A grooming gang survivor has accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government of “gaslighting” victims – after she quit the national inquiry panel in fury. Ellie Reynolds says she was being manipulated by Home Office mandarins who attempted to ban her from even speaking to members of her own family and were terrified of being branded “racist”.
She called the probe a “whitewash” and claimed it is has been designed to fail otherwise top officials and people in authority would be exposed and lose their jobs. Ms Reynolds and fellow survivor Fiona Goddard accused Labour of “sabotaging” the national probe on Monday claiming “political interference” and mishandling by the Home Office had led to their decision to step down from the inquiry’s victims and survivors liaison panel on Monday.
In her resignation letter, Ms Goddard described “secretive conduct” and the use of “condescending and controlling language” towards survivors. She also warned of a “toxic, fearful environment” and a “high risk of people feeling silenced all over again”.
Ms Reynolds accused the Home Office of excluding survivors from key discussions and holding meetings without notifying them, saying officials made “decisions we couldn’t question.”
And she blasted Labour further claiming she wasn’t allowed to “seek support from outside of them.”
She said: “If I was a little bit overwhelmed or struggling, I wasn’t allowed to seek support from my family or any other survivors on the panel. We were discouraged from speaking to outside of the panel. So to me that felt like a, a division. It felt like it was then set out to try and divide us and make us weak again. You know, a lot of survivors, they don’t go to authorities for support, they go to family and they go to other survivors because the authorities have failed them so many times before.”
Ms Reynolds, who was groomed and abused as a teenager in Barrow, was asked by LBC radio host Nick Ferrari who had put out those stipulations and she replied, “From inside the panel. That came from the organisation that was running it alongside the Home Office.”
She added: “We weren’t allowed to discuss anything. I think looking back on it now, it was more a manipulation tactic to say, you know, they came across as really nice – but equally controlling. So, they were saying, ‘we understand that you’re so sensitive, so if you need to talk to anybody, you don’t talk to survivors, you come to us’. And when you read back on the emails now, you can see that it’s nothing short of gaslighting how they’ve run the whole inquiry – they’re scared of being labelled as racist. And it shouldn’t be like that. We’ve almost had like a tactic put over where we’re fearful of saying what ethnicity our abuses are and it shouldn’t be like that.
“And I think if the inquiry actually was successful and it came out, a lot of police officers, social workers etc would lose their jobs.
“So, I think it’s been a cover up from the start and I think it’s just initiating that false hope on the general public so they stay quiet about it.
Ms Reynolds told the interview that her abusers were Bangladeshi, adding: “Mostly it was a Muslim grooming gang.”
She added: “I’m disappointed, I am heartbroken. But equally as well, I’m not surprised. It’s another way to silence everybody so that the government and the authorities look like they’re doing the job, but they’re. They’re not. It’s. It’s basically a whitewash.”
Ms Reynolds was speaking to LBC’s Nick Ferrari at Breakfast
