Williams was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in jail in January 2023 for perverting the course of justice after a jury found she had lied and gone to extreme lengths to frame five men, including inflicting injuries on herself. Her viral post had previously triggered a wave of hate-related crimes against Barrow's Asian community. The series explores whether there was any 'truth beneath the lies' and whether the focus on proving Williams lied led to the denial of a wider grooming problem.
The series, produced by Sandpaper Films, features interviews with Williams' family and survivor testimony. According to the series synopsis, it reframes the case to expose a far wider story, uncovering accounts from other women in Barrow whose allegations of abuse by a group of predominantly Asian men were dismissed or ignored. It also explores how far-right groups have weaponised such cases while agencies, wary of racism accusations, have often avoided confronting perpetrators' ethnicity.
Sandpaper Films, whose previous work includes 'The Betrayed Girls,' produced the three 60-minute episodes. Executive producer Henry Singer said the team had previously made a film on the Rochdale grooming scandal. When the Williams story broke, he said, something did not sit right with them regarding how the press was telling it. He described a three-and-a-half-year journey navigating a tricky landscape to separate fact from fiction, discovering a much larger story to tell not just in Barrow but nationally. Singer said the abuse of young girls has been ignored and dismissed for too long and hoped the series would spark a long-overdue debate.