Editor's Note: This story has been updated with Newland's conviction.

LONDON — They say love is blind.

A trusting British woman who was planning to marry her boyfriend says she agreed to wear a blindfold throughout their two-year relationship because her partner said he was too ashamed of the injuries he had suffered during a car accident.

When the woman lifted her blindfold during a sexual encounter in a hotel, she says she was stunned to discover that her boyfriend was a woman—and a woman that she knew well.

“I just pulled it off. Gayle was just standing there,” the woman told police. “I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it.”

The complainant, who cannot be named for legal reasons, claims she was sexually assaulted by her friend who had tricked her into believing she was a man and had sex with her using a strap-on.

Gayle Newland, 25, was found guilty of three counts of sexual assault in Chester Crown Court on September 15.

It is alleged that she approached her friend on Facebook using a fake account under the name of Kye Fortune, a young man who was half-Filipino/half-Latino.

After talking online, the court heard that Fortune confided in his new friend that he had been involved in a car accident. In the aftermath of that crash, he said doctors had discovered a brain tumor.

For months they talked online and over the phone, but Fortune insisted that he was too sick to meet up in person. The alleged victim told police that the man did have a strangely high-pitched voice but they eventually became close.

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

She said the man had mailed her an eternity ring and she believed they were engaged to be married.

Eventually, the complainant said Fortune agreed to meet in person on the condition that she wear a blindfold because he was still recovering from the various afflictions and he was “anxious about the way he looked.”

When she walked into a hotel room in the historic city of Chester near Liverpool, she says “Fortune” was in the bathroom. In the bedroom, she says, petals and Hello Kitty bears decorated the bed and a face-mask and scarf had been laid out.

The complainant says she placed them over her eyes and her lover emerged from the bathroom. After they had sex, he allegedly claimed that he needed to return to a hospital for further treatment.

The date was repeated several times.

On the last of their meet-ups, the complainant says she sensed something was wrong. “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,” she said. “I was sat on the bed, he was standing up. Something in my mind said, ‘Pull it off! Pull it off!’”

“Gayle was just standing there,” she says. “Straight away she held her hand down over her face and said, ‘It’s not what you think.’”

The complainant claims her friend tried to explain away her extraordinary deception by comparing it to the movie 17 Again, in which Matthew Perry (Chandler from Friends) is transported into the body of Zac Efron.

After the stunning discovery, she said she sent a series of abusive text messages to her alleged tormentor.

“How could you do this to me for two years? You have been a fake, you have manipulated me. Fake life, fake love,” she wrote. “Are you for real? You should be locked up for what you have done. You really are a piece of work. I have just one question, why me?”

When the prosecutor asked why she had written those messages, she explained: “Because I was angry. I had just found out that the person I thought I was in a relationship with… not only (were) they not that person, it was a female. Someone completely different.”

Newland denies any wrongdoing.