Shocking moment grooming gang fantasist pretends to be drugged | UK News

Newly-released video shows the moment a serial fantasist pretends to be drugged in a warped bid to convince police she had just been brutally raped members of an Asian grooming gang.

Eleanor Williams, 23, was jailed for eight-and-a-half years after being found guilty of perverting the course of justice in March 2023.

A Facebook post showing her badly-bruised face – caused by hitting herself with a hammer – was shared more than 10,000 times and sparked a surge in hate crimes in her hometown of Barrow-in-Furness.

Three of her victims later tried to take their own lives, her trial heard.

Now, body-worn footage previously only seen by jurors has been released to the BBC, showing how her lies became more elaborate over a three-year period.

Towards the end of her campaign, in late July 2019, police visited Williams’ home to find her face bruised and bloodied.

Footage shows her staggering around the room before apparently collapsing into a chair.

Detective Constable Claire Ritchie, who specialises in interviewing sex crime victims, says in the clip: ‘She is obviously a really troubled girl, and in that respect I feel really sorry for her.

‘When it was all going on, it was, “Is it a really vivid dream that she genuinely thinks has happened? Is she unwell?” There’s got to be something.’

At the end of the trial, the judge said he had ‘received much psychiatric evidence in this case – but there is no explanation for why the defendant would commit these offences’.

Detectives believe Williams’ ‘would never have stopped’, with her lies only spiralling even further.

Detective Chief Inspector John Graham-Cumming said: ‘My serious concern was that she was going to end up killing herself or come to some serious harm.

‘I don’t think it would have ever stopped.’

Williams’ first false allegation was made when she was just 16.

She and several oithers had been at a man’s home in November 2017 when she was sick after drinking alcohol and smoking cannabis.

The man and his friends contacted Williams’ mum and sister, who came to collect her and later took her to hospital, where she claimed she had been raped.

A similar situation played out again a year-and-a-half later, when she made a second set of fake claims against another man who took her home from a night out when she became intoxicated.

She accused him of raping her and then coming to her flat where she was threatened with a knife.

In one clip, Williams can be heard telling police: ‘He had a knife and was waving it around… [He] pulled me into the bathroom by my hair, stripped me naked and was hitting me with the shower head.’

The man spent 10 weeks in prison before being released.

Weeks later, Williams claimed she had been groomed since the age of 12 or 13 by a local business owner, who she said 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.

The Honorary Recorder of Preston, Judge Robert Altham, said: ‘This was a detailed account of the most serious sort of sex trafficking.’

Williams told police he had taken her to Amsterdam where he forced her to work in a brothel and sold her at an auction for 25,000 Euros, but the buyer did not go through with the deal.

Speaking about the case for the first time, Detective Constable John Robinson said he believes Williams researched previous grooming scandals before concocting her lies.

He said: ‘What I can clearly see is an evolution.

‘You’ve got an awful allegation in 2017, a much worse allegation in 2019 and weeks later it properly snowballs into a massive organised crime group.’

The prosecutor compared Williams’ account in the trial to a scene from the Liam Neeson film Taken, in which an ex-Secret Service agent’s teenage daughter is abducted by human traffickers.

She had been in Amsterdam – but had shared a hotel room with her sister and sister’s boyfriend.

While she was there, her so-called attacker’s bank card was being used at a B&Q in Barrow.

She accused another man of raping her and selling her to two Asian men after a chance encounter in Preston city centre.

In sentencing remarks which were broadcast on television, the judge said: ‘It is troubling to say the least that she shows no significant signs of remorse.’

He said there is no explanation for why she made the allegations, which he described as ‘complete fiction’, adding: ‘Unless and until the defendant chooses to say why she has told these lies we will not know.’

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