A 22-year-old woman from Barrow-in-Furness has been found guilty of perverting the course of justice by telling “malevolent” lies about being trafficked by an Asian grooming gang and making false rape allegations against a series of white men.
Eleanor Williams, known as Ellie, sparked a worldwide solidarity movement when she posted graphic photos of herself on Facebook, alleging she had been beaten and raped by men who took her to sex “parties” around the north-west of England.
The post, made during the first Covid lockdown on 20 May 2020, prompted more than 100,000 people to join a Facebook group called Justice for Ellie. It led to a line of merchandise featuring a purple elephant, her favourite animal, and prompted a crowdfunder, which saw more than 1,000 people donate ?22,000 to help her and bring her abusers to justice.
It set off a chain of events that included a far-right group gaining a foothold in Barrow, and drove a sharp rise in racism and Islamophobia. Curry house windows were smashed, beloved restaurants were boycotted and one Muslim takeaway owner was chased down the street by men who poured alcohol over his head. A local reporter who covered the case had to leave Cumbria on police advice after receiving numerous death threats.
It also ruined the lives of those she falsely accused, who were spat at, ostracised and called “paedo” in the street. What Williams failed to mention in her viral Facebook post was that she had already been charged with making false rape allegations against four men.
One of them, an 18-year-old man who had gone on a night out with her and friends, spent 10 weeks in prison on remand before police checked his alibi. All too late they realised they had picked him up in Barrow town centre on the very night she first accused him of drugging and raping her, having spotted him arguing in the street. The jury was shown bodycam footage of Jordan Trengove in the back of a police van with another girl at the exact time he was supposed to have raped Williams.
She made two further claims against Trengove, including false allegations that he had raped her at knifepoint, manipulating social media posts to make it look as though he was sending her Snapchat messages boasting about the rapes.
It took Cumbria police some time to discover the Snapchat account had been created using the internet connection at the house of Williams’s mother – a local Labour councillor, Allison Johnston – and that Williams had multiple phones she used to create a fictional web of abusers as well as fellow victims she created to corroborate her lies.
The charges were dropped but Trengove had been found guilty in the court of public opinion and someone painted the word “rapist” on the side of his house. Now 22, Trengove says he suffers from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his imprisonment and that he would have killed himself had he not become a father in August 2021.
“She has ruined my life,” said Trengove. “I used to be a happy person. I was always going on nights out with my friends, I was never in the house before this. Now I spend every day at home. Ever since this went on I feel like I’ve been trapped in my own little prison. I don’t feel like I have a life any more.”
Mohammed Ramzan, a local businessman known as Mo Rammy, received more than 500 death threats after Williams accused him of being the ringleader of the grooming gang. She alleged he had taken her to Amsterdam where he sold her at a brothel to the highest bidder, as well as to Ibiza, where she and other girls were pimped out to groups of men.
Again, Williams manipulated social media messages in order to frame Ramzan. But it did not take police too long to realise Ramzan had alibis for everything. When he was supposed to be auctioning her off in Amsterdam he was in Barrow B&Q. His passport record showed he had never been to Ibiza.
Other innocent men were framed as traffickers: a random stranger she had a brief encounter with in a back alley in Preston; a boy from Barrow whose home she had been drinking in. Others found themselves drawn into her web of deceit when she started chatting to them online and then changed their names in her phone to make them look like Asian abusers.
The prosecution accused her of confecting the Asian grooming gang after watching the BBC drama Three Girls, which told the true story of girls who were sexually exploited in Rochdale. They said she took the Amsterdam auction plot from the 2008 film Taken, in which Liam Neeson plays a father searching for the sex traffickers who abducted his daughter.
Much of the initial public sympathy came because of the photographs Williams posted purporting to show her injuries: black eyes, swollen lips, bruises and slash marks all over her body, and a little finger almost severed at the tip.
But a forensic pathologist who examined the photos concluded that the injuries were self-inflicted, probably with a claw hammer police found covered in Williams’s blood but absent of anyone else’s DNA. The jury was told that a few days before making the Facebook post, Williams had bought a claw hammer from Tesco.
Simon Fell, the MP for Barrow and Furness, said the case had caused huge community tensions in Barrow, with an increase in racist attacks on Asian people and “unofficial surveillance operations” being carried out on Asian businesses.
“We saw a couple of plate glass windows put in in curry houses,” he said. “I had doctors who worked at the local hospital come to me who were really concerned about their safety and their kids’ safety.
“I know one gentleman who ran a curry house, his wife left him and took his children away, because accusations were made against him. This really affected people, genuine people who’d been in the community for years and years and years.”
He said Williams’s false claims provided “fuel” for a far-right group, Patriotic Alternative, to start campaigning in the Cumbrian town.
A jury of six men and six women took just three-and-a-half hours to find Williams unanimously guilty of eight counts of perverting the course of justice.
Wendy Lloyd, senior crown prosecutor with the north-west rape and serious sexual offence unit, said: “The impact on those falsely accused has been devastating and this conviction now fully exonerates the men who she accused of serious sexual abuse.
“Each of Eleanor Williams’s accusations were thoroughly investigated, until it became clear that they were completely and incontrovertibly untrue and made with malevolent intent.
“False accusations of this kind are very rare. This has been an unusual case and it is important for victims of rape or sexual assault to understand that they should never fear coming forward to report the crime to police.”
Williams will be sentenced on 13 and 14 March.
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