Gayle Newland: Woman found guilty of posing as a man to trick friend into sex at new trial

Prosecutor Simon Medland QC told the jury she was a ‘manipulative, deceitful and very crafty young woman’

Gayle Newland, pictured at a previous trial, will be sentenced on 20 July (PA)

A woman has been convicted of impersonating a man over two years in an “astonishing deception” to trick her female friend into sex.

Gayle Newland created a “disturbingly complex” online persona to achieve her own “bizarre sexual satisfaction”, Manchester Crown Court heard.

A retrial jury found the 27 year old guilty of committing sexual assault by using a prosthetic penis without her victim’s consent. She will be sentenced on 20 July.

​Newland was jailed for eight years for three counts of sexual assault in November 2015 by another jury at Chester Crown Court.

But the conviction was quashed in the Court of Appeal last December and she was granted a new trial by three Court of Appeal judges in London.

They ruled that original trial judge’s summing up of the original case was not fair and balanced.

A new jury has now found her guilty again.

Newland convinced her friend she was a man by putting on a deep voice and using a blindfold throughout a dozen sexual encounters during a two-year relationship with the victim, the court heard.

Her victim said she had been made to wear the blindfold at all times the pair were together, even while they sunbathed and “watched” a film at her flat.

She told the court she only realised her partner was a woman when she pulled her blindfold off during sex and saw it was her friend wearing a strap-on penis.

Newland claimed her accuser always knew she was pretending to be Kye Fortune – a Facebook profile she created at the age of 15 using an American man’s photographs and videos – as they engaged in role play while struggling with their sexuality.

She said no blindfold was used as they had sex on about 10 occasions at the complainant’s flat in Chester in 2013.

She told the court she did not strap bandages to her chest or wear a swimsuit and a woollen hat to conceal her appearance.

She insisted the complainant had spent “hundreds” of hours talking on the telephone to her friend as Kye and more than 100 hours in each other’s company.

Her accuser knew she was pretending and was a willing participant in sexual role play as both struggled with their sexuality, she said.

But prosecutor Simon Medland QC told the jury she was a “manipulative, deceitful and very crafty young woman”.

Newland “went to such astonishing lengths to control the complainant’s life and make her do the things the defendant wanted her to do,” he said.

It also emerged that Newland had been pretending to be Kye Fortune with at least three other women she met online.

One woman engaged in online and telephone conversations over a five-year period before she eventually worked out she had been deceived.

In a statement to the court, she said she started becoming suspicious when she noticed that houses in the background of some of Kye’s photographs appeared to be American.

Another woman rumbled her when she spotted a dog named Pixie on both Fortune and Newland’s social media profiles.

The verdicts can be reported after reporting restrictions imposed at the start of the retrial were lifted.