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Woman who posed as a man and duped friend into sex jailed after retrial

Written by on 21/07/2017

A woman who pretended to be a man and duped a blindfolded female friend into having sex has been jailed for six-and-a-half years.

Gayle Newland was found guilty of committing sexual assault by penetration, using a prosthetic penis, during a retrial at Manchester Crown Court in June.

Judge David Stockdale QC told the defendant during sentencing that it was "difficult to conceive of a deceit so degrading or so damaging for the victim upon its discovery".

The 27-year-old slumped to the floor of the dock as the sentence was handed down.

Newland, from Willaston, Cheshire, was originally jailed for eight years in November 2015.

But the initial conviction was quashed after it was decided the trial judge’s summing up had not been fair and balanced.

On Thursday, Judge Stockdale told Newland: "This was a deceit of such subtlety and cunning in its planning and was a deceit, from your point of view, so successful in its execution that an outsider unaware of the full history of the case might find it difficult to comprehend.

"But truth can sometimes be stranger than fiction. The truth, the whole truth here is as surprising as it is profoundly disturbing."

Newland had created a fictional Facebook profile, pretending to be a half-Filipino, half-Latino man called Kye Fortune.

During "hundreds" of hours on the phone with her victim, also in her twenties, "Kye" told her that "he" was having treatment for cancer and paranoid about his physical appearance.

The victim subsequently agreed to wear a blindfold during their meetings – not only during up to 15 sexual encounters, but also while watching TV, during a car journey and while sunbathing.

Newland had claimed both women were gay and denied concealing her true identity.

In an extract from a victim impact statement, the complainant said Newland had "managed to plague every attempt I have made to make my life positive".

She was left with "this continuous, ominous, unsettling feeling she has planted in what is left of my life".

Newland’s barrister, Nigel Power QC, said his client had significant and long-standing mental health problems.

It had been documented from an early age that she had social anxiety, general anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, an eating disorder and dyspraxia.

Mr Power said that since her first conviction, Newland had been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and gender identity disorder.

"The defendant now has good insight into those conditions and is obtaining such treatment as she can to help to come to terms with them," he said.

But while the judge accepted the psychiatric evidence that the risk of offending was "very low", he also noted that Newland had shown no remorse and maintained her innocence.

Nor did her mental health problems "excuse" her actions, the judge said.

(c) Sky News 2017: Woman who posed as a man and duped friend into sex jailed after retrial