Victim’s fury after girl posing as man in bed walks free
A MOTHER who was duped into sex by a woman posing as a man told of her anger yesterday at seeing her attacker walk free.
Carol Sanders, 28, waived her anonymity to condemn judge Michael Heath’s decision to impose a suspended sentence on Fiona Manson.
She said she had been left a ‘victim of a sex attack and political correctness’.
Manson, 25, a transsexual awaiting gender reassignment surgery, has since changed her name by deed poll to Kyran Lee and is now living as a man.
He appeared in court to be sentenced on Tuesday using the male moniker.
The court heard Lee had posed as a ‘muscular’ young single father called Joey G-Star Crislow. He wooed Miss Sanders through text messages and phone calls before they finally met.
Lee wore a male bodysuit and deerstalker hat as a disguise to bed Miss Sanders, using a prosthetic penis during the 2012 incident.
Judge Heath imposed a two-year suspended sentence after telling him: ‘It must have been enormously difficult growing up.’ But just a month earlier, Gayle Newland was jailed for eight years for a similar offence in which she slept with her female victim around ten times after pretending to be a man.
Yesterday Miss Sanders condemned the ‘soft’ sentence given to Lee and asked: ‘How can one person be jailed for eight years but my sex attacker just walks out of court?’ She added: ‘It’s disgusting. We were both raped to all intents and purposes. We thought we were having consensual sex with one person but they were someone else.
‘The inconsistency just ends up kicking victims like me instead of making us feel safe. It makes my skin crawl. I thought for the first time in years I’d feel safe and be able to sleep at night. But instead he’s back out on the street.’
The victim, whose surname has been changed, told The Sun she was single and pregnant when she began chatting with Lee online. It was around a year before they finally met. They went on a number of dates before the relationship became sexual. Miss Sanders, who like Lee is from Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, said: ‘We had what I thought was just awkward sex but it didn’t matter as I thought I was with a really nice guy. Looking back now it’s clear she was worried I would work out she was using a fake penis. It embarrasses me.
‘He always kept his clothes on in bed. He had such a deep voice and a man’s haircut.’ She went to police after her mother saw Lee working at a local McDonald’s, with his female birth name on his badge.
Miss Sanders said the revelation he was actually a woman caused her to undergo counselling for anxiety and depression and said she felt like she was grieving for ‘this person I loved’.
Lee pleaded guilty to assault by penetration, which carries a maximum sentence of life. He had been cleared of a further count of tricking a second woman into bed in 2008 after a trial at Lincoln Crown Court in October.
On Tuesday, barristers said that according to sentencing guidelines, Lee faced two to eight years. But Judge Heath gave him a suspended sentence after giving him credit for his guilty plea and deciding his actions were ‘not a ruse to practise lesbian behaviour’.
The court heard Lee is now awaiting gender reassignment on the NHS – but his victim accused him of making ‘a mockery of the system for people with genuine gender problems’.
Last month, Newland, 25, was jailed for eight years over a ‘complex’ twoyear deception in which she claimed her victim knew she was a woman.