A woman who posed as a man to trick a friend into sex using fake penis and a blinfold has been sentenced to six and a half years in prison.
Gayle Newland, 27, created a fake online identity on Facebook to set her plan in motion. She posed as a half-Filipino half-Latino man called Kye Fortune and developed a relationship with her victim, also in her 20s, over a two year period. Newland used photos of an American man on her Facebook profile and when they spoke on phone, she disguised her voice to sound masculine.
When they eventually met up, Newland told her victim to wear a blindfold because she was undergoing treatment for cancer and insecure about her appearance. It wasn’t until their 15th sexual encounter that the victim took off her blindfold to discover she was having sex with Newland not a non-existent man called Kye.
Sentencing Newland today, Judge David Stockdale QC said the offences demonstrate “an extraordinary degree of cunning and a chilling desire to manipulate and control the lives of others”.
When Newland heard her sentence, she grabbed hold of the dock’s glass panels and screamed “no” while shaking her head and crying. She looked at her family members who were present at the hearing and they shouted words of comfort and blew kisses.
Newland denied concealing her true identity. She claimed they were both gay and struggling with their sexuality. She said when they met up and had sex they used ‘Kye’ as a fantasy figure during role-play.
She was jailed for eight years in November 2015 after she was convicted by another jury at Chester Crown Court but the conviction was quashed in the Court of Appeal last December and a retrial ordered after it was ruled the trial judge’s summing up of the case was not fair and balanced. She was found guilty of three counts of sexual assault and cleared of a fourth count during the retrial.
