'Elon Musk's rants made me sick' says survivor of child grooming gangs
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A brave survivor of Telford’s grooming gangs - who has devoted years of her life working for other victims - says she was left “sick” and “tearful” by billionaire Elon Musk’s online rants. Holly Archer, which is not her real name, was the first victim to alert the Sunday Mirror to the scale of the abuse gangs in Telford. With her help, after an 18-month investigation, we revealed how up to a thousand girls had been abused in the Shropshire town over four decades, and that the scandal was linked to five deaths.
Musk has tweeted more than 40 times about UK grooming gangs, calling for a national inquiry and a fresh general election. Holly said: “I feel like our voices, all of our hard work, has been twisted and our experiences have been exploited for who knows what reason? Is it for politics or radical racist reasons? I feel really proud of what we have done but for the first time today I sat down and cried about not feeling we have done enough.”.
Holly Archer’s abuse began aged 14 when she was introduced to perpetrators by boys her own age. She said: “Over the next four years, I was raped on a daily basis, sometimes by nine men a night. I had two abortions and my ordeal left me so broken I attempted suicide. It took me a long time to accept I was a victim of child sexual exploitation but when I did I became determined that no child should suffer the hell I had.”.
She was central to our campaign for an inquiry in Telford and said: “After the Mirror story in 2018, the truth about what it is like to be a survivor was in everyone’s faces. There was an extraordinary council meeting a few weeks later where it felt like a turning point. People began listening to what we were saying rather than trying to navigate through it using processes. Once that started to happen here and we were people in a room with opinions that was when the whole system changed.”.
