Months into the investigation into Eleanor Williams’s claims she was the victim of an Asian grooming gang, police discovered inconsistencies.
She was arrested and has now been found by a court to have made everything up and sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison after making a series of false rape allegations.
WARNING: This article contains images people may find distressing
The 22-year-old made a series of claims that she was abused by an Asian gang and raped by multiple men as early as 2017.
Here we take a look at the details that prosecutors said helped prove her accusations were “a pack of lies”.
First false allegation
The first false allegation was made by Williams when she was 16.
Preston Crown Court heard she had been with others at Cameron Bibby’s house in November 2017 when she was sick after drinking alcohol and smoking cannabis.
Mr Bibby and his friends contacted Williams’ family who collected her and later took her to hospital, where she alleged she had been raped. Williams withdrew support from prosecution in January 2018, after Mr Bibby had been arrested.
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Trafficking
Williams also claimed she had been groomed since the age of 12 or 13 by local business owner Mohammed Ramzan, who she falsely claimed took her across the region and persuaded her to have sex with other men.
She described punishment beatings, rape, a girl nearly dying as a result of a beating and another having a dog set on her.
“This was a detailed account of the most serious sort of sex trafficking,” honorary recorder of Preston Judge Robert Altham said.
Mr Ramzan, one of the men wrongly accused, said two weeks after he was arrested following Williams’ claims he attempted to take his own life.
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The trip to Amsterdam
Williams also told police she had been taken to Amsterdam by Mr Ramzan, forced to work in a brothel and sold at an auction for 25,000 Euros, but the buyer did not go through with the deal.
Prosecutors compared the account to a scene from the film Taken, in which an ex-secret service agent’s teenage daughter is abducted by human traffickers.
They said at the time Williams said they were in Amsterdam, Mr Ramzan’s bank card was used in B&Q in Barrow.
The court heard Williams had been in Amsterdam, but had shared a hotel room with her sister and sister’s boyfriend.
The trip to Blackpool
At the time Williams said she was being raped by men in Blackpool, evidence showed she was staying in a hotel she had booked herself.
She later admitted she had made this up, but claimed the men had forced her to tell the story to discredit her.
When police made enquiries, they found she had travelled to the seaside resort alone and stayed in a hotel, where she bought a Pot Noodle from a nearby shop and then remained in her room watching YouTube on her phone.
The social media messages
During the trial, the prosecution alleged Williams sent some social media messages to herself and tried to make them appear as if they were from traffickers or other victims.
She used a second mobile phone, given to her by a women’s help group for victims of abuse, to create conversations with an imaginary fellow victim, the court heard.
Phone mast records showed that while texts were exchanged, the two mobile phones were in the same place – even when the defendant travelled to Scotland to see her father.
The sex parties
Speaking in court during her trial, Williams said she was taken to sex parties from the age of 13 in “Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Preston, everywhere” and made to have sex with numerous older men.
More than 20 women Williams listed as present at sex parties all denied being there. The prosecution said Williams had either known the girls from school or found their details online.
The trip to Ibiza
Williams admitted she lied about being trafficked to Ibiza after police said they could check her travel records.
She claimed she was taken to the island for two weeks where Mr Ramzan paid men to have sex with her.
But in a police interview, she admitted this was false when police presented her with the possibility of having her travel records checked, the judge sentencing Williams said.
The hammer
In what the prosecution called her “finale event”, in May 2020 Williams was found by police with injuries including a swollen eye, cut finger and injuries to her legs and abdomen which were “too numerous to count”.
She would later post pictures of the injuries on Facebook with a description of being beaten, groomed and trafficked by Asian men. But, evidence from a pathologist found the injuries were consistent with being caused to herself.
A hammer found at the scene had her DNA on and was identical to one she had purchased from Tesco earlier in the month.
A Home Office pathologist for the prosecution examined photographs and medical notes about the injuries and concluded they were “consistent with multiple, self-inflicted hammer blows”.
