Does she need help NOT 6 years in jail?
It’s such a bizarre case: the troubled private schoolgirl who tricked a female student into having sex with her by pretending to be a man. Now she’s been convicted of sexual assault ...
AS the jury foreman delivered the guilty verdicts, Gayle Newland shook her head and wailed: ‘I can’t go back to prison — I can’t.’ three weeks later, she returned to court for sentencing and was told she would be jailed for six-and-a-half years.
Newland once again failed to hold back her emotions, sobbing in the dock and stamping her feet. ‘No!’ she cried out.
Such reactions are perhaps unsurprising, since Newland has already had a taste of what is to come. the 27-year-old was originally convicted and sentenced to eight years in jail in 2015, but was freed from prison on bail after a successful appeal following criticism of the judge’s summing up, forcing the recent retrial.
While at hMP Low Newton, a maximum security prison near Durham, she spent time on the same wing as mass murderer Rose West. Newland, a privately-educated university graduate, rubbing shoulders with Britain’s most notorious living female killer? how on earth did that happen?
the answer lies in one of the most extraordinary and controversial criminal cases of recent times.
In brief, Newland was jailed for pretending to be a man to trick a female friend into sleeping with her. Posing as a male called Kye Fortune, she went online to seduce a fellow student at the University of Chester.
When they finally met in person, she persuaded her victim to wear a blindfold at all times. then, maintaining the deceit that she was a man by using a strap- on sex toy, Newland had multiple sex sessions with her.
the victim not only wore the blindfold during sex but also for at least 100 hours when the pair were together — going for drives, sunbathing and even ‘watching’ films. When the student finally ripped off her blindfold, she was horrified to discover Gayle Newland, not Kye, standing in front of her.
Unlike Newland, she was not a lesbian, and had she known who it was, she said, would never have consented. And it is that which goes to the controversy at the heart of the case.
Newland’s supporters rail both at her conviction and her sentence. how could an intelligent woman — as her victim undoubtedly is — have been duped for so long and in such a way? Doesn’t Newland’s explanation that both were in fact gay and that they were indulging in role-play make far more sense?
As for her sentence, that has been branded ‘shameful’, ‘cruel’ and ‘shocking’ by posters on a Facebook group set up in her name.
Similar sentiments have been expressed by members of the legal profession, who question how such a deception could merit a sentence that paedophiles and rapists do not always receive.
they say that a number of similar recent cases show that young men and women — often gay or transgender — are being unfairly treated by the criminal justice system purely because of confusion about their sexuality and gender.
‘I can’t help thinking that it doesn’t feel right to me to describe these cases in the same way as what you might think of classic sexual offending,’ says Matthew Graham, head of criminal law at law firm Mowbray Woodwards.
‘ Because it isn’t the same. You can do a hell of a lot and get a similar sentence: wearing a balaclava, you can walk up to someone on the street, drag them down an alleyway and sexually assault them. And to say that matches this case feels to me completely wrong.
‘the gravity of the offending is that Newland lied. She told a lie. And that seems to be the seriousness of it, rather than the heart of the sexual assault.’
that Gayle Newland is a complex character there can be no doubt.
Raised in a £500,000 house in Willaston, on the Wirral, she attended £12,400-a-year Queen’s School in Chester paid for by her father Brian, who ran a construction company.
At school, she began developing her online alter ego, Kye. At first she used the false name to speak to girls on internet chatrooms, but soon it became part of a bizarre double life, Kye Fortune’s character embellished with an American man’s photographs and videos.
Asked to explain why she hid behind this fake profile, Newland said: ‘I had gone from primary school where I was happy — a mixed primary school, where all my best friends were boys — to a completely different environment at an all-girls school. I knew I was attracted to girls, but I didn’t know what that meant. that was one reason: I was more comfortable.’
By the time Newland got to the University of Chester to study creative writing, she had used Kye to dupe unsuspecting girls on more than one occasion, but never before with such devastating effect.
her victim this time was also at the university. An attractive but vulnerable young woman, she had been brought up in a Methodist family and had recently split from a boyfriend, with whom she had been in an abusive relationship.
She told Manchester Crown Court that Kye first contacted her on Facebook in 2011, claiming he was a fellow student. they spent hours talking, coming to regard each other as boyfriend and girlfriend, despite never having met.
For a year, Kye stalled — claiming to be self- conscious of injuries suffered in a car crash and to be seriously ill with cancer.
But at the same time Kye was eager to introduce her to a ‘close friend’, Gayle Newland. the pair got to know one another in person, going to concerts and watching films together.
After a year, Kye also agreed to meet, but with strict conditions. She would have to put on a blindfold before he entered her room and she could not touch him.
As a precaution, Newland wore a woolly hat, swimsuit and bandaged her chest to hide her breasts. the woman agreed. She was ‘naive’, she admitted, and also ‘desperate to be loved’.
In this way they would have sex more than ten times.
the victim even agreed to requests to cover her eyes while watching films, eating dinner or sunbathing.
their relationship progressed in this bizarre way until the summer of 2013, when, during a sex session, she realised Kye actually had long hair. Pulling off her blindfold, she found Newland standing there, sex toy at the ready.
‘there was no point until the day I took the blindfold off that I thought for one second that a woman was the person behind this,’ she said.
Shocked, the victim ran out of her own house. Newland followed and CCtV footage showed them rowing in the street. that same evening Newland attempted suicide, jumping off a canal bridge.
‘ I have done something I shouldn’t and now my friend can’t forgive me,’ she would subsequently tell police.
the deception, the victim said, had a devastating effect on her life. She suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety as a result.
‘ I hated myself. I felt filthy, disgusting,’ she told the court. ‘there were not enough showers in the world to clean me.’
Newland’s version of events was very different. She claimed they first met in a nightclub, that they were both lesbians and that they had entered a consensual, but secret, relationship. As part of this, she claimed, she communicated with her girlfriend as Kye — as part of an ‘extended role-play’.
She told the jury: ‘ One of the reasons was that neither of us was out as gay; neither of us comfortable with our sexualities.
‘It’s fair to say both of us were genuinely struggling with it. It was like two stupid girls really, experimenting with our sexualities, if that makes sense. It felt a bit different; it was a bit of fun.’
Newland said the relationship broke down a week after she told the victim she was coming out as gay to her parents — and that the victim suddenly began making accusations.
her defence team also delved into the ‘devastated’ victim’s private life, highlighting the fact that within weeks of going to police she was having sex with a man.
‘Part of it is because I felt stupid that I had slept with this fake penis,’ the victim said during cross- examination. ‘Part of you wants to be reckless and sleep with men. Part of it is just being reckless. I slept with a lot of guys. I got drunk. I did a lot of things when the bottom of your life caved in.’
So, two very different stories. But on each occasion that they were laid out in detail before a court, the jury sided not with Newland but with her victim. In the latest trial, she was convicted by a 11-1 majority verdict of three counts of sexual assault by penetration.
‘this was a deceit of such subtlety and cunning in its planning, and was a deceit from your point of view so successful in its execution, that an outsider to this case might find the facts difficult to comprehend,’ said Judge David Stockdale QC, sentencing her to six years in prison for the assaults. But in this case, the truth, the whole truth, is as surprising as it is disturbing.
‘She did not consent to these invasive acts of penetration because her willing compliance with your abusive behaviour was obtained by a deceit.’
While the sentence may seem harsh, it is within guidelines for these sorts of offences. Newland perpetrated a deception that lasted for years, did not plead guilty, and had shown no remorse. the impact on the victim also had to be taken into account.
And yet some question whether cases such as this should be treated differently from other sexual assault cases — or indeed merit charges being brought at all.
Under section 74 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, a person consents to sexual activity ‘if he agrees by choice, and has the freedom and capacity to make that choice.’
In the Newland case, the prosecution had to prove that
‘I can’t go back to prison — I can’t,’ she wailed Her naive victim ‘was desperate to be loved’
She’d previously targeted three other women
the victim had not freely chosen to have sex; that the deception meant she had not made a free choice. She believed she was sleeping with a male, not a female, and had chosen to have sex on that basis.
But legal experts point out that when it comes to sex, deceptions are not uncommon. Some may exaggerate their wealth or social standing to improve their appeal, or claim to be single when in fact they are married. Others might choose to lie about their religion. But lies of this nature are not seen in law as sufficient to damage fatally the ability to consent freely. Gender deception, it seems, is. In recent years a number of cases similar to that of Newland have reached the courts. Y et none has resulted in such a lengthy sentence.
‘Normally, with the criminal law , you know that something is criminal; you don ’t need to be a lawyer to know something is criminal, that it is wrong ,’ says lawyer Matthew Graham.
‘I should imagine with the Gayle Newland case you could a sk 20 different people and get 20 different answers as to whether it is criminal or not, and what sentence it deserves.’
He says that cases such as this that actually reach court are merely the tip of the iceberg , and that many more will have come to the attention of the police but have not resulted in prosecutions due to lack of evidence, or to an unwillingness to give evidence.
There are also concerns about the implications of the case on transgender people. F or example, does someone transitioning who has undergone surgery but does not reveal this to a sexual partner become a sex offender?
‘These convictions send out a mixed message,’ says Samantha P egg, senior lecturer in criminal law at Nottingham Trent University. ‘ P eople who are transitioning are not seeking to deceive others about their gender , they are living and presenting as the person they are. I do think this leaves them in a difficult position.’
Newland herself was said to have had a ‘complex’ psychological background. She’d been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, in which a person can experience distress because there is a mismatch between biological sex and gender identity. She’d also been diagnosed with Asperger’s, a form of autism, as well as eating disorders, anxiety and depression.
But while accepting them as a mitigating factor, the judge said they were ‘not an excuse’ for what she had done.
Because it also emerged during the trial that Newland’s deception of the student was not her only one. Police gathered evidence that, as Kye, she had targeted three other women. The uncontested witness statement of one of them, who began speaking to Kye in 2009, showed a very similar pattern of behaviour.
The witness described falling in love with K ye online but being fobbed off with excuses, including about cancer treatment, whenever she pushed to meet.
Newland made no attempt to meet the woman, but allowed a relationship to develop even in 2014 while on police bail for offences against the original victim.
At the sentencing, it also emerged that Newland had pleaded guilty to an unrelated offence of fraud.
While on bail for the sexual offences, she had defrauded the marketing agency she was working for. Her company paid bloggers to endorse products in online post - ings, so she pretended to be ten fictional bloggers and invoiced the firm for £9,000.
For this offence she was jailed for an additional six months — meaning that she faces a total of six and a half years in prison.
Even when released, the stigma of what she did will remain with her. Newland was told that she must sign the sex offenders’ regis - ter, and remain on it for life.
‘Why sex offender?’ she tearfully asked from the dock when informed. A question some — but by no means all — will doubtless sympathise with.