Woman who duped friend is jailed for sexual assault

● Newland used prosthetic penis and pretended to be a man

A woman who duped her female friend into having sex by pretending to be a man has been jailed for six and a half years.

Gayle Newland, 27, created a “disturbingly complex” online persona to achieve her own “bizarre sexual satisfaction”, carrying on the deceit for more than two years.

Newland, of Willaston, Cheshire, was found guilty at a retrial at Manchester Crown Court in June of committing sexual assault by penetration, using a prosthetic penis without her blindfolded victim’s consent. She sobbed and slumped to the floor of the dock as sentence was handed down yesterday.

She was originally jailed for eight years in November 2015 after she was convicted of the same offences. But the conviction was later quashed on the grounds that the trial judge’s summing up of the case was not fair and balanced.

The retrial jury was not told of the fraud conviction until it had returned its verdicts.

Judge Stockdale told Newland: “She [the complainant] did not consent to these invasive acts of penetration because her willing compliance with your abusive behaviour was obtained by a deceit.

“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

0 The judge said of Gayle Newland’s case ‘the truth here is as surprising as it is profoundly disturbing’ an outsider unaware of the full history of the case might find it difficult to comprehend.

“But truth can sometimes be stranger than fiction. The truth, the whole truth, here is as surprising as it is profoundly disturbing.”

He went on: “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 20s, to wear a blindfold at all times when they met at the complainant’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 and videos. She spent “hundreds” of hours talking on the phone to her friend as Kye, telling her “emotionally vulnerable” victim that “he” was undergoing treatment for cancer and was paranoid about his appearance.

The complainant agreed to demands for her to wear a blindfold at all times during up to 15 sexual encounters and while watching television, going on a car journey and even sunbathing.