Print subscriptions My account Search jobs Search UK edition

Support the Guardian

Available for everyone, funded by readers
Support us

News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle More

UK UK politics Education Media Society Law Scotland Wales Northern Ireland

UK news
Woman who lied about grooming gang
guilty of perverting course of justice Most viewed
Live No 10 says NHS is
getting ‘funding it needs’
Eleanor Williams, 22, claimed she had been trafficked by Asian and refuses to accept
gang and made false rape allegations service is ‘in crisis’ @ UK
politics live
Helen Pidd Why are wholesale gas
North of England prices falling and will it cut
editor UK bills?
Tue 3 Jan 2023 14.30
GMT
Travellers from China who
test positive in UK for Covid
will not need to isolate

Japanese government
offers families 1m yen a
child to leave Tokyo

Risk of UK winter power

cuts fades amid fall in
wholesale gas prices

More than 100,000 people joined a Facebook group to support Eleanor Williams. A crowdfunder
to help her drew £22,000 in donations. Photograph: Justice For Ellie

A 22-year-old woman from Barrow-in-Furness has been found guilty of

perverting the course of justice by lying 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 birthed 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, fat 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.

Williams was found unanimously guilty of eight counts of perverting the

course of justice. She will be sentenced on 13 and 14 March.

Topics
UK news
news

Reuse this content

Most
viewed
UK UK politics Education Media Society Law Scotland Wales Northern Ireland

News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle

Original reporting and incisive About us All topics Advertise with us

analysis, direct from the Guardian Help All writers Guardian Labs
every morning
Complaints & Modern Slavery Search jobs
Sign up for our email corrections Act
Patrons
SecureDrop Digital
newspaper
Work for us archive
Privacy settings Facebook
Privacy policy YouTube
Cookie policy Instagram
Terms & LinkedIn
conditions
Twitter
Contact us
Newsletters

Back to top
© 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. (modern)