How Eleanor Williams’ Lies About Grooming and Abuse Collapsed | a crime

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It was about halfway through Eleanor Williams’ trial for perverting the course of justice when Mohamed Ramadan found himself at Preston Crown Court, waiting to give evidence.

There were also a number of young women, called in after Williams told police that they, like her, had been trafficked by an Asian beautification ring and forced to have sex with men at “parties” across the North West of England as well as abroad.

I asked the girls what case he was involved in. “They didn’t know me, but I was supposed to be the evil ringleader, the guy who set them all up for sex and took them to Blackpool, Ibiza, Amsterdam,” said Ramadan, an entrepreneur from Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria. Williams had been called the ringleader of a European beautification ring, accused of starting a sexual “relationship” with her at the age of 12 or 13, and then getting her to hook up with friends and strangers.

One by one, the girls came forward to the witness box to deny being one of Ramadan’s alleged victims. Some know Williams vaguely from school. Others said they had never met her. It was just one of many surreal moments in the three-and-a-half-year ordeal as 43-year-old Ramadan became an outcast, spat on the street and called “Bido”.

Ramadan was first arrested on suspicion of sex trafficking on 7 July 2019, while driving his BMW in the park on Walney Island in Barrow, where he lives with his wife Nicola above her shop interior. But his real nightmare began 10 months later, during the first Covid lockdown, when Williams logged into Facebook and recorded a 1,362-word post that had disastrous consequences for the isolated Cumbrian town she came in contact with.

“This is the hardest post I will ever write,” she began. “I didn’t want to share this because I’m afraid of the judgment that’s going to come with it, which is why I kept it completely [sic] About what happened to me, but people asked me to tell my story. When people asked why I had a black eye or bruises, I made all kinds of excuses, from falling over to banging on the door.”

The truth was entirely darker, I suggested. Yesterday I was put in the back of the car, and taken to an address to have sex with 3 Asian men. Afterwards I got hit because I owed it to these guys for not showing up to a “party” [sic] For more than 7 weeks due to the corona virus. The party organizers decided to beat me up to teach me a lesson.”

The post on May 20, 2020, was accompanied by photos of Williams, known as Ellie, who was 19 years old at the time. Her eye was black, very swollen. Her legs and stomach were covered in cuts and bruises, and the tip of her little finger was nearly severed. One of the photos, dating back to 2019, appeared to be a picture of her breasts with a slash cut, her nipple covered in a heart emoji.

Pictures of Eleanor Williams injuries. Photo: Elle Movement Global Justice

With this viral post, she set off a domino race that created a toxic relationship between Cumbria Police and the public. Eventually, this led to a far-right group gaining a foothold in Paro, striking fear into the Asian doctors at the local hospital, and creating a culture of fear among the town’s small ethnic minority communities.

Ramadan, who was no longer under investigation at the time, was not named in the post, but it wasn’t long before his name appeared in a list of Asian men and companies that went viral via Snapchat. Then the persecution began. “That was when everything exploded and everything collapsed on us because it went so far and wide,” Ramadan said. “It was a social media trial.”

Within 20 minutes of Williams making that ominous post on Facebook, police arrested her for breaking her bail. What she fails to mention is that eight weeks ago she was charged with multiple counts of perverting the course of justice after a two-and-a-half-year police investigation into allegations of rape she made against a group of men, all white. Except Ramadan.

The detectives initially thought they were dealing with Cumbria’s largest barbershop ring ever – and at its heart was the most vulnerable young woman in the county, who had been reported missing by her mother 32 times in one year and often appeared black and blue in obscure locations, drunk and half-naked. . But gradually, with the help of flight logs, mobile phone data and CCTV footage, they became convinced that Williams had made up most or all of it. The question was: why?

Not all of these details could be made public for fear of prejudice to Williams’ future trial, so investigators were unable to reveal what evidence they had against her, in particular a forensic analysis which indicated that her injuries were caused by a hammer she had purchased from Tesco.

Eleanor Williams’ delivery with a hammer, which she used to injure herself. Photo: charity

They looked on in awe when the Williams family started a Facebook page called Justice for Ellie, which quickly amassed more than 100,000 followers from around the world. Other young women began telling their horrific stories of abuse, sparking a sister movement, Justice for Girls. A prominent supporter of Williams was Maggie Oliver, a former Greater Manchester Police officer turned whistleblower for abuses in Rochdale. A crowdfunding project, started by an Essex alderman who had never met Williams, raised £22,000.

One of Williams’ old teachers came up with a logo, a purple elephant, that reminded me of the elephant necklace she refused to take off at school. Within a few days, every house on Ramadan Street, except for one, featured an elephant in its window.

“You can buy bracelets, mugs, t-shirts and T-shirts,” Ramadan says. “It became torture, it felt like a chase.”

He claims to have received 500 death threats. Bricks were thrown at the shop, and windows were broken in the couple’s rental properties, driving out the tenants.

“The children were throwing flour, eggs, bags of crisps, whatever they could find. They would stand outside and shout ‘Bedoo’ and then kick it as soon as we called the police,” Ramadan said.

Eventually, the abuse got so bad that Ramadan left Barrow to live with his mother, and he says one of his sons dropped out of college because of the bullying. He wasn’t the only one who felt run out of town. Simon Fell, MP for Barrow and Furness, talks about a Carrie landlord who left Barrow after false allegations left his marriage in tatters. Asian pharmacists, GPs and nurses have come to him to express concerns for their safety, as a far-right group called the National Alternative has started an anti-immigration campaign in the city – a move that Vail believes was “fueled” by the cause.

A Muslim restaurateur told The Guardian of losing tens of thousands of pounds in business after he was mistakenly drawn into Williams’ lies, chased down the street by two racially abusive thugs who poured alcohol over his head.

Amy Fenton, reporter for the local Mail newspaper, left Cumbria temporarily on the advice of the police after receiving death threats. She covered Williams’ first appearance in court for perverting the course of justice and also interviewed a number of Asian restaurateurs who received death threats after being wrongly accused of being part of a grooming ring.

All Cumbria Police were able to say at the time that a year-long investigation with the National Crime Agency and a subsequent independent review found “no evidence” to support allegations of any grooming ring in Barrow.

But the fire that initial Facebook post started was already spiraling out of control. When Williams first appeared at Preston Crown Court, in June 2020, dozens of Justice for Ellie headgear supporters protested outside, shouting “scum” at reporters.

While some of those falsely accused by Williams have kept a low profile, Ramadan defended himself in several Facebook Live videos and printed thousands of posters reading #JusticeForBarrowBoys, which he plastered all over town.

Justice posters for Baro Boys made by Mohamed Ramadan. Photo: Facebook/Mohamed Ramadan

His defiance got him into trouble: Last year a court imposed a restraining order on him for harassing Williams’ mother in one of his videos. And although he was not on trial when he later appeared as a prosecution witness at Preston Crown Court, the defense was allowed to present evidence of cocaine found in his flat and the two years he had spent in prison for assaulting his ex-wife.

Ramadan was fortunate to be able to counter Williams’ allegations. The court heard that when she said he took her to Ibiza his passport record showed he had never been to the Balearic Islands. When she says he took her to Amsterdam and sold her to the highest bidder in a brothel, his Barrow B&Q bank card was used.

But there was a complication to some of Williams’ other lies. Social media helped spread her story — and framed her victims. She created Snapchat accounts with names that sounded like her alleged abusers, and manipulated her contacts so that real men illegally messaging her across various social networks suddenly had Asian names.

So why did the police take Williams so seriously? Cumbria Police said they were dealing with an “extreme range of circumstances…with a wide range of false accounts, with a duty to prove and refute, and therefore to support both victim and suspect, even when these roles are combined”.

Crowdfunding page for Eleanor Williams. Photo: charity

Williams was just 16 when she filed her first false rape claim, which involved another teenager from Barrow. When she made her third allegation, police found her battered and naked in her apartment, so unresponsive that they feared she might be dead. After they first arrested her on suspicion of perverting the course of justice, on July 20, 2019, she continued to disappear and was found repeatedly, alone and away from home. and on one occasion she was found collapsed and half naked on the Millennium Bridge in Lancaster; On the other hand, she was found injured at Lancaster railway station.

Giving evidence, Williams said that “men” took her there. But she admitted lying about a whole series of incidents, including telling police that Ramadan had trafficked her to Blackpool for a sex party and threatened to throw her overboard, when in fact she had gone to the coast on her own, and booked her hotel room on Booking.com.

After the jury returned its unanimous verdicts on Tuesday, the conversation turned to psychiatry reports to be commissioned before sentencing in March. Prosecutor Jonathan Sandiford KC has suggested one line of psychiatric investigations suggested whether Williams suffered from a factitious disorder, formerly known as Munchausen syndrome, in which someone deceives others by appearing ill — by getting sick on purpose or by harming oneself.

Phil thinks Williams is a victim of something – and needs support.

He said, “No one does what she did with her body, making up their stories that she made up and going as far as she went without being someone who was somehow completely broken and damaged.”

Ramadan’s wife, Nicola, describes the rulings as “true justice for Ellie”. But the questions remain: “Why did you do that? That’s what we want to know. We probably wouldn’t know the truth if I told you that tomorrow. Because it was all lies from beginning to end.”

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