fits some of the facts, it didn’t quite fit reality. 

That two grandmasters could be involved in creating the toddandclare scheme is hard to believe. It was a pretty clumsy frame job. And Jennifer Shahade has a busy life. Besides her grandmaster status, she’s a poker player, an author and blogger. She’s on the road a lot attending chess and poker events either as a player or a moderator. 

And Jennifer Shahade is pregnant. And not by Tunde Reid-Kapo. 

Claims that Shahade and Reid-Kapo must be the real life Todd and Clare are incorrect. Shahade has been involved with director and film producer, Daniel Meirom, for the last 8 years. Shahade’s relationship with Reid-Kapo was business. She promoted his game, YamieChess.

Reid-Kapo and Shahade at the New York Toy Fair in 2014

Both Shahade and Reid-Kapo have Twitter accounts that interacted from December of 2013 until September of 2014.  Since then, nothing. There’s no evidence that Shahade and Reid-Kapo have had any contact since 2014 and nothing that links her to the ToddandClare scam.

But there is evidence that Reid-Kapo was involved with ToddandClare. The Wayback Machine, copies websites exactly as they appear on the date copied. The website of a company called Schiel & Denver redirects to ToddandClare. You can see this in the screen capture below.


The screen capture below shows metadata from ToddandClare.com showing up for SchielDenver. This occurs when a website is redirected and points to another site.



Schiel & Denver was a vanity book publishing company owned by Tunde Reid-Kapo and his mother, Margo Reid. They started this business in England around 2008 and ran it for a couple years. Reid-Kapo grossly misrepresented Schiel And Denver with fake employees and grandiose claims. 

The book editor listed for the company in 2010 was Camilla Bowles-Hartley. The name Camilla Bowles should be familiar to you. I guess once Camilla realized Prince Charles wouldn’t be King of England, she decided to take a second job to supplement their income. 

Another fake editor was Simon Hornby. The real Simon Hornby or rather, Sir Simon, passed away this year, he was the chairman of WH Smith, a British retail chain selling books and magazines. 

It’s unlikely that Schiel And Denver made money, their promotional material shows they weren’t very informed about the publishing world. They over-hyped themselves and couldn’t deliver what they promised which eventually caught up with them in negative reviews.

Tunde Reid-Kapo appears to be both a conman and a nut job with grandiose schemes that he can’t quite pull off. I’ve looked at pages of the ToddandClare site and it looks like it was a legitimate attempt at a dating site but once again, Tunde exaggerated and misrepresented the site, his promotional videos were unprofessional, and much of the text on the site was copied and pasted from other sites. I believe ToddandClare.com was Tunde’s latest business attempt and wasn’t created in order to frame Julian Assange.  Tunde probably expected his website would provide some clout behind his allegations. I doubt he foresaw the reaction his crazy plan would spawn.

As for motivation, no one can say for sure except Tunde, but perhaps a few clues can be found in a couple of books he wrote (yes, published by Schiel And Denver). In Financial Existentialism, Tunde appears to have declared himself a sovereign state. 

A personal declaration of independence from T. Reid-Kapo, the poetry author of My Autistic Waterlily (2008), which deliberately draws upon the United States Declaration of Independence and United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights to provide the documentary framework and valid evidence for the legal consent of an equal, but separate, lawful State for the author’s life in context to the human community, and the laws of dignity and nature.

Tunde sounds like his chess game is missing a few pieces.

His book of poetry, My Autistic Waterlily, claims to be based on a true story and autobiographical. If so, then Tunde was the victim of physical and sexual abuse.

All things considered, it really looks like the frame against Julian Assange was done by Tunde Reid-Kapo acting alone rather than part of a conspiracy.