The woman who cried wolf and fuelled a local race war

When Ellie Williams told of her experience at the hands of a grooming gang, it seemed clear what was right vs wrong. But the truth, writes Zoë Beaty, was much more complicated...

- Zoë Beaty

Mo Ramzan is sitting in his living room in Barrow-in-Furness, desperately trying to prove his innocence. Six days ago he was a local ice-cream-truck owner, content with family life. Then he was wrongly named as the leader of a Pakistani sex-grooming gang. Opposite Mo, perched on a maroon red sofa, is Tommy Robinson, the white nationalist, anti-Islam activist and cofounder of the English Defence League - the only man Mo thinks can help him to clear his name.

Less than a week before their conversation, Mo's life was turned on its head by a single Facebook post that spawned a national outcry. On 20 May 2020, a fragile young woman called Eleanor Williams took to social media to share a long, graphic post detailing her horrific experiences at the hands of "men from takeaways... Mostly Pakistani men" - who she alleged were involved in a sex-grooming operation in the small Cumbrian town.

Williams recounted how she had been continually raped, stripped and beaten, burned, and even had her finger cut off by her perpetrators. The post, which showed the then 20-year-old black-eyed, slashed and bruised, was shared more than 100,000 times; within days, people in Barrow had taken to the streets, calling for justice. More than £22,000 was raised in a crowdfunder to support a private prosecution of her attackers. Her story provoked reactions as far afield as America and Australia, while here in the UK, it quickly stoked and ignited already simmering racial tensions.

Asian men in the vastly white town were vilified, their businesses smeared and attacked. One restaurant owner received phone calls in which he was told his wife would be raped in front of his two young children. Ramzan, an ice-creamvan owner, was named and singled out as the grooming gangmaster, alleged to have passed Williams around groups of men at sex parties so that they could rape and abuse her.