A woman who tricked a female friend into sex by pretending to be a man has been sentenced to six years and six months in jail.
Gayle Newland created a “disturbingly complex” online persona to achieve her own “bizarre sexual satisfaction” carrying on the deceit for over two years.
A jury at Manchester Crown Court last month found Newland, from Willaston in Cheshire, guilty of committing sexual assault by using a £20 prosthetic penis without her blindfolded victim’s consent, following a retrial.
The “manipulative, deceitful and very crafty” 27-year-old told her victim, also in her 20s, to wear a blindfold at all times when they met and she only found out she was having sex with Newland when she finally took off her mask.
Newland created a fictional Facebook profile, pretending to be a half-Filipino half-Latino athletic young man called Kye Fortune, using an American man named Carlo’s photographs and videos from his Myspace page.
The defendant spent “hundreds” of hours talking on the telephone to her friend as Kye telling her “emotionally vulnerable” victim “he” was undergoing treatment for cancer and was paranoid about his physical appearance.
She agreed demands for her to wear a blindfold at all times during sexual encounters and while watching television, going on a car journey and even sunbathing.
She earlier told the court from behind a curtain where she gave evidence: “I was so desperate to be loved. It’s pathetic, so desperate for love, so desperate.”
Newland claimed both women were gay and struggling with their sexuality when they met up and had sex, with her as Kye, during role-play.
She denied concealing her true identity but was found guilty of three counts of sexual assault and cleared of a fourth count.
Newland was jailed for eight years in November 2015 after she was convicted of the same offences by another jury at Chester Crown Court.
Newland, who graduated from the University of Chester with a degree in marketing and creative writing, wailed “I can’t go back to jail,” after being found guilty a second time.
On Thursday she crouched in the dock and wept as she received concurrent terms of six years for three counts of sexual assault in 2013.
Newland received a further sentence of six months to be served consecutively for defrauding her former employers of £9,000 by creating fake client profiles at the internet advertising agency while she was on bail.
The retrial jury was not told of the fraud conviction before it returned its verdicts. The Recorder of Manchester Judge David Stockdale QC lifted reporting restrictions on the fraud.
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