BY IAN URBINA
New York Times

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The young woman who was found in 2007 in a backwoods trailer in West Virginia, where she said she had been held captive and raped, recanted her story on Wednesday.

“Megan Williams was 20 years old in September 2007 when she reported that she had been kidnapped, raped and tortured in an allegedly racist attack,” Byron L. Potts, Williams’ lawyer, said Wednesday in a brief statement. “Megan Williams is now recanting her story.”

The turn of events represents a shocking reversal in a racially charged case that led to the conviction of seven people, all but one of whom are serving lengthy prison sentences. It also raises questions about whether the prosecutor, who resisted strong pressure to pursue hate-crime charges based on race, should have gone further in checking Williams’ credibility.

But Brian Abraham, the former prosecutor for Logan County who handled the cases, said the seven people charged with the crimes relating to Williams’ abuse had been convicted based on physical evidence and their own corroborating statements, not on Williams’ testimony.

“The ironic part of this whole thing is that we were criticized by Ms. Williams and her supporters for allowing the defendants to take plea agreements,” Abraham said, adding that the reason he offered plea agreements was that he was skeptical of Williams’ testimony.

At a news conference, Potts added that Williams had made up the story to exact revenge on a boyfriend who had beaten her up. She was coming forward because she no longer wanted to live a lie, Potts said.

Williams, in a January interview with The Call and Post newspaper in Cleveland, where she now lives, said she had been abused at the trailer. But she said her mother, whom she feared, made her embellish the story for financial gain. Williams’ mother, Carmen Williams, died in June.

Abraham added that Williams’ initial police report corresponded with the physical evidence and crime scene. “But then,” he said, “Ms. Williams began talking to the media and her story grew and changed, and that is when we stopped relying on anything she said.”

Williams, who is black, said the beatings sometimes involved racial epithets. Many civil rights leaders were critical of the prosecutor’s offer of plea agreements to the defendants, all of whom are white, and his pursuit of hate-crime charges against only one of them.

The Rev. Al Sharpton addressed a 2007 rally against hate crimes in Charleston, the state capital, and gave $1,000 to Williams’ family as a Christmas gift.

He said Wednesday that he had sent a letter to the current Logan County prosecutor, John Bennett, asking him to look into Williams’ new statement. “If the prosecution depended on something Ms. Williams said that she is now saying is false, the prosecutor needs to reopen this case,” Sharpton said. “And I told Ms. Williams exactly that.”

Those charged with the crimes against Williams may have been easy targets for such accusations because they had a history of violent crime.

At the time of the alleged assaults, Williams was staying at a ramshackle trailer owned by Bobby Brewster and his mother, Frankie Brewster, in Logan County, about 50 miles from Charleston. Brewster had killed his stepfather at the trailer when he was 12, the authorities said, and served time at a juvenile facility. In July 1994, Frankie Brewster shot and killed an 84-year-old woman she was looking after, also in the trailer, according to court records. She served six years at a state correctional facility and was paroled in 2000.

The police discovered Williams at the trailer in September 2007 after receiving an anonymous tip that she was being held captive. Williams later told the police she had been stabbed, sexually assaulted, beaten with sticks, forced to eat human feces and doused with hot water.

But in correspondence with The New York Times starting in February 2008, one of the accused offered a more complicated picture of life at the trailer.

In a letter in March 2008, that person, Alisha Burton, wrote that Williams was indeed held captive but only after a romantic relationship with Brewster had taken a turn for the worse.

“At the end, Frankie and her son, Bobby, would take turns pushing the chair by the door and sleeping there at night,” Burton wrote. “They made sure she wouldn’t go get the help she needed when she was cut by Bobby. She was held there for a week after she was cut by Bobby and Frankie B. b/c they was scared someone would get the law.”

Burton confirmed that Bobby Brewster had beaten Williams, but rejected the notion that the abuse was a hate crime, since Williams and Brewster had dated for months.