A woman has appeared in court accused of tricking another woman into having sex with her by bandaging her body and using a prosthetic penis to pretend she was a man, a court has heard.

The complainant says she thought she was with a man she had befriended on the internet called Kye Fortune, who had asked her to wear a blindfold as he was recovering from a brain tumour and did not want her to see his scars.

But the alleged victim said she later discovered the “man” was a friend, Gayle Newland, 25. Newland, of Willaston, Cheshire, is on trial at Chester crown court, where she denies five counts of sexual assault between February and June 2013.

The court heard that the alleged victim received a Facebook friend request in 2011 from Fortune. They communicated online and Fortune later told her he had been involved in a car accident, after which medics had found he had a brain tumour.

The complainant told police that he said he was having treatment in hospital and was not well enough to see her. But the pair spoke frequently on the phone, with Fortune’s voice described as high-pitched.

She told the interviewing officer: “He was saying how much I had helped him get through his illness. [He said] it was a sign, we should get married, we should have kids, we were going to do all sorts of things.”

During this time, the woman said she met Newland, who became a close friend and said she knew Fortune. Eventually, the complainant and Fortune decided to meet in person at a Chester hotel, the jury heard.

The woman told police that Fortune asked her to wear a blindfold because he was “anxious about the way he looked” and “could not walk properly” due to nerve and muscle damage. She said he was in the bathroom when she entered the hotel room.

The complainant said she put on the blindfold, a sleeping mask and a scarf, before a “shaking” Fortune came in and said he had signed himself out of a private hospital in Manchester. She claims they then had sex before Fortune said he had to return to hospital.

Further hotel visits followed, where they allegedly had sex again, the court heard. Describing what she claimed was their last sexual encounter before she went to the police, the woman said: “When I was having sex I grabbed for the back of his head and my hand got caught on something. It did not feel right.

“I was sat on the bed, he was standing up. Something in my mind said ‘pull it [the blindfold] off, pull it off’. I just pulled it off. Gayle was just standing there … I just couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe it. Straightaway she held her hand down over her face and said ‘it’s not what you think’.”

She told the interviewing officer: “I couldn’t believe that person would want to do something like this to me … these past two years [they] had fabricated this world around me. He … Gayle … pulled the wool over my eyes.”

The woman said she believed the deception would still be continuing if she had not removed the blindfold. The trial continues.