Woman jailed for posing as a man to have sex with girl
A WOMAN was jailed for six-and-ahalf years yesterday for tricking another woman into believing she was a man and becoming her lover.
Gayle Newland, 27, created a “disturbingly complex” male persona called Kye Fortune on social media to lure the woman into having an online relationship.
Kye insisted “his” unwitting girlfriend wear a blindfold at all times when they met, claiming that cancer treatment left him paranoid about his appearance.
Newland even kept up the deception that she was a man when the couple had sex by strapping down her chest and faking her manhood with a plastic prosthetic.
In 2015 at Chester Crown Court, Newland was jailed for eight years but the conviction was later quashed on appeal.
Yesterday she was jailed for six-and-a-half years after a jury at Manchester Crown Court convicted her of the same sex offences again.
Newland, of Willaston, Cheshire, sobbed and slumped to the floor of the dock as the retrial’s sentence was handed down.
She screamed “no” and clung to the glass panels of the dock as security staff tried to lead her to the cells.
The former private schoolgirl was jailed for a total of six years for three sexual assaults.
She was handed an extra six months for a separate fraud offence after stealing £9,000 from her former advertising agency employers.
Jailing her, Judge David Stockdale QC said: “This was a deceit of such subtlety and cunning in its planning and execution.
“Truth can sometimes be stranger than fiction. The truth, the whole truth, here is as surprising as it is profoundly disturbing.
“It is difficult to conceive of a deceit so degrading or so damaging for the victim upon its discovery.”
Newland had told her victim, also in her mid-20s, to wear a blindfold at all times when they met at the unnamed woman’s flat.
She created a fictional Facebook profile, pretending to be a half-Filipino, half-Latino man called Kye Fortune, using an American man’s photographs.
She spent hundreds of hours talking on the telephone to her friend, telling her Kye was paranoid about his appearance.
The victim agreed to the bizarre demand of wearing a blindfold when together for sex, while watching television on the sofa and even when sunbathing.
The victim said: “I never thought for one second that a woman was behind this.”
Newland claimed she and her victim were lesbians struggling with their sexualities, dismissing her Kye persona as mere “role play”.
Fooled
During the trial, prosecutor Simon Medland, QC, asked the victim: “To whom were you consenting?”
She replied: “With Kye Fortune, the person I shared all my dreams with.”
The court heard Newland had written a letter to her victim, wishing her “nothing but happiness” in the future.
In the sophisticated fraud charge, the court heard that Newland, in her advertising agency role, paid bloggers to post content.
But Mr Medland said she manipulated her employer’s payments system by creating fake online writers – and paying them.
He said Newland fooled the company’s directors into thinking a person really existed and had really done the work.