Woman found guilty of sexual assault after tricking short-sighted teenager into thinking that she was a man
14 June 2023, 16:06 | Updated: 14 June 2023, 16:29
A woman has been found guilty of sexual assault after duping a teenage lover into thinking that she was a man.
Georgia Bilham, 21, had faced 17 sexual offences after being accused of deceiving an unnamed 19-year-old woman by pretending to be male, rather than female.
A jury dismissed all of the charges except one of sexual assault by kissing, which related to the night that they were intimate.
Bilham was told by the judge that she would be sentenced on July 19 - but he added that she would be placed on the sex offenders register immediately.
Jurors had heard that Bilham posed online as George Parry, a man from Birmingham. The prosecution said that the victim could not consent to sexual activity with Bilham because she thought her lover was a man.
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Bilham wore a hood while meeting her victim, who is short-sighted, and claimed to be "paranoid" because of a link to Albanian gang members.
Bilham admitted telling lie after lie to her victim - but argued that she thought the woman she had sex with believed she was really a woman and not a man.
Chester Crown Court heard that Bilham created a Snapchat account as George Parry, a male drug dealer from Birmingham. She and the victim met online, before meeting up and beginning a sexual relationship.
The victim said she felt some sort of 'hard willy figure' through Bilham's clothes when they were intimate. She only worked out that Bilham was a woman after looking into her on social media.
Bilham was cross-examined by prosecutor Anna Pope and admitted lying to her alleged victim.
Ms Pope said: "You knew she was not going to be sexually attracted to you as Georgia Bilham?"
The defendant replied: "I can't answer that."
Ms Pope said sex took place based on the complainant believing she was having sex with a man. Bilham said she enjoyed no sexual gratification from the encounters.
And Bilham again said she believed the complainant knew she was a female but Bilham did not want to tell her who she really was.
Ms Pope continued: "Why didn't you just say you are a female with a different name?"
Bilham replied: "Because I was caught in a web of lies."
The court heard last week how he victim's mother described her suspicions being raised as she discussed the relationship with her daughter.
She said that she saw Bilham for the last time when she went out to move her car.
"I was watching because I had this weird feeling in my tummy, so I was watching to see how George would react with me," she told the court.
"As soon as he saw me looking he pulled his hood over his face and put his head to the side."The woman said her daughter told her "George" kept his hood up because of social anxiety.
She added: "I asked her if she was doing sexual things with George and she said 'yeah'."I said 'with his hood up?' And she said 'yeah' and I thought 'bit strange'."
Bilham stayed at the mother and daughter's house about four times. The mother said she knew when Bilham had stayed because the toilet seat was left up.
She said that on the last occasion she met Bilham when he brought her a hot chocolate, wearing his hood up, and he was shaking as he put the drink down.
She said she later went into her daughter's bedroom and the pair were sitting in the room in "pitch black" with the blinds closed.
The mother said her daughter told her that Bilham could not be female because she "felt something in his pants".
But the alleged victim's mother later worked out that Bilham was female, not male, by putting together several clues in a spider diagram, she said.
The evidence that piled up included the fact that Bilham covered her face in photos with an emoji, a bracelet being found in his car, and her daughter finding a bank card in her name.
She told the court: "I was just like 'oh my God, oh my God, it's a girl, George is Georgia' and I felt completely sick."
In a message sent after she had been confronted about her real identity, Bilham told the complainant she hated herself for what she had done and had wanted to end it but "didn't know how".
She added: "I don't even dress like a lad, it just took over my life."It was (a) stupid, stupid, stupid mistake that shouldn't have happened."
Bilham's defence lawyer Martine Snowdon said that the victim knew that Bilham was really a woman.
"There is no doubt that Georgia Bilham lied about who she was, but they both knew it was fiction," Ms Snowdon said.
