When 18-year-old Jordan Trengove agreed to go on a night out with Eleanor Williams in 2019 he had no idea that accepting her invitation would not just land him in jail but make him the enemy of a global anti-grooming movement with its own line of merchandise.
The teenagers and some friends went drinking in Barrow on 9 March 2019 and as far as Trengove can remember, Williams disappeared halfway through the night. He didn’t pay much attention because he was distracted by another girl, Ebony, that evening.
Ebony ended up with him in the back of a police van after officers spotted him arguing at a taxi rank in the early hours. “They said: you’re drunk, let’s take you home,” remembers Trengove. The duo were dropped off at a friend’s house and ended up having sex on the sofa, according to Ebony when she was called to give evidence at Williams’s trial more than three years later.
Weeks passed and one day Trengove was asleep in bed when police arrived to arrest him on suspicion of raping, drugging and assaulting Williams. He protested his innocence and cooperated with police, handing over his phone and submitting to an intimate body check so that officers could look for signs of the violent struggle Williams had described. “There was no bruising, no markings,” says Trengove now. But the damage was done. The next day someone painted the word “rapist” on his house and smashed in the windows.
Before he knew it, he was in court being remanded in custody, charged with three counts of rape. Williams had produced “evidence” that Trengove had admitted to the rapes, goading her on Snapchat, calling her “a dirty slag who was well up for a shag that night”. It took police all too long to realise that this Snapchat account had been created using the wifi at the Barrow home of Williams’s mother.
“Prison was very, very scary,” he said. “I was put in cells with actual rapists and paedophiles. I shared with a man who admitted to me he was guilty of sending pictures to eight-year-old kids.”
Trengove spent his 19th birthday in prison, serving 10 weeks on remand before police realised the evidence against him didn’t stack up. The girl Trengove actually had sex with on 9 March gave police a selfie she had taken in the back of the police van, while suspicion grew that far from being a particularly unlucky victim of multiple rapes, Eleanor Williams was in fact a fantasist making one false allegation after the other with the help of social media.
Not only did she create fake profiles to frame Trengove and some of her other victims, she started up explicit conversations with innocent men – on Tinder, Snapchat or the intimate photo sharing site OnlyFans, where she had an account – and renamed them in her phone so that it looked as though their penis photos and propositions were coming from those she falsely accused.
Out of jail, Trengove was a free man but an outcast in Barrow. “I was barred from everywhere. I was called a rapist, a nonce.” Within a few months he moved away. “I thought it would end but the first day we moved in I had someone shout rapist at me. It was clear then that no matter where I went, someone would always know.”
Things calmed down and then on 20 May 2020 Williams posted the fatal Facebook page alleging that she had been trafficked and exploited by an Asian grooming gang.
She didn’t name Trengove, but his name soon became linked with the case, regardless of his skin colour, as more than 100,000 people joined the Justice For Ellie Facebook page and bought elephant-themed wristbands, keyrings and bumper stickers to express solidarity. A rally was organised where convoys of cars drove from Barrow to the town where Trengove now lives, flying Justice for Ellie banners. He tried to tell protesters the truth but no one would listen.
“I went downhill,” he said. “I tried killing myself over it. I tried running away from it all. I tried ending my relationship, walking away from my family.
“The amount of problems put on my life just from one [Facebook] post is ridiculous. Because I’m autistic, it’s even harder. I got diagnosed with complex PTSD because of it all.
“Ever since this went on I feel like I’ve been trapped in my own little prison,” he added. “I don’t feel like I have a life any more.”
Trengove became a father in August 2021 but struggled to bond with his son as Williams’s trial kept getting postponed. “When I was in his newborn stage I couldn’t love him like a dad should. I tried to distance myself away. My whole life just became sitting in playing [video] games. That was the way of escaping the reality of my life.”
Trengove, now 22, was in court on Tuesday to hear the jury find Williams guilty of eight counts of perverting the course of justice, including three involving him. “I’m over the moon,” he said afterwards, pledging to go home and give his son a big hug. “I’ve got my life back.”
