I tried to shield Brianna from online hate… how many deaths will it take for social media giants to act asks Esther Ghey

IT was a chilling prediction of the horror to come.

“I was afraid I would come home from work one day and find Brianna raped and ­murdered,”; whispered her mum Esther Ghey, recalling her ­darkest fear.

She was terrified that her sassy, sharp-tongued, 16-year-old daughter had befriended sadists on the dark web.

But Brianna was not killed by a stranger she met online.

She was lured to her death by schoolfriend Scarlett Jenkinson, along with Eddie Ratcliffe, a boy she had never met.

The twisted pair, both 15 at the time, took Brianna, who was trans, to a local park, where they stabbed her 28 times with a hunting knife.

The murder sparked shock and condemnation across the world.

Now a powerful new ­documentary, which includes exclusive interviews with Brianna’s closest friends and murder detectives, explores the ­haunting lead-up to the crime.

For the first time, Cheshire police have also shared their bodycam footage and disturbing custody suite interviews with the blank-faced ­killers, who were caught within hours and have since been jailed for life.

Jenkinson and Ratcliffe have never shown any remorse.

They were sentenced to 22 years and 20 years respectively at Manchester crown court last February after being ­convicted of the murder, which horrified even hardened cops.

In the ITV film, Brianna: A Mother’s Story, Detective Superintendent Adam Waller, who led the investigation, said: “I have attended a number of murder scenes, but not one of them was as horrendous as that in terms of the injuries.

“It was the most atrocious knife murder I have seen in 26 years of policing.

“The level of depravity will stay with me forever.”;

‘I tried to protect her’

It emerged in court that Jenkinson and Ratcliffe had first tried to kill ­Brianna by mixing strong painkillers into a McDonald’s milkshake in a bid to make her death look like suicide.

When that failed, they resorted to more extreme measures, with devastating consequences.

Struggling to contain her ­emotions, Esther, 38, admits in the film that she did not know the full extent of what was going on behind her daughter’s bedroom door in the months before her life was cut short.

They battled over Brianna’s ­excessive mobile phone use, but she changed her passwords and created multiple accounts to prevent her ­worried mother from checking up.

“Every time I speak about Brianna, it reminds me of what I’ve lost,”; said Esther.

Losing a child is like having a hole in your heart. You try to fill it with other things. Brianna is such a good example of the suffering young people go through now

Esther Ghey

“Our relationship towards the end was really quite strained because the more I tried to protect her, the more she pushed me away.

“I struggled to monitor it — it was a constant stream of worry.

“No matter how much love, ­compassion and empathy you pump into your child, they go online and see harmful messages of hate.

“I was her mum, always complaining about her behaviour.

“I was so naive.

“Hopefully, no parent will ever be in the situation I was in.”;

Esther, from Warrington, Cheshire, firmly believes Brianna would still be alive if her killers had not been able to dredge violent content, including torture and murder videos, from the deepest reaches of the dark web.

She also told how her daughter became addicted to social media during the Covid lockdowns, following her transition from Brett to Brianna at the age of 14.

The social media companies have a moral responsibility to make sure harmful things aren’t happening online. They are making money from us wasting time online, and when you realise that, it is quite shocking.

Esther Ghey

It is an issue that has been put into sharp focus by the Netflix drama Adolescence, which follows the arrest of a 13-year-old boy for murder after he became obsessed by online content from the toxic “manosphere”;.

Esther’s husband, Wes Powell, had been a loving stepfather to Brianna and her older sister Alisha since he met Esther ten years ago.

They were a close-knit family and even chose Brianna’s new name together — Alisha persuaded her against choosing Blossom because “it sounded too like a stripper’s name”;.

But Wes chooses to remember ­Brianna as the carefree kid she was when he first met her aged eight.

He said: “She was obsessed with gymnastics but, as she entered her teens, the sociable side of her personality dipped and at secondary school her behaviour became disruptive.”;

Wes recalled how Brianna changed when she transferred to Birchwood High School to make a fresh start after the first Covid lockdown.

But it was there she met killer ­Jenkinson.

“Brianna was fragile, vulnerable and gullible when she met Scarlett,”; Wes recalled.

“She had never been on a bus on her own before that final day she went to meet them — that shows the level of control Scarlett had over her.”;

In the documentary, Esther also has a meeting with Facebook whistleblower Arturo Bejar.

He had a senior role at Meta, the US tech company that also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, between 2009 and 2015, and again from 2019 to 2021, when part of his job was to ­protect users from online harm.

But he realised the safeguards were not working when his own 14-year-old daughter started getting sexual advances via Instagram.

As they stroll beside the Hudson River in New York, he tells Esther the extent of the problem: “Misogyny, harassment — it turns out that all of her friends were experiencing the same thing.

There is so much harmful ­content and negative influences that children can access. It’s something that really needs to be looked into. The statistics are shocking.

Esther Ghey

“I was shocked.

“Every kid is going to have their life harmed in some awful way by this product.

“It really doesn’t need to be this way.

“Why do people post hate? Because it gets views.

“People are defenceless against it.

“It’s like sending your kid into the worst neighbourhood where you know they are going to be sold drugs.”;

­Brianna’s family noticed a sharp decline in her behaviour when she began engaging in “dangerous”; interactions with strangers online.

She amassed thousands of followers after her make-up tutorials started going viral — but, as her digital ­popularity soared, she started self-harming and starving herself.

Social media also fed Brianna’s insecurities about her appearance, and she was diagnosed with ADHD and autism.

“She lost so much weight she had to be hospitalised,”; Esther revealed.

“I tried to help — her anxiety was ­spiralling.”;

Esther, who suffered from body dysmorphia herself as a teen, has never visited the spot where Brianna died and has refused the council’s offer of a memorial bench.

But astonishingly, she has forged a friendship with killer Jenkinson’s mother.

Esther says she has no sympathy for the two murderers, but felt sorry for their parents who lost a child, too.

In an extraordinary act of kindness, she regularly meets with Emma Sutton “to understand what she has gone through”; and says she feels no resentment or anger towards her.

“I saw how broken both mothers were,”; Esther said.

“I can’t imagine any parent would go out of their way to make their child the way they were.

“Meeting Scarlett’s mum was really emotional.

“It was good for both of us.

“We speak every week.

“It’s been healing for me and Emma.

“Both of us are mothers who are trying to navigate something nobody should ever have gone through.

“I could either hide away, or I can try to take a more positive approach and actually make something good out of a horrific situation.

“If you have empathy towards ­yourself, then you have empathy towards others.”;

Esther, who worked as a food ­technologist until Brianna’s murder, now has two clear goals: To introduce mindfulness training in schools and to reform the internet with tighter child safeguarding for social media and mobile phones.

Feel threatened

British Online Safety Regulator Ofcom says most children see ­harmful ­content while they are still of ­primary school age.

I hope this documentary contributes to the push for children’s welfare online and offline. I wonder how many more deaths it’s going to take?

Esther Ghey

Esther has met PM Keir Starmer and raised more than £95,000 to promote her passionate and ambitious campaign, Peace In Mind — which she hopes will be her daughter’s legacy.

She said: “I’m at the point now where I would say ban under-16s from social media.

“It’s an absolute cesspit.

“I’ve reported so many hateful comments, but I always get the response that they haven’t done anything wrong.

“The social media companies say it isn’t something they can take down.”;

Esther is also calling for a public inquiry into peer-on-peer violence, which is rising sharply across the country.

During filming, she visited a blighted New York high school, where many pupils carry weapons because they feel threatened, and met grief-stricken dad Tony Mizell, whose daughter Emery was stabbed by another 15-year-old in the Bronx following an online dispute.

“Losing a child is like having a hole in your heart,”; she said.

“You try to fill it with other things.

“Brianna is such a good example of the suffering young people go through now.

“She can really be someone people can learn from.

“This is something I’ll continue to do until we see change.

“The social media companies have a moral responsibility to make sure harmful things aren’t happening online.

“They are making money from us wasting time online, and when you realise that, it is quite shocking.

“There is so much harmful ­content and negative influences that children can access.

“It’s something that really needs to be looked into.

“The statistics are shocking.

“I hope this documentary contributes to the push for children’s welfare online and offline.

“I wonder how many more deaths it’s going to take?

“I used to say, ‘Night night, love you’ every evening, but Brianna said, ‘Don’t say that any more’, so I stopped.

“Hold your children tight and never stop telling them you love them.”;

• Brianna: A Mother’s Story is on ITV on Thursday at 9pm.