A woman has been found guilty of sexual assault for pretending to be a man in order to trick one of her friends into having sex with her while wearing a blindfold.



Gayle Newland, 25, protested her innocence from the dock at Chester crown court after being found guilty of three counts of sexual assault on Tuesday.

She had admitted using a male alter-ego called Kye Fortune to chat up girls online, saying she was not comfortable with being a lesbian and found it easier to approach women that way. But she denied sexual assault, claiming her accuser, also aged 25, always knew she was pretending to be a man as they engaged in roleplay while struggling with their sexuality.

The pair had sex about 10 times until on one occasion the complainant took off the blindfold and saw Newland wearing a prosthetic penis, her breasts restrained by bandages under a swimming costume, her long hair covered by a hat.

On Tuesday, a jury of eight women and four men convicted the defendant, from Willaston, the Wirral, of three counts of sexual assault by penetration, which took place at the complainant’s flat. She was cleared of two similar offences said to have taken place at hotels in Chester: largely after her defence was able to prove she had not purchased the prosthetic penis until after those encounters.

The jurors reached majority verdicts on which 10 of them agreed on each of the three guilty counts after six hours and 11 minutes of deliberation.

Adjourning the case for pre-sentence reports, Judge Roger Dutton told the court that Newland had “serious issues surrounding her personality”.

He told Newland the consequences of her behaviour “may be serious”, prompting her anguished response: “How can you send me down for something I have not done?” She will be sentenced in November following assessments by psychiatrists and probation.

It was certainly one of the more unusual trials held at Chester crown court in recent years. “You have heard details of the event that you may not discuss with a loved one never mind a stranger, but you have to talk about it round the table,” the judge, Roger Dutton, told the jury before they began their deliberations on Monday.



By this point, they had seen an eminent QC, Nigel Power, brandishing a lurid pink strap-on dildo, as he questioned his client, Newland, about when she had bought it, how she put it on (“like a harness” was the answer) and whether her accuser knew she was wearing it when they had sex.

They had listened to the extraordinarily personal aspects of two women’s sex lives. It was a task they took commendably seriously, with one jury member complaining to the judge halfway through the trial that they had noticed a man in the public gallery smirking. The smirker was duly shamed by Dutton, who said sternly: “I can assure you, the juror does not find this case funny at all.”

The jury’s job was to decide which of the two 25-year-old women who gave evidence before them was lying. Was it Newland, the tearful defendant, whose sobs became so convulsive in the witness box that she had to take frequent breaks?

Or was it her accuser, her former friend? A calm but “very gullible and naive” young woman as the prosecution put it, who rejected the offer to give evidence via video link or from behind a screen, in order to insist she would never have brought such an “embarrassing” case were it not true? “I wanted to make sure she didn’t have the chance to do this to anyone else,” she told the jury.

The complainant’s case was that she was so desperate to be loved that she suspended her disbelief during her two-and-a-half year relationship with Newland, whom she truly believed was a man called Kye Fortune. Kye told her he was insecure about his body, having lost muscle tone following treatment for a brain tumour and a car accident. Because of these body consciousness issues, he asked her to wear a blindfold every time they met, even when they watched films together or went out in “his” car.

She agreed. Giving evidence last week, the complainant said: “Every time I met up with Kye Fortune, I either had the mask on already or he would wait outside the door and I would put it on. I was so desperate to be loved. It’s pathetic, so desperate for love, so desperate.”

She was heterosexual, she insisted, and thought Newland was too. She admitted she had been perhaps foolish to have sex with someone she had never seen in the flesh, but insisted she only ever consented to sleeping with a man, not a woman wearing a strap-on.

It was around the law of consent that Newland was charged, the prosecution alleging she knew full well that her friend had not seen through her disguise, and would not have consented had she known the truth.

Newland’s defence was that the complainant knew “from the get-go” that she and Kye were one and the same. She claimed the pair met not online but in a club in Chester and confided in each other that they were both attracted to women but weren’t yet out to friends and family. She testified that she told her accuser that she talked to girls on Facebook using the alias Kye Fortune. The woman added Kye as a friend shortly after, she claimed.

Insisting that the complainant knew the truth, Newland told the jury she did not even try to differentiate Kye from herself, pointing out that she told the complainant they both had the same birthdays, and were both into “chickflicks” and R&B music, both had obsessive compulsive disorder, and both had a dog called Gypsy. She insisted that when they talked on the phone she used when playing Kye, she never made any attempt to hide her voice.

The jury didn’t believe her. The complainant had always insisted that she only met Newland after striking up the online relationship with Kye, initiated by “him”.

Backing up her story was the evidence of another woman who had also been duped by Kye Fortune. She never met “him”. She figured out his true identity after realising he had the same dog as one of his Facebook friends: Gayle Newland. The other woman rang Kye’s number asking for Gayle. “Speaking,” said the woman. The game was up – at least, that time.

Newland’s accuser said she encountered Gayle in a rather different way. She told the jury that after three or four months of communicating on Facebook, Kye told her he had a close friend who was also in Chester and that she and her would get on. That friend was Newland. In course, they became firm friends and would socialise together and visit one another’s homes.

The complainant said she only realised the truth on 30 June 2011, two-and-a-half years after meeting Kye online, and after spending at least 100 hours in “his” company, always wearing a blindfold, usually made from a sleeping mask and a scarf.

On that afternoon, she said Kye asked her to give him oral sex, but that the testicles, as the prosecution put it, “didn’t feel right”.

“She removed her scarf and blindfold and to her horror discovered that she was not in bed with Kye – she was in bed with the woman she knew as her friend Gayle Newland, who was wearing a bizarre costume, which included the prosthetic penis strapped to her waist,” said the prosecuting barrister, Matthew Corbett-Jones, when he opened the case.

In the end, it was probably Newland’s behaviour after this dramatic denouement that secured her conviction. First, she tried to kill herself by jumping from a bridge in the canal in Chester. Having failed, she told a police officer she had done something her friend would “never forgive” her for.

That evening, the complainant sent Newland a text message accusing her of being sick and a “fake” who fabricated the present and the future. On 2 July, Newland sent a string of apologetic texts saying she had no confidence in herself and could only be herself elsewhere: “But in order to do that sadly I have to lie a little but I didn’t lie about being ill.”

She later sent a long email in which she admitted lying about who she was, saying she had to make up lies to cover her initial lie.

Confronted about these messages in court, Newland said she was so in love with her accuser that she would have said anything to win her back. Sobbing, she said: “All I knew was: I needed her in my life. I loved her. I didn’t want to be without her. I couldn’t imagine being without her. Stupid, in love, or whatever the hell you want to call it, but I think I would have done absolutely anything, said absolutely anything … as ridiculous as it sounds, for her to stay in my life.”

But she lost her friend, and now, depending on the sentence passed, she may also lose her freedom.



