‘I went downhill’: man falsely accused of rape on becoming a hate figure

Article here. Excerpt:

'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.”'