Unreliable Witness 1: Who is Ellie Williams?

Before we begin, a warning this episode of Unredarble Witness contains descriptions of violence and abuse. Episode 1. Who is Ellie Williams? She's just turned 22. But looks younger. Small, pale faced, no makeup. The men and women of the jury follow her words intently. Anyone walking into court at that moment would assume she's the victim. She speaks slowly and quietly. This is her testimony. Eleanor Williams tells Preston Crown Court that she's been sexually abused and beaten countless times at the hands of a grooming gang. She had written a 1300 word Facebook post which was already famous before the case got to court. I didn't want to share this because I'm scared of the judgment that will come with it. It's why I keep quiet about what has happened to me. Yesterday I was put into the back of a car, taken to an address to have sex with free Asian men. The post had gone viral, quickly shared 100,000 times. Her words are spoken by an actor. These are evil yet clever men. They know how to manipulate, convince and threaten girls into staying. And when they can't, they use extreme violence. Eleanor put up pictures of her injuries too. They're almost too hard to look at even now. Her eye, a red bulge, swollen shut, her finger bloodied and partially severed, and her body, a constellation of cuts and bruises, and carved into her skin, the word rat. But Eleanor Williams isn't the victim in this case. She's the one on trial. The prosecution's case is that everything she's saying is a lie. And even the mosaic of horror inflicted on her body, she's done it to herself. From Sky News podcasts, this is unreliable witness. I'm Sky News's home editor, Jason Farrell. And I've been covering this story with specialist producer Liz Lane. And we've spent months piecing together new details in this case. You may not have heard of Eleanor Williams, or you may think you know the story well. But I can assure you, there's a lot you don't know. What you may remember is that her Facebook post and the story kicked up a massive storm in Barron Furnace in Cumbria. The Asian community was targeted, restaurants attacked, there were death threats, people abused in the street, and there were angry protesters. It's sort of a rippled like this huge shot wave across the town. But we had threats, people were going to burn the shops down, burn us down. People threatened to kill us, ripped my wife. We started to see protests outside the police station. And a lot of the anger was at the police in terms of why you're not investigating this, we've seen the images. The story would twist and turn. In this podcast, people share new information with us. And we'll also hear many characterizations of the woman at the centre of it all. The person that the press are betraying is not the person I know. And that really is the first fundamental question. Who is Eleanor Williams? We've just come to the street in Barrow where Eleanor Williams lived off and on with her family. And I'm here with Liz Lane, who's been investigating this story for over a year now. Yeah, it's a quiet suburban street. And Eleanor Williams lived in this house, a fairly large sandstone semi-detached house. And she lived here with her mum, her stepdad, her older brother and older sister and half-brother. And they all call her Ellie. Now we're here to meet her sister, Lucy Williams and her mum, Alison Johnston. Hi, I'm Lucy. Where should we go? Just to say, yeah, thank you. This way. Okay. She's the third child of far siblings. I've got three children to Ellie's dad and then I got divorced and remarried and then I've had another child. And we live together, altogether in this house. She seen her own dad regularly and she still has a good relationship with him now. How old was she when you guys split up? Two. Two. Yeah. Just describe your relationship growing up, you and Ellie, just what was life like? Always been very close. Obviously, my mum got remarried and she had William. So me and Ellie ended up sharing a room growing up, which just met Broughtt's closer. We've just been best friends, really. And so being the big sister, did you have a kind of, I don't know, sometimes it can be, you know, you don't want to have anything to do with them. Sometimes you feel kind of a bit paternal. What was it with you guys? It was a bit of a ball. Yeah. It's like I have it of copying me and it drives me insane. I should steal my stuff, but yeah, always being very close. Not wanting to argue with you, really, me and Ellie. It's very sweet. We're on. Lucy sent me some videos of Ellie and in them, she comes across as really happy, clowning around, mucking around, making Lucy laugh. I'm a hero. In one, she got shoes on her hands, pretending they're her hands, and another, she's singing into this bottle as if it's a microphone, and another, she's kind of wrapped herself up in this blanket. I'm going to bury you. Because you can't see me, I'm so like a purple burrito. And in all of them, you get a sense that she's, you know, this happy, go lucky, carefree girl. I also speak to a girl who went to school with her, and she said the same thing that she was bubbly and outgoing. Right, listen, be afraid. Be afraid. Be afraid. Be afraid. She has got a good sense of humour, she loves her family and likes to be involved in things. She always did well at school, she's quite intelligent. She likes to write poetry, she likes music. She attended Brownies and Guides, and seemed to be well liked, and that was supported by a good peer group. And seemed to be, you know, fitting into the world quite well. I had first noticed some issues probably in the last years of a senior school where she was following out with a friendship groups. But I just took that as a normal behaviour for teenage girls, but in general, she's, you know, up until that point. She's, you know, always been just silly. And like most teenagers, she wanted to start earning some money of her own, landing a job at the Railway pub in Barrow Town Centre, where her boss was Brian Smith. She started as a 16-year-old collecting glasses and managed to work her way through to, she got as far as team leader. She had a great work ethic even from a child. She was always willing to cover shifts, wanted to do as many hours as possible. Good all-round worker. She's just a lovely girl. A lovely girl. Do anything to help anyone. Always there to try and cheer you up and up until a bit later on in her life. She was always there to try and make people happier. She's always having a giggle and a laugh. Very nice person. Barrow is boarded by flat marshy countryside in the sea, and part of the town where I'm standing now is an island, connected by a bridge that crosses this large estuary where I can see boats lying lopsided in the muck waiting for a lifting tide. And on the banks opposite me, there's a huge symmetrical shipyard buildings of BA system, which really loom over the whole town. You can see them wherever you are in their shape like a row of giant beach huts. And it's all set against the distant hills of the Lake District. And it is a painting. It's beautiful. It's dramatic. It's stark. And Ellie Williams lived here all her life. And this knife come here many times. It really helps to get a sense of what the town is like. It's in the southwest of Cumbria, but outside of the tourist hotspot of the National Park. The local conservative MP Simon Fell says the geography of this place has a psychological impact. Barrow is a strange place. It's on a peninsula in one of the hardest to reach part of the UK from many places. So the road which gets you into Barrow, the A590, is often described locally as the longest cul-de-sac in England. People often mention you don't pass through Barrow. You only come here if you have a specific reason to visit. It's a long way to the next big town or city. 90 minutes to Blackpool, two hours to get to Carl Isle. And that isolation, surrounded by the sea too, leads to what Simon calls a peninsula mentality. The single largest employer in Barrow is the shipyard. It employs, I think it's three out of every five people in the community of working age. And it's been there for generations. People went to school together, they worked together. They're not working side by side in the shipyard together. They are in an industry that's probably related to it or is fed by it in some way. So it is close knit and that is no exaggeration to say at all. So people know each other's business. And when they're not physically close to each other, they are using the internet a lot. So they're often online. Barrow is a real Facebook town. And this is why Eleanor Williams' claims on Facebook would eventually impact the town so dramatically. News travels fast. And this was shocking news. I am not the only girl in Barrow who has gone through this or is going through this. I know plenty of girls involved. They have broken my ribs, many bones in my face. They have split my ear, they've cut my throat, they attempted to cut my boobs and nipples off. They have carved words into my body, branded me with letters. Eleanor was 19 when she put that post on Facebook in May 2020. But her behaviour had started to change in the years running up to that, according to her sister Lucy and mum Alison. I didn't really notice at the time, but probably in them latiers of senior school. Looking back on it now in an objective mind, there was probably things that happened in then, but I was batting it off as other things that were happening. And my mind didn't even go to a grue名 or abuse. What sort of things were kind of raising land else? We had a few incidents of Max and Bruce's on a face, where she was told to make a puff at school. Episodes at school where a behaviour was not disruptive, but maybe answering back a little bit. Any indications she was taking drugs? No, I wouldn't have said so. Because she moved out, didn't she? She did, yeah. Is that when it really started? I noticed her behaviour changing and a mood changing for possibly six to eight months before she moved out in the year. So we're talking a couple of years before the Facebook post here. So she's, I would be quite a upbeat character, really happy. It felt like she wasn't looking after herself properly to the degree that she would. And she certainly wasn't keeping her environment as clean and tidy as she usually would. At the Christmas time she took all her gifts and presents and stuff upstairs, and she just jumped up at the bottom of the bed where usually she'd had tidied them up, put them away, brought the rubbish down. She was spending more time on her own, probably, not coming down and being with the family. She seemed unhappy in herself, I could just not, it's a change in a mood. Yeah. And then she moved out suddenly in the April of 2019. She didn't even take her stuff with her, she just kind of left and she was on a flat wonder, but we didn't originally know she was in the flat. We just, just wasn't showing up, we thought she'd gone missing, she was staying at her friends. Yeah. And then my mum's from how found out she'd got a flat on Barrow Island. It was all very strange. And did she talk to you about it as your sister? Not really, like, she kind of cut us all off at this point. She would not speak to my mum whatsoever, because my mum just tried to get her home. She slowly started letting me in, but she won't talk to the whole family. She wouldn't let me in the flat, she'd meet us or me and my friends for food sometimes, or to go for a drink, but that was about it. Ellie was holding down three jobs, working in the kitchen at the local St. George's care home, carrying on her pub job, and working as a glass collector in a nightclub called Manhattan's. And then I was going to a festival, and she did my hair for me, and she was telling me little bits then, but not a lot of it. Can you say little bits? Give me an idea of what sort of thing. Obviously I was asking about the bruises, she said she'd been grabbed in Manhattan's arm, it's off the pot wash at St. George's that she's caught around on. She'd always have an excuse for the bruises. And was she trying to hide it? Was she.? Yeah, often she'd have long sleeves on. Just give me an idea of, kind of, like, how often she would be bruised. Like, weekly. It started on her arms, and then there was a few bits on her legs, and then slowly it started becoming on her face. She'd have black eyes or a busslip, and it just got worse and worse and worse. At first I was like, oh yeah, it's coming through a drunk person to grab someone. Yeah. That's normal, but when it was happening all the time I was like, "No, Ellie, that's not happening." And what did you think was going on? Honestly, I didn't have a clue. I thought she'd had been in a beautiful relationship. And that someone was faster to get the flat. So Liz, you really get the sense, don't you, that her behaviour is changing. Over quite a short period of time, the family don't know what to do about it. You know, they don't want to ask too many questions in case they push her away. No, but then comes this turning point in Alison's mind. She gets a tip off about where Ellie's living now, where she's moved to. And is this place called Steema Street in Barrow Island? And it's notorious for counter-dying, drug dealing, drug overdoses. And you went down it, didn't you? Yeah, I've been there. It's really rundown. There are mattresses kind of strewn around, old sofas. The buildings themselves, these old tenement buildings and there's peeling paint and wire sticking out of the walls. Ellie's flat, it was a ground floor flat with bars on the window. And Alison decided to go around and try and find her. Front door was open. I knocked, went into the vestibule, knocked on the living room door. Ellie was in the living room with two police detectives. And she said to me, "Oh my God, what you doing here? Get out, Mum, you're not welcome." And the detectives said to me, "We're just interviewing Ellie. When we finish with Ellie, we'll come over and see her and tell you what's going on." So I came home. What did Ellie look like at that point? She looked stressed, very stressed and worried. And then the police came over, "What did they tell you?" They told me that Ellie had made an allegation of rape. They didn't tell me who to. And whilst they were interviewing her and investigating that claim, they had found serious messages on her phone that would suggest that she was a victim of abuse. That must have been really concerning. Absolutely, but in the back of my mind, I knew something was going on because why would your teenage daughter suddenly upsticks and move out of a loving family home and not tell her parents where she was going? But Liz, the family weren't the only ones noticing the changes, were they? No, I mean, I've spoken to quite a lot of people living in Barrow who knew Ellie in various different capacities. Who all saw that she deteriorated in quite a quick space of time. We've spoken to someone who knew Ellie from school. She's the one who earlier described her as bubbly and outgoing. And she later would go out and hang out at the pub where Ellie was working. She would only speak to us anonymously, so we've used an actor to revise her words, and we're going to call her Jodie. She got skinnier and then obviously she was just covered in bruises all the time. Like, her eyes were black consistently. It wasn't a sort of black eye. It was like her eyes were swollen, or like a part of the thirst was swollen, and the bruises were really prominent. And you know like the whites have you right, sometimes it was like red. And I assume that maybe she was like dead and someone that was not good for her and was maybe abusive. I remember it's I'd go out with my friends and we'd say yeah, we'd always talk about it and wonder what was going on and stuff. And obviously if I went in with family they'd mention it and go, "What happened to her face?" And I was like, "I don't know, but something's going on." Like, everyone knew something was going on, we just didn't know what it was. She kept coming in with bruises, mainly on her arms and the occasional black eye and I kept asking her what's happening because it's quite protective over her. Yeah. The customers were asking what was the matter with her and we had none of us had any explanation at the time. Yeah. Apart from that she's bumping into things which didn't seem credible, so we didn't believe them. Brian, her boss from the pub, said often they were Asian men watching her. We'd come out of the pub, always on the front, just 100 yards down there. There would be people opposite, waiting and just looking. It seemed to me that their presence was the most intimidating thing for her. We would then walk her up through the town here. So you've seen her in the shopper own, huh? Yeah. Up through the town and down the street with all the bars. She's a nice high street here with just a normal everyday high street, isn't it really? And then you turn right just a bit about 300 yards up there. Yeah. And that's the main street where the main music pubs and stuff are in the nightclub that she used to work in. Let's go have a look. I actually spoke to someone else who worked at the pub and she said that she used to shopper in her around here as well. And it's what, two, three minute walk just to get to Cavendish Street. And I'm looking down now and I can see Manhattan because the American flags dangling below and just a few takeaways on the other side of the street. Did she ever go missing like not to earn up for work? Yes, all the time. All the time. And then she was found. At one time she was missing, I think that was the time they found her in Morkham and she'd been kicked out of a car, nude. And just left her there, after that did. well she said to me that after one of these parties that she'd been to and they just kicked her out and she was drugged at the time. And the police found her down there, police found her all over the place. But in the end she started to trust me and I hopefully never really wanted to break that trust. But I felt that I had to tell the police that because she wasn't. And when she's telling you this story, so being kicked out of the car naked and Morkham and stuff like that, I mean you must be horrified. Oh, yes, horrible. But she'd never let anybody do anything about it because she was that afraid of the people that she was involved with. We even had six of them come in the pub one day. She saw them before they even came in and ran out the back crying. None of us really knew exactly what was happening at the time. They didn't buy anything. They just came to the bar, didn't speak. I don't look around, turned around, walked down the pub to the other end and then walked back. And they were going to come to the bar again and I threw them out. Then they claimed all the racist thing while you kicking us out. I don't have to give you an explanation. I don't want you in here. Has this to loose you tell similar stories from when Ellie worked at the club? Ellie was normally on this little bar and there was always man, maybe two men, Lingering, Farron. And there'd be harassing Ellie shouting at her stare and at while she worked and Ellie would just completely ignore her. Obviously if they wanted to drink she'd serve her and then go back to ignoring her. And when she'd come to the end of the bar sometimes to go get some more glasses or bottles or whatever, did grab her. So the staff would move up to the top bar with more people, did follow her up there, keep on harassing her. It was just constant and obviously when she'd finished work some of the staff started noticing what was going on and they'd bring her home or bring her back to a flat wherever she was staying. But if they weren't offering that or she was adamant she was going she'd go off with them men. Right, you'd see her go off with these guys. I have occasionally. I mean, did she say anything to you before she'd go off? I'd tell her not to go and then she'd start seeing saying I have to, you don't understand kicking up in the middle of town. Did you know who those, who those men were? No, not at the time. It was the same night one of the men was harassing Ellie at the bar and some of our friends seen it and did one him off. So there's like a takeaway around the corner from the nightclub and Ellie was actually coming home that night with me. It grabbed her outside of the takeaway, I've started pulling her around and he was like, come on we're going to. Did you see that? Yeah. You say you saw someone grab her? Yeah, and she was like, no I'm going with sister and his face, he was so angry with her. And she did come home with me and then the next weekend she came back black and blue like worse than we would ever seen from it. Any of the points to this happened, did you think right, I'm going to the police? But I've said it a few times and she kept telling me not to go. She'd beg me not to talk to him. What would be her reasoning? What would she say? It would bring more trouble, you don't understand Lucy, it would bring more trouble, you don't know what's going to happen. So how's she devastated there? And there's another thing. Lucy and Alison both told us that Ellie became protective over her phone. She was inundated with messages which she tried to hide. Phone calls, snap chats, Facebook messages and there was a lot of men messaging her. What sort of messaging? Asking her to go out to wear certain types of clothes and to put hoops in, to make sure she looks good for the day. It was all very weird. So not the normal kind of boyfriend chat? No. What distinguished it from, say, being a boyfriend, getting in touch with her? Won't even a hello or sometimes always a kiss on the end, but it was just very blunt messages with her. And then if she'd put no, did fretting her. I've seen messages where it says, "Do what we say are we will burn you?" "Are we will come to your house and rape your sister?" "Are we will burn your house down?" And I believe that's the reason that she moved out of this house because she was worried about putting a family in danger. Lucy sent me some images that she said she filmed coming in on Ellie's phone, that she was sent on Snapchat. Wow, okay, that's really huge knife that's been unsheathed and left on the bed. That's really threatening. Yeah, and then here's another one with several knives and a machete. So four weapons in total again laid out on a D-Vay. You say knives, but two of them look like swords. And the machete is like one of those curved, nasty, sharp weapons that, and what's the message? It says happy new year, that one, and then here's another one with somebody holding a gun. You just see their finger tipped. And the caption says, "Never catch me lacking." So I'm always going to have some kind of weapon, yeah, if ever you see me look out, basically. Yeah. And so Lucy says she filmed these as to capture his evidence basically because with Snapchat, the messages disappear after a very short period of time. But also if you try and screenshot something that you get on Snapchat, the person who sent you the message gets notification. So Lucy was filming them coming in. Videoing them so that the person couldn't see that they were being recorded. Yeah. And of course, Alison says at this time, and we're talking 2019, that Ellie's life is going into complete chaos. So she's frequently going missing sometimes days at a time. She was then beginning to turn up in other towns outside of Barrow. How did you know this? Because I would have reported and missing. And so then the police would form me often in the middle of the night to say, "We found Ellie." She was on Markham train station, now she's turned up in Lancaster. She's in an ambulance, we're taking it to hospital, this is where she'll be. So I've often got up in the middle of the night and drove to Lancaster, which is an hour away. So seeing these states, always drugged, always alcohol and drugs, and always then with significant injuries. She's still got a scar on her throat. It's right across there. On top of that, she's had a breasts cut. She's got two Macs across there. A Rea's being caught, a finger's being caught. She's got rats carved across her stomach. She's got Macs around her ankles. Ellie had lived away from home for over six months, and her family say the incidents were getting worse. So in the November, there'd been an incident in her flat where there was an Asian male found, and he wouldn't leave. And she said that he was wanting us to get a key cut to give to his friends so we could bring other people there over the weekend. And she'd refused. And she'd made some kind of excuse that she needed to go out to get the key cut, and she'd gone to the women's centre and told them the police had come and they'd gone over to the flat. And removed the male, but just sent him on his way. And it was after that incident. She'd gone missing again, and turned up in the hospital and would say to her, Ellie, if this behaviour doesn't stop, if you don't stop, you're going to end up dead. I really thought that one of the days I would get a call to say Ellie's dead. So Alison got Ellie home, and that's what she wanted, but there was a pretty frank conversation between the two of them. So she'd come home and said to me, "Mom, just because I'm at home doesn't mean it's all going to stop. I can't just make it stop overnight." And I said, "No, but if you're at home and you do go missing, I've got more of a chance of raising the alarm faster." And so she did agree to come home, but it certainly didn't stop, and I was still regretting to miss in. And then one night, Ellie was found down a lane near a field, horribly injured. Lucy took me back to when she found out. I think I was working that night, and obviously when I'd come home from work, she'd been missing. It was awful. She was covered, worse with seeing her, probably. On that occasion, she actually was in her bed, and I'd gone in to see her, and she was just crying saying she couldn't call with her anymore. And that's when she decided to put the post, or write the post. And did she then reveal what else had happened to her, because obviously you could see what? Yeah, obviously she'd ran up her jambas, and she lifted her top up to show me, and all the bruises, all of her legs. She was just covered, covered head to toe, and bruises. Some looked like fingerprints, or hand mats, in a way. They were up her back, on the back of her legs. They were shoulders, they were just everywhere. And you said, "Someone looked like cigarette burns, maybe?" Yeah, they were like, "Some of them looked like cigarette burns, and then there were some weird marks, like, circling marks, on other, a lot bigger than cigarette burns. And, well, I skinned in the middle, but then, around the outside, it looked like a burn, it was weird." And who said, "Lolis, let's get this online?" Ellie, originally, it was the only way she could see it, stop him. So Lucy photographed her injuries, and Ellie wrote the words of that now infamous Facebook post. "I used to believe that these people loved me. I realised now that they're used me for their own gain and profit. These are mostly Pakistani men and some are business owners. I have spoken, and it was the scariest thing I have ever done. I will get the justice I deserve, and I will be so proud of myself. I want to encourage any other girl to go to the police and speak. Tell the truth, you will be believed." That was like, "You sure you want to do it, everyone's gonna know, but she was adamant you wanted to." She was like, "It's the only way. She could see it, stop it. Or someone listening to her and taking it seriously." And it's pretty raw. Yeah, very. How did you feel about her posting it? I was scared for her to be quite honest. Lucy was right to be scared. Next time on unreliable witness, the posters out there, and Eleanor Williams, has lit a fuse, and started a chain of events that spiral out of her control. Unreliable witness is a Sky News podcast presented by me Jason Farrell. Investigated by specialist producer Liz Lane, the series producer is Anne Marie Bullock. As the day wraps up, get this scoop on what's been happening. With "Here's the scoop" a new podcast from NBC News with me your host, Gazzin Vesugian. We'll take a deep dive into the day's top stories with NBC News' trusted journalist. It's a fresh take that's sharp, thoughtful, and it's informative bringing you closer to the headlines and conversations that are shaping our world. In the front page, the zeitgeist, "Here's the scoop from NBC News. Listen daily wherever you get your podcasts." [BLANK_AUDIO]