A woman accused of lying about being trafficked and sexually exploited by an Asian grooming gang has told a court she was in love with the alleged ringleader.
Eleanor Williams, 22, from Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, finally gave evidence at Preston crown court on Tuesday, two months into her trial for perverting the course of justice.
She told the jury she was just 12 years old when she met Mohammed Ramzan, an ice-cream man and restaurateur she alleges groomed and trafficked her, at a birthday party.
Ramzan, known locally as Mo Rammy, has previously told the court that the party was the only time he had ever met Williams and that everything else she had said about him was lies.
But she claimed on Tuesday that she went on to work in his Indian restaurant, Mr Elephant, and that he became her “boyfriend”.
Louise Blackwell KC, defending, asked Williams what happened to make her view the restaurant owner as her boyfriend. Williams said: “We had sex.”
She told the court: “I thought it was love, I thought he loved me, so I was happy about the situation.” But, she said, Ramzan started getting “more angry” and wanted her to do “sexual favours” for his friends.
She described being at a private function at the restaurant, where about 40 men were attending a Ramadan feast, when Ramzan asked her to have sex with his friend.
She said: “He told me it was a big deal, that his friend was going to commit suicide, that he’d love me even more if I done it, and I believed him.”
Williams said she felt “dirty” afterwards, adding that she had sex with Ramzan’s friend between 12 and 20 times.
She said Ramzan promised her it would just be a “one-time thing” but “when it happened more than once I questioned that and he said: ‘Well I love you for doing it so it doesn’t matter how many times you do it.’ I couldn’t really argue with that.”
A number of Ramzan’s employees at Mr Elephant and his other businesses gave evidence for the prosecution saying Williams had never worked there.
One of eight charges Williams faces encompasses a string of allegedly false claims she made involving Ramzan, including the allegation that he took her to Amsterdam and sold her to the highest bigger at a brothel, and trafficked her to Ibiza to have sex with multiple men.
The trial continues.
