Eleanor Williams: The grooming gang lies that sparked outrage

Eleanor Williams said she was the victim of a grooming gang and had been raped multiple times, sparking outrage and protests in her home town. But as she is convicted of multiple counts of perverting the course of justice for inventing the whole story, the BBC looks at the impact her lies had.

The horrific story Eleanor Williams told on social media quickly went viral.

The then 19-year-old claimed she had been passed around for sex "for years" across the North of England by an Asian gang who drugged her, beat her, blackmailed her and threatened her with weapons.

It captivated her home town of Barrow, Cumbria, heaped pressure on the police, led to abuse for local journalists and excited the far right.

Now, a jury has decided her tales of being trafficked abroad and the photos of her injuries were all lies.

The bruises that hundreds of thousands saw in her Facebook photos were real, but they were caused by Williams' own hand after she attacked herself with a hammer.

Months before she posted her lies, she had been relating an even more elaborate story to the police, claiming a string of innocent men were rapists, sex traffickers and armed murderers.

One man, she said, had trafficked her to Amsterdam, forced her to work in a brothel and sold her in a slave auction.

But his phone and bank records showed he had been shopping in B&Q in Barrow at the time.

Another, she said, was an Asian drug dealer who had threatened to kill her and dump her in the sea unless she had sex with multiple men.

He was actually a young white Tesco worker from Essex who she had been speaking to on a dating site.

She claimed she was forced to have sex with multiple men in one night in Blackpool, but CCTV footage proved she had been shopping and spent the night alone in her hotel room.

Some of the men she accused were arrested - one was charged and spent 10 weeks on remand in prison - all said their lives had been ruined by her baseless allegations.

Now, nearly three years after her claims were made public, a jury has convicted Williams, 22, of eight counts of perverting the course of justice.

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This was an unusual case. In Cumbria in 2020-21, there were 46 reported offences of perverting the course of justice. In comparison, there were 1,177 reports of rape, sexual assault and trafficking.

In March 2020, Barrow, on the southern tip of Cumbria, was trying to make sense of the life under the first Coronavirus lockdown.

Largely confined indoors, many people were focused on social media.

Williams' posts horrified those who saw them - and made many people angry.

Her trial heard from numerous witnesses who recounted how "everyone" in Barrow knew her story.

She said her abuse was being perpetrated by "evil yet clever men" who were "mostly Pakistani".

But Williams went further - she wrote: "I am not the only girl in Barrow who has gone through this or is going through this."

Her lies aroused interest from the far right.

There were protests where people met up for socially-distanced rallies on retail parks where they would sit in their cars and beep their horns in unison.

Some took things further and staged protests outside Barrow's police station and the offices of the local paper, The Mail, claiming not enough was being done about the town's supposed grooming problem.

Far right bloggers promoted the protests and, in some cases, attended them, though not necessarily at the invitation of the organisers.

The best known was Stephen Yaxley Lennon, better known by his pseudonym Tommy Robinson.

Williams' family wrote on Facebook that they did "not want him involved", but he spoke to some of those she accused and in a video report at the time he said he had discovered "conflicting accounts" that he "didn't expect".

Mohammed Ramzan, a well-known Barrow businessman, was one of those Williams accused.

He described how in the months after her viral Facebook posts, their town was "a step away from anarchy".

He was arrested in 2019 after Williams told police he was one of her principal abusers who had sexually abused her since she was 12 or 13.

As the rumours spread, windows at his home were smashed, his businesses premises and his ice cream vans were attacked and he was frequently verbally abused in the street.

As tensions rose, Mr Ramzan himself received a community order for non-violent harassment of some of Williams' family. He says it was due to online comments where he was defending himself.

Jordan Trengove was another of Williams' victims, but unlike the others he was charged on the basis of her allegations and spent 10 weeks on remand in prison, before being cleared.

He described spending time in a cell with "an actual paedophile" who admitted to his crime.

"Once something's said in Barrow, because it's such a small town, that's it, it's stuck with you for the rest of your life," he said.

In April 2020, after a month of fever-pitch protests, Cumbria Police announced that Williams had been charged with perverting the course of justice.

The following month, the force revealed that, after a year-long investigation, claims of a grooming gang operating in Barrow had "not been corroborated".

It seemed to run completely contrary to the vivid and detailed story that Williams had told on Facebook.

She listed how her abusers had broken her ribs, broken bones in her face, split her ear, cut her throat, attempted to cut off her breasts, carved words into her skin, branded her, used her as an ashtray, dislocated her elbow and "beaten me black".

She said they had given her drugs to the point she was "nearly addicted to heroin" and had "stripped me naked, beaten me and dumped me in the middle of nowhere".

The police announcements appeared to strengthen the resolve of Williams' supporters in Barrow and further afield.

Hashtags dedicated to her trended, supportive videos appeared online, posters popped up in windows across Barrow and money was raised. One online fundraising campaign to "Get Justice for Ellie" raised more than £22,000.

The protests continued, including one outside Preston Crown Court when she appeared to enter a not guilty plea.

By the time her trial eventually began in October (having been delayed since 2021) those she had accused had waited more than three years since their arrests.

Williams had also spent more than a year in prison after she breached her bail conditions.

As the case opened, the questions about how all of Williams' claims, seemingly supported by photos, could have been made-up were addressed from the start.

Prosecution counsel Jonathan Sandiford KC described the defendant as "a serial liar".

Her defence was that most of her allegations were true, except some which she had been forced to fabricate by her abusers.

She had used two phones to text herself messages from her "abusers", and she had changed the names of her Snapchat contacts to make it appear she was conversing with people traffickers.

Mostly she had relied on the good nature of police officers and people in Barrow who took her distressing claims at face value.

Many of her allegations were disproved easily with evidence from CCTV, bank records, phone records and social media searches.

The jury learned she had admitted in a police interview that she lied about being trafficked to Ibiza and raped when the officers pointed out they could simply check flight records to corroborate her story.

Possibly the most shocking for those in her home town was the revelation that she was responsible for the painful injuries they had seen on her Facebook posts.

Detectives had recovered a hammer stained with her blood, identical to one she had bought days earlier, and a pathologist concluded her injuries were consistent with self-inflicted blows.

The question of her motivation was one that eluded the trial - a transcript from one police interview showed an officer asking her whether she simply liked getting the force's attention.

But speculation over the inspiration for her stories has been rife - in court Mr Sandiford pointed out the similarities between some of her claims and the plots of the Liam Neeson film Taken and the BBC drama Three Girls.

Mr Ramzan suggested his accuser had lifted part of the plot for her story from the Hollywood thriller Gone Girl.

"It's so many movies put together and you've just thrown my name in the mix and for what reason? It just baffles me. It's horrendous," he said.

For Mr Ramzan, Mr Trengove and the string of other innocent men Williams accused, it is the end of a nightmarish chapter of their lives.

After three years of being haunted by a dark and entirely fictitious past, Mr Ramzan told me he is looking to the future.

"I'm getting my life back now," he said.

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