A teenage girl who pretended to be a boy in order to engage in sexual activity with a severely shortsighted girl also duped a second teenager, a court has heard.
Georgia Bilham, 21, is on trial at Chester crown court for 17 sexual offences after allegedly deceiving a teenage girl into sex by pretending to be a boy.
The alleged victim, who can’t be named, insists she did not consent to have sexual contact with a girl. She says she believed Bilham was a boy called George Parry who had anxiety and claimed to be “paranoid” because he was mixed up with Albanian drug dealers.
Bilham was approximately 15 or 16 when she first posed as “George” online, but 19 when the alleged sexual activity took place.
Whenever the pair met, Bilham, who is from Chester, disguised her long blond hair by keeping her hood up, even when in bed. She wore male clothing and put on a deep voice with a Birmingham accent, the court heard, and always took her alleged victim’s glasses off as soon as they met.
On Thursday, another young woman told the jury she too had met “George” online in 2021 when “he” added her on Snapchat.
Nikita Hughes, 22, said she was 16 when they first started chatting. She said she called him Brummy George because of his accent and met him just once, after a failed attempt to meet him in Nando’s in Birmingham’s Bullring shopping centre while on a college trip.
She told police there was something “strange” about George that “I couldn’t put my finger on”, but had no idea he was a girl.
Giving evidence without screens, Hughes told the jury George added her on Snapchat in 2021 and they started talking “all the time”, including on Facetime video calls.
She said he sent her a photograph purporting to be himself, but she never got a proper look at his face. She caught a fleeting “glimpse” the one time they met in person, in May 2021, when he picked her up at the McDonald’s where she worked in Abergele, north Wales.
The jury heard that George, who was wearing a tracksuit with his hood up, drove Hughes around the Great Orme, the headland by Llandudno.
“I caught a glimpse of him at one point, then my face got pushed away,” she said, explaining that George pushed her away. She considered it “strange behaviour” and never saw him again.
The court also heard evidence from an optometrist from Specsavers who gave the alleged victim an eye test in January 2020. Katriona Holding said the complainant was so shortsighted she would be classed as blind without her glasses.
She would “only be able to see shapes and movements but no details” of anything further away than 14cm, she told the court.
