COLUMBUS, Ohio  The young woman 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, Ms. Williams’s lawyer, said Wednesday in a brief statement. “Megan Williams is now recanting her story.”

The turn of events represents a striking 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 Ms. Williams’s credibility.

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