A young woman has told a court she got trapped in a “web of lies” after posing as a boy to meet girls online, but insisted that a woman she had sex with knew she was female.
Georgia Bilham, 21, from Chester, said she created a male alter ego called George as “an escape” from her unhappy life, saying her mum would not have approved of her being in a lesbian relationship.
She denies 17 counts of sexual assault against a young woman who was so shortsighted that she was legally blind.
The complainant, who cannot be named, told police she would never have consented to sex if she had known Bilham was a girl.
Giving evidence at Chester crown court on Monday, Bilham admitted having sexual activity with the woman when they were both 19, in the summer of 2021, but said the woman had figured out by then that she was not really a man.
Bilham said she first encountered her alleged victim when she was 14 when they met through a mutual acquaintance, hanging around as a group outside McDonald’s in Chester for half an hour.
A few years later, in 2017, she created a Snapchat account in the name of George Parry and contacted the complainant and another girl, Nikita Hughes, who gave evidence last week.
Bilham insisted she was not trying to trick the complainant into thinking she was a boy but rather did not want her to realise who she really was in case their friends and family found out.
Asked by her barrister, Martine Snowdon, why she lied to the complainant, she said she did not want her to know “that it was me. Not that it was a girl. That it was me.”
Bilham said she considered herself straight now but that in retrospect she was not in 2021.
Snowdon suggested Bilham may have not been open about her sexuality because her family would not accept it.
“How do you think your mum would have reacted if she knew that you were in a same-sex relationship?” the barrister asked.
“I don’t think she would have been very happy about it,” Bilham said.
She admitted creating a false backstory for George, putting on a Brummie accent after claiming to be from Aston in Birmingham. The jury heard a recording of her pretending to be George, using a deep voice that veered between the Midlands and Merseyside.
She said she always wore her hood up when meeting the complainant to hide her long blond hair, telling the complainant it was because George had got mixed up with some Albanian gangsters “and was paranoid”.
She told the jury that when she was 18 she had an Albanian boyfriend called Denis, “who was involved in stuff he shouldn’t have been doing”. While posing as George, she suggested Denis was one of the gangmasters.
Snowdon asked Bilham why she created the false profile and kept it a secret from her friends and family. “I just wasn’t happy with myself,” Bilham said, adding that it was “just an escape”.
Snowdon asked: “Have you ever thought that you wanted to change your gender and become a boy?” Bilham answered: “No.”
Bilham said she assumed the complainant knew she was a girl after they were involved in a car crash in May 2021. She told the jury that a police officer told the complainant that Bilham, who had been driving, was a girl.
The court heard that the complainant sent Bilham messages in the hours after the incident saying “I’m so confused” and “How have you lied for so long and why?”.
Bilham replied saying she had only lied to the police, having been given a fake female driving licence by the Albanian gangsters.
The complainant replied: “Answer this with yes or no: are you a girl? And if you are a girl why the fuck have you lied all this time?”
Bilham said she assumed from that point that the game was up but continued to pretend to be George after the crash. “I was just trying to protect myself because I got myself caught up in the web of lies,” she told the court.
After the crash, the pair continued to see each other and the relationship turned sexual, the court heard.
Anna Pope, prosecuting, asked why Bilham did not drop the George act. “Was the benefit to you that you were getting a buzz out of deceiving her into thinking you were a man?”
Bilham said no. The trial continues.
