How middle-class Georgia became sex offender for kissing girl as a boy

How did middle-class Georgia Bilham from leafy Cheshire village become convicted sex offender for kissing another girl – who said she thought she was a boy?

• Georgia Bilham, 21, had faced 17 charges of sexually assaulting the 19-year-old
• But a jury took just three hours to throw out all the charges but the first one
• Now MailOnline reveals the full story behind case that made headlines globally 

On a warm August evening nearly two years ago, Peter Bilham received a message on Facebook from a young woman he had never previously met.

Nothing could have prepared the 60-year-old garage owner from Tarporley, Cheshire, for what it said. Apologising for breaking the news in this way, the woman — whom we will call Bella* — told Peter his only daughter, Georgia, had been posing as an orphaned boy called George from Birmingham and had fooled her into having a sexual relationship.

‘Your daughter put on a male accent for this amount of time and wore lad clothing including boxers, where she puts something in her pants to pose as a penis, completely fooling me,’ Bella wrote.

‘I understand that sounds naive, but your daughter is a very good liar — she had an answer for everything with names, places, times. There was a lot of uncertainty around this situation, but I never expected it to be so wrong and this twisted.’

She was getting in touch, she added, because while deciding whether to ‘take this further’, she felt Peter needed to get his daughter some ‘professional psychological’ aid.

Posing in a bikini on holiday in Spain with her long blonde hair and tanned skin, 21-year-old Georgia Bilham is clearly used to the attention generated by her looks

Nothing could have prepared her father Peter Bilham, 60, for the message he received on Facebook on a warm August evening two years ago informing him of his daughter’s crime. He is pictured outside court on Tuesday with Georgia 

‘She’s a fantasist who needs serious help,’ she added.

What Peter said to his daughter isn’t documented, but it’s probably safe to assume there were some awkward conversations had that night.

Ultimately, the exchange led to the start of a bizarre chain of events which ended this week in the austere environs of Chester Crown Court, where 21-year-old Georgia Bilham was convicted of sexual assault against Bella for duping her into kissing her when she believed she was a boy.

READ MORE: The woman who created a secret male alter ego to dupe girl into kissing her: Georgia Bilham went to top school near her parents’ £400,000 leafy Cheshire home – but got trapped in her own web of lies as she posed as a boy to seduce teen

She was cleared of a further 16 offences, but was warned by Judge Michael Leeming — who has ordered a report from a forensic pyschiatrist — that he could not rule out sending her to jail when sentencing takes place in August. ‘All options are open,’ he told her.

In her defence, Georgia had insisted that Bella knew she was a girl throughout their four-year — mostly online — ‘relationship’, but her 20-year-old victim swore that was not the case, and said she was devastated that she was duped so extensively for so long.

Either way, there is no refuting that Georgia Bilham created an extraordinary web of lies over many years, or that there are eerie echoes of another recent case in which a woman disguised herself as a young man in order to trick her female lover into sexual activity.

In 2017, former private schoolgirl Gayle Newland — also from Cheshire — was jailed for six and a half years for three counts of sexual assault, after using a £20 sex toy and a blindfold to dupe a fellow student into believing she was having sex with a man called Kye Carlos Fortune, a case described by the judge at her retrial as a ‘disturbingly complex and astonishing deception’.

The case made headlines around the world, with many questioning whether it was psychiatric help, not prison, that Gayle required.

As a teenager lacking in self-confidence and questioning her sexuality, the garage owner’s daughter created a male alter ego known as George (she is pictured posing as ‘George’)

Bilham sat smiling outside Chester Crown Court waiting for the jury’s verdict earlier this week

Georgia Bilham arriving at Chester Crown Court with her father earlier this week. He was a constant presence as the extraordinary details of his daughter’s deception were laid out – her mother nowhere to be seen

Bilham (pictured on holiday) grew up in a peaceful Cheshire backwater renowned for its canal and unusual ‘staircase’ locks

The same question could perhaps be asked of Georgia Bilham, whose blonde, feminine image was pictured in newspapers this week.

Her father Peter, who separated from Georgia’s mother when she was 12, attended court every day throughout the eight-day trial, to support his daughter.

READ MORE: Disguise used by woman, 21, to trick short-sighted teenage girl into thinking she was a boy called George is revealed as she is found guilty of sexual assault for kissing her – but cleared of 16 other charges

An only child, Georgia was raised in a £400,000 detached home in a sleepy backwater on the Shropshire Union canal. She attended a prestigious school in Tarporley, where she was remembered as an unremarkable loner by fellow pupils.

Former schoolfriends this week recalled her as a low-key girl who, while keeping her blonde hair long, preferred shapeless tracksuits to glamorous clothes.

By the time she left school at the age of 18, however, taking a job as a housekeeper at the 16th-century Swan Hotel in Tarporley, she had — publicly at least — embraced a more traditionally feminine appearance.

‘She was very girly in some ways,’ recalled a former colleague this week. ‘Georgia always had her eyelashes and her nails done, but she also liked wearing slouchy tracksuits. She was still a bit of a tomboy even then, but facially I can’t understand how anyone could mistake her for a man, she’s so pretty. She was very quiet, she didn’t seem to have many friends and just got on with the job.

‘I couldn’t believe it when I heard what she’d been accused of. It didn’t sound like the Georgia I knew.’

The court heard how Bilham, who claimed not to have got any sexual gratification out of the relationship, deceived her victim into thinking she was a young man after they began messaging online. Georgia Bilham is pictured outside Chester Crown Court this week

Earlier the court was told Bilham sent text messages, mocked up here, to the alleged victim 

Bilham is pictured arriving for the trial at Chester Crown Court with her father, a 60-year-old garage owner from Tarporley, Cheshire earlier this week 

In fact, the court heard how in 2017, when she was 15, Georgia set up a bogus profile on the social media app Snapchat, using secretly copied photos of a fellow male pupil with blond, spiky hair, and posted them under the username George_132.

George_132 would eventually evolve into George Parry, under whose guise Georgia tried to befriend at least two other women on social media. Among them was McDonald’s worker Nikita Hughes, from Wales, with whom Georgia also swapped messages on Snapchat.

The pair agreed to meet up, with Georgia picking her up in her car in early 2021. Giving evidence for the prosecution, Nikita, who now works as cabin crew, told the court there was something ‘weird’ about ‘George’, who had pushed her head away when she tried to look at ‘his’ face.

She decided not to see him again.

By then, Georgia had already been interacting with Bella for years, after befriending the then 14-year-old on Snapchat in 2017.

The pair, who are a year apart in age, quickly became close, chatting about food, clothes and music. During those conversations, Georgia told Bella she was one of three children raised in Birmingham and who now lived in Blacon, a suburb of Chester, with her grandma, as her parents had died.

‘George’ sent pictures of ‘his’ brother Alfie — in reality her nephew Freddie — and his ‘sister’ Izzy and her baby Enzo — in fact Georgia’s real-life best friend Izzy and her baby. Izzy was unaware of her friend’s deception until after she was unmasked.

George_132 would eventually evolve into George Parry, under whose guise Georgia tried to befriend at least two other women on social media. Among them was McDonald’s worker Nikita Hughes (pictured), from Wales, with whom Georgia also swapped messages on Snapchat

It was while still at school that Bilham secretly copied photos of a fellow pupil with blond, spiky hair to create the bogus Snapchat profile George_132X – who was to evolve into George Parry

While Bilham was cleared of 16 out of the 17 offences for which she was on trial, she nevertheless faces being placed on the sex offenders’ register

Puzzlingly, ‘George’ also said he had links to a gang of Albanian drug dealers. ‘He made stories up about how he’d got involved with Albanians ‘Denis’ and ‘Lumi’ and ‘Fatos’ and how Denis has took him under his wing and is like a big brother to him,’ Bella wrote in her bombshell Facebook message to Georgia’s father. ‘He had endless stories and pictures on his phone of the Albanians and out for meals in London and Birmingham.’

Not long after they began communicating, the pair met for the first time one winter evening in Blacon. In a gesture that would become a pattern throughout their relationship, ‘George’ wore his sweatshirt hood up throughout and spoke in a deep voice with a Birmingham accent. He also made a point of asking Bella — who had terrible eyesight — to remove her glasses.

READ MORE: Teenager who claims she was duped into sex by a woman pretending to be a boy called George ‘knowingly went along with a fiction’, court hears

They talked for about two hours, but in the wake of that encounter Bella blocked George on social media, telling ‘him’ there was ‘something weird’ about ‘him’.

Yet they resumed messaging a few weeks later, sometimes exchanging multiple messages a day, which over time ran into the thousands. In them, Bella repeatedly questioned ‘George’ about his honesty, accusing him of pretending to be something he wasn’t.

‘I do not know what to believe,’ she wrote to him in January 2021. ‘Sometimes an angel tells me you are innocent and sometimes the Devil tells me you are weird.’

Questioned in court, Bella denied that she knew ‘George’ was lying about his gender, although she admitted it was a peculiar friendship which on occasion felt more like an addiction.

‘It was not healthy,’ she said in the witness box. Giving evidence in her defence, Bilham put it differently, describing their online interaction as a ‘love-hate relationship’ it was ‘hard to walk away from’.

It was not until May 2021 that the pair met again face to face. By then, Georgia had acquired her driving licence and had access to her mother Michelle’s Ford Focus, allowing her to pick Bella up and take her for a drive.

On the second occasion she did this, they kissed for the first time — an interaction for which Georgia would subsequently receive her conviction for sexual assault.

Jurors heard how that same night, in the small hours, Georgia lost control of the car and drove into a hedge, which meant the police were called.

She subsequently had to give her realname, with attending officer PC David Fallows testifying in court that he had informed Bella that the person she knew as ‘George’ was actually a female called Georgia.

As a result, Fallows said, Bella was ‘distressed’ and ‘crying’ and ‘hunched over in a foetal position’ as he drove her home.

The judge also ordered a pre-sentence report before his final sentence and warned her that prison could still be an option. Georgia Bilham is pictured on Wednesday 

Bilham admitted being caught up in a ‘web of lies’ but denied getting a ‘buzz’ out of deceiving the teenager, maintaining throughout that she thought the woman she had sex with believed she was a woman. She is pictured on Wednesday as she embraces a young man in a hug

The prosecution said Georgia managed to assuage Bella’s suspicions by saying the misunderstanding was caused by ‘George’s’ Albanian associates, who had mistakenly given ‘him’ a female fake ID. She also sent a picture of a boy’s body which didn’t show a face. 

Either way, the duo continued seeing each other every few days, walking Georgia’s dog or visiting local beauty spots. Throughout, Georgia continued to wear her hood up, insisting she was trying to remain low-profile because of her Albanian gang links while also encouraging Bella to keep her glasses off.

The pair were also sexually intimate, although they never had full intercourse. Instead, ‘George’ — who insisted on wearing tracksuit bottoms, a jumper and a hood even in bed — would perform sex acts on Bella, who said that on occasion while ‘spooning’ she ‘felt a willy-like figure’ against her leg.

In messages to her mum that were read out in court, Georgia spoke of using ‘boxers and socks’, which the prosecution suggested was what Bella could feel.

Georgia’s account was that this was, in fact, a reference to a former male lover’s underwear which her mother had found in a drawer.

As summer wore on, Bella’s suspicions mounted: the jury heard she had messaged a friend to say she feared George ‘could be a massive transgender’ and that she had also contacted George to suggest he be honest. ‘I just hope one day you have sorted your head and want to be true about who you really are with me because the bond between us is unbreakable,’ she wrote.

The prosecution said Georgia managed to assuage Bella’s suspicions by saying the misunderstanding was caused by ‘George’s’ Albanian associates, who had mistakenly given ‘him’ a female fake ID. She is pictured arriving to court on June 6

Yet in court she said that, while she knew something was wrong, she could never have fathomed the truth.

‘I knew there were deep issues but not that he was a girl,’ she told the court in evidence.

In the event, it would be Bella’s mother who saw that ‘George’ was not all he seemed when, in August 2021, she met him in person.

Bella’s mother, untroubled by sight issues, immediately thought George was a girl and told her daughter so. After consulting family and friends, some of whom mentioned Gayle Newland’s case years earlier, she decided to contact the police.

Georgia was arrested and interviewed under caution before being charged with 17 counts of sexual assault. She subsequently took down her Facebook page, although it was reinstated this week with a new profile picture, taken one morning before she attended court.

There seems little question that she carries regret for her actions. Chester Crown Court heard how Georgia had texted Bella a heartfelt apology, a sentiment repeated in several messages to her mother, calling her duplicity a ‘stupid mistake’ that she bitterly regretted.

‘It was never meant to go that far,’ she wrote. ‘The whole thing wasn’t me (crying emoji) I couldn’t see a way out of it. It was just lie after lie, I couldn’t see a way out.’

The most deeply puzzling question, of course, is why Georgia started out down such a path in the first place. Insisting in the witness box that she was not a lesbian, she struggled to explain why she had created her double life.

Bella, it seems, is haunted by the same question. ‘I would understand if it was a moment of madness but this has been years and thousands of lies,’ she wrote to Georgia’s father. ‘It’s shocking.’

* Name has been changed

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