Abuse survivor Ellie Reynolds quit the national grooming gang inquiry panel over fears the Labour government was silencing victims’ voices.
Survivor Ellie Reynolds, 25, from Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, has today slammed the Prime Minister for breaking their trust and ignoring concerns of “corruption,” despite having to recall horrifying memories of being raped, kidnapped and beaten. She told the Express: “Personally, I didn’t really have high hopes for the inquiry to begin with, and I’m quite a positive person. Maybe people like Fiona and me were put on that panel for a reason – to see how corrupt it was and expose it before it was too late.
“The problem we’ve got is how high up does [the corruption] actually go? They not only have to get the public’s trust back, but also the survivors’ trust. We’ve asked to meet with Keir Starmer and have not had a response. That basically just proves that he’s not bothered. He doesn’t care.”
The resignations of Fiona Goddard, Ellie, and a third survivor known as Elizabeth followed concerns the inquiry would be “watered down” and “downplay the racial and religious motivations” behind their abuse.
Ellie Reynolds has blasted Keir Starmer for ignoring ‘corruption’ (Image: Express)
Having been ordered to revisit her trauma alone over a video link, and forced to comply with strict conditions which she felt limited her ability to seek support during the agonisingly difficult process, Ellie quit the panel in the autumn amid claims of a “cover up” and a “toxic environment for survivors”.
Speaking about the shambolic background to the inquiry for the first time, she revealed how she felt being silenced had undermined her mental well-being. Conditions of participation included asking those who shared her home to vacate the property while she was giving evidence; not to talk to other members of the victims’ panel, and not to discuss her distressing evidence with friends or family.
“If we needed support, we had to go through them,” she told me with a shake of the head. “We sent an email and would be allocated a counsellor. You’ve got to understand that victims and survivors of crimes like this won’t just go to any random person to speak about their traumas. You have to have a trust-built relationship.
“They spoke to us like I would speak to my one-year-old. They saw us as weak, vulnerable children and not the adults and survivors that we are.”
Ellie Reynolds with Nigel Farage at a press conference in October (Image: PA)
Even texting the other women on the victims’ panel, reluctantly put together by the Labour government to give its grooming gangs inquiry legitimacy, was forbidden.
For Ellie, who had a supportive relationship with fellow survivor Fiona Goddard, it felt like the rug had been pulled from under her feet. “When I spoke to her, I had like this anxious, sick feeling of, ‘am I allowed to talk?’” she explained. “It was a lot of weight on our shoulders to be dealing with such sensitive things and not be able to offload them.”
Ultimately, underestimating the survivors would prove an enormous error for the government. Ellie and Fiona weren’t going to be patronised by a state machine that had failed them so many times already and, in October, explosively broke down the Home Office’s wall of silence by publicly resigning their positions.
In an open letter, Ellie explained she was quitting because the inquiry had become “less about the truth and more about a cover-up”.
Lifting the lid on the shocking treatment that led to her departure – and it reveals a story of ignorance, incompetence and obstructiveness at every level. The government never supported calls for a national inquiry into grooming gangs. So, when Oldham Council made an official request for one at the start of January last year, safeguarding minister Jess Phillips refused.
Elon Musk’s fury at Jess Phillips
Ministers argued that the seven-year Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which concluded in 2022 under Professor Alexis Jay, had already covered such matters. The council’s request may have gone no further had Phillips’ refusal not caught the attention of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.
Fiona Goddard, a fellow grooming gangs survivor, with whom Ellie forged a strong bond (Image: Getty)
Barrow-in-Furness (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)
In a series of raging social media posts, the billionaire tech magnate claimed Phillips should be in prison for the decision and accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer of failing the victims during his time at the Crown Prosecution Service.
Initially, the Labour government fought back with Starmer slamming Musk for “spreading misinformation” and “jumping on a bandwagon”. But, backed into a corner by a Conservative Party intent on forcing Labour MPs to vote on whether they opposed or agreed with the need for a fresh inquiry, ministers were forced to concede.
A matter of weeks after the Oldham decision, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced a police review of cases that had previously been cast aside and commissioned Baroness Casey to carry out a three-month audit of the scale of grooming gangs.
This only delayed the inevitable and, in response to Casey’s findings that the scale of the scandal, factors of ethnicity and subsequent cover-ups had not been properly investigated, a national inquiry was finally and reluctantly agreed in June last year.
Not long after, Ellie was approached by Fiona Goddard to join the victims’ panel.
“Fiona said that she’d been circling my story for years and the inquiry was keen to have me on board to air my opinions [and] share my story,” she said. “We were there to do the frame of reference – basically the 20 recommendations to say how they should be doing things from a survivor’s point of view.”
Tech billionaire Elon Musk attacked the government over it’s failure to investigate grooming gangs (Image: Getty)
On paper, it sounded like an important opportunity to use the harrowing experiences of being groomed, manipulated and abused to effect real change. But as discussions began, Ellie was soon disappointed. As far as she could see, all the decisions regarding the inquiry had already been made by the Home Office without consulting them.
“I started having meetings and the liaison officer was sending emails saying things like, ‘These are the questions that you’re going to be asked. This is how your reply should look’,” Ellie continues. “We were told on a [Microsoft] Teams meeting not to talk about the ethnicity of the men who raped us – which made us think why? Would it be the same if it was a white man? Probably not.”
This decision to sideline the race and background of perpetrators in this way represented an immediate betrayal of the findings of Baroness Casey’s rapid review.
The fear of appearing racist
She “found examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist or raising community tensions” and that “blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions [led to failures]”.
This, Baroness Casey suggested, created a void in which the most bigoted views would flourish. “Ignoring the issues, not examining and exposing them to the light, allows the criminality and depravity of a minority of men to be used to marginalise whole communities,” she explained.
But Ellie and Fiona began to feel that part of the reason they had been banned from discussing these topics was that grooming gang adviser Sabah Kaiser, their liaison for the panel, had publicly adopted an opposing position on this specific issue.
After the resignations, shadow home secretary Chris Philp revealed in Parliament that Kaiser had two years earlier said that discussions about the overrepresentation of Pakistani heritage perpetrators were “destructive, distracting [and] irresponsible”.
For Ellie, being silenced on the issue of race felt like a serious violation. She believes the horrors she experienced were, in part, because she was a white girl.
“The problem that we’ve got is that, if we call out a problem of being raped by an Asian male, we’re deemed as racist,” she said. “But the same Asian male is okay to sit and call you ‘white trash’, treat you like you’re disposable, and emphasise how much they hate white girls and white women.”
Ellie was raped and abused as a young woman in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)
The “fear of appearing racist” that Casey describes in her review has, in Ellie’s opinion, enabled a situation where entire communities can come to view white girls as “commodities” without being challenged by officialdom.
“You do find that the majority of people who operate grooming gangs do have one thing in common and that’s how unworthy white women are,” she said. “That is a massive problem that nobody wants to touch on.”
The more Ellie began to question what role she and the other survivors were playing in the process, the more she saw evidence that they were being used to legitimise something which had been decided by the powerful beforehand.
“We were there to be their voice and then they’d strip ours from us,” she added. “We were basically feeding them with information and then they’d dispose of us. It was re-victimising [and] humiliating.”
“I think what they did with most of the survivors is offered a pretty penny. They know that most of the survivors do struggle with mental health and we are unable to work. The Home Office was offering £50 an hour for us to sit and tell our story. So lots of people agreed.”
‘They weren’t listening’
As she read the profiles of the ex-police officer and social worker candidates for inquiry chair, she felt they were unsuitable. She began to suspect that, in a grimly familiar pattern that has played out over and again in grooming gang cases – that victims would be blamed by the authorities for the failures to tackle their abuse.
She said: “I think that they were using us [and making us] complicit in trying to cover it up. I feel like we were there in case anything backfired on them. They could then use us as leverage to say, ‘Well, we had survivors’ input’. We were a scapegoat.”
Ellie and Fiona decided enough was enough. They weren’t going to participate in an exercise they believed would muddy the waters rather than shed light. They planned not only to quit the inquiry but also to expose its true nature to the world.
“[In the end] it wasn’t one specific thing,” Ellie added. “The way they’d speak to you, the way everything was top secret, the fact that we were expected to trust a former police officer or social worker when they’d failed us as much as what they have.
“No matter what we said, it wasn’t taken into account [or] respected. They weren’t listening. I felt like we were just another statistic.”
When the survivors went public with their resignations, all hell broke loose. There were scathing headlines and a fiery exchange in the House of Commons, where an emotional Jess Phillips was criticised for describing the survivors’ critiques as untrue.
Unsurprisingly, Ellie’s trust is completely broken and she no longer believes Labour can deliver any meaningful scrutiny of one of Britain’s worst scandals.
Not that she regrets the decision to join the panel. “I feel like if we hadn’t exposed it, the chances are that it would have been covered up again because not long after the two chairs stepped down,” she said. “I feel like we were put there for a reason. We needed to see that it was corrupt.”
Responding to Ellie’s story, a Home Office spokesperson said: “The minister is absolutely committed to engaging with victims and survivors, and an offer remains open to meet with Ellie Reynolds.
“The Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs has full legal powers to compel evidence, to uncover the truth, and provide answers that survivors of these horrific crimes deserve. The Inquiry will have the power to examine whether ethnicity, religion and culture played a role in responses at local and national levels.”
A Government spokesperson said:
“The sexual abuse of children by grooming gangs is among the most horrific crimes imaginable. The government is absolutely committed to engaging with victims and survivors, and an offer remains open to meet with Ellie Reynolds.
“The Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs has full legal powers to compel evidence, to uncover the truth, and provide answers that survivors of these horrific crimes deserve.
“The Inquiry will have the power to examine whether ethnicity, religion and culture played a role in responses at local and national levels.”
