Canadian police put out a call this month for information about an internet-famous woman who has been missing since June. Élora Patoine, 30, was last seen on June 19, two days after her partner dropped her off at a gas station.
But while investigators seek information on the “high-priority file,” scores of YouTubers say they’re already familiar with Patoine. She’s the partner of 39-year-old Jean-Francois Gariepy, a French Canadian white nationalist internet personality who has called for a “white ethnostate” and hosted white supremacist figures like Richard Spencer on livestreams. To Gariepy’s fans, Patoine is known as “Mama JF,” a recurring figure in Gariepy’s videos. Her disappearance has led to friction on the right, with some personalities suggesting foul play, while Gariepy says video evidence puts him in the clear of any crime.
Gariepy has suggested Patoine’s disappearance is evidence that men should have more legal control over their wives. (He and Patoine are not legally married, but he said in a recent video that he considers her to be his wife.)
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Reached for comment, Gariepy told The Daily Bast that Patoine was traveling.
“The self-appointed journalists who are today interested in the case of a free woman who has decided to travel, which they seek to present to you as a case of male foul play, are the very same people who were interested years ago at smearing the same male with lies,” he said in an email. “That should tell you all you need to know about the seriousness of the concerns of these people.”
“She has gone on a trip and she left no trace behind and she got rid of, apparently, anything that could help track her,” including her credit cards and cellphone, Gariepy told a YouTuber in an interview this month.
“Mama JF chose to go another way, went off-grid on her own volition. That’s a project she’s been working on and preparing for many years, and I have respected her liberty in doing so. So she chose to go and now the police is looking for her because she has given no news to anyone and she could be dead. She could be dead or she could be having fun at some party and just didn’t hear about her loved ones are worried about her.”
Gariepy said Patoine has long expressed an interest in off-the-grid living, and took one such trip several years ago. In a separate video this month, Gariepy recounted Patoine’s return from that previous trip.
“She said ‘Yes, I thought you wanted me to leave,’” he recalled of her return. “That is sometimes the state of delusion in the female mind and I can’t do anything about this. I have zero control over this. If we were in the society, the Christian society of 1920, maybe I could file some report and say ‘Hey, my wife is a little crazy, she’s a little out there. Can I control—can I own her, basically?’”
By Gariepy’s telling, Patoine began expressing plans to take a trip in May, when she purchased camping equipment. She did not tell him how long she’d be gone—two weeks or forever. On June 17, he says, she asked him to drop her off at a gas station near a bridge that is popular with hitchhikers. He did so, in front of gas station cameras, he says. He says she remained in contact with him for the next two days before telling him she’d changed her plans, and that she would be discarding her phone.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police released a similar timeline of Patoine’s last sightings. She was seen on June 17 in the Prince Edward Island town of Borden-Carleton, they said, and spotted again on June 19 in Moncton, New Brunswick, approximately an hour from Borden-Carleton.
Then her trail vanishes. Her absence was also noted in Gariepy’s videos.
Patoine was known to Gariepy’s audience and to his critics, particularly for a 2019 incident in which she appeared to accuse someone of attempted murder. That person appeared to be Gariepy’s guest.
“No, seriously, you tried to kill me, OK?” Patoine said in the video. “And I’m fucking sick [inaudible]. You always follow me everywhere and you say you want to make spiritual movement but you fucking tried to kill me for two years, OK? You’re a fucking psychopath, man.”
Gariepy ushered her offscreen, explaining to the audience that “Mama JF mistakes [the guest] for someone who has committed acts of violence against her. So that’s why you see her currently sad.”
In June, Gariepy made a video acknowledging that Patoine had left him, suggesting that she had opted for streetlife in a city over life as a housewife.
“Even when you get to that point, with Bitcoin reserves and everything, they will still choose to go to the city to be a crackwhore,” Gariepy said. “That is just what women are. They are all crackwhores deep inside and some of them can hide it for temporary amounts of time for a specific purpose, if they have a plan. I’m not even talking here specifically about Mama JF.”
He described embarking on a deep clean of his house after Patoine left. Those comments have drawn scrutiny from other far-right personalities. RamZPaul, a far-right vlogger, called Gariepy’s story “very weird” and noted that “your immediate action was to deep clean and sanitize your home” could look, to an outsider, “like you never expected her to return.”
In an interview with a YouTuber this month, Gariepy defended the cleaning.
“I cleaned my house when Mama JF was gone,” Gariepy said. “If you don’t understand why, you probably have been single forever. Everyone knows that a female has a lot of imprint onto a house. They do a lot of crazy stuff. Sometimes they play with water. Sometimes it gets into the electronics. I mean, Mama JF has broken two of my laptops, just playing with water. So when a woman leaves the house and she has controlled the fridge, she has controlled the plates, she has controlled the placement of all of the tools in the kitchen for years, you come back to your home, you look at it and you want to reshape it in the way you want. So I reshaped the home when I came back from dropping off Mama JF and holy shit did it felt comfortable.
“After years of having a packed fridge—I love a fridge that there’s lots of space. I love to have so much space that I can put my arm in it and reach for my Diet Pepsi can that’s in the center of it. I couldn’t do that with Mama JF and all of her lettuces and her carrots and her beets. So yes, I did clean my house when an important event in my life happened, which is that my wife went on a trip and I will never know if she would come back.”
“RamzPaul has been a guest on my show before,” Gariepy continued. “I didn’t expect to be betrayed like this. But the investigators don’t fall for this crap.”
Gariepy says he never reported Patoine’s absence to police, because he believes it is voluntary. “Honestly, I don’t even know if she wants to be found, and that is something you have to weigh if you’re in this situation,” he said in a video.
But sometime in late September or early October, someone apparently reported her disappearance.
“This launched a whole investigation that I’ve been involved in for, I don’t know, maybe four days, five days,” Gariepy said in an Oct. 4 video. “I don’t know. But the feds are coming regularly to my house. They are waking me in the morning. I sleep late [...] They wake me up every morning. There are days when they come once. There are days when they come twice. There’s always a truck of the feds in front of my house.”
Gariepy said investigators have seen proof of his account of events, including footage from the gas station where he agreed to drop Patoine. He added that Patoine might be in Peru or Morocco, and that she might purposely avoid detection by police.
RCMP was not immediately able to comment on Gariepy’s remarks.
Gariepy has been involved in previous legal cases with women, all of them in civil court, The Daily Beast previously reported. During a contentious child-custody battle in the U.S., a now-ex-wife accused Gariepy of threatening to take their child to Canada. During the custody case, an undergraduate Duke University student testified that Gariepy had conducted an inappropriate sexual relationship with her when he was employed as a researcher at the school, and she was working as his research assistant. The student alleged “emotional abuse” by Gariepy. (Gariepy is no longer with Duke, which declined to comment on the circumstances of his departure, citing university policy.)
Gariepy previously told The Daily Beast that the relationship was consensual. During that custody case, which he lost, Gariepy also became embroiled in a guardianship battle over a 19-year-old whom he described as his fiancée. The teenager had autism and had been assessed by a counselor as having “the social and mental maturity of a 10 or 11-year-old child.”
The teenager lived with Gariepy for three weeks, during which time “we were trying to make a baby,” he later testified in court. The teenager’s parents, who sued for guardianship of the young woman and won, said she had returned home frightened, under the mistaken belief that she was pregnant.
In a video after the court cases, Gariepy lamented that a person’s public statements could be used against them in custody battles, stating that “that is a problem a white ethnostate could solve.”
And as the RCMP put out calls for information on Patoine this month, Gariepy drew lessons from her disappearance. After tweeting about the missing person’s case earlier this month, Gariepy made a video in which he read some of the replies to his tweet.
“‘Did everyone’s girl lose her shit this summer? Mine went full post-partum bonkers in August,’” he read from one fan’s reply.
“And I said ‘That’s the cost of female liberty: 50,000 policemen, full-time salary, nationwide searches. We could feed the homeless a billion times.’ Just take our society and just allow some degree of control by husbands unto their wives. Just basic control of some little financial aspects, like no, you won’t travel to Peru and so I’m going to decide for you that you won’t travel to Peru. Just allow some form of control of husbands over their wives and you’re not gonna get events like the Mama JF craziness here.”
