A woman who used a prosthetic penis to trick a woman into thinking she was having sex with a man has been jailed for six-and-a-half years.
Gayle Newland, who had previously been freed on appeal, fell to the floor of the dock sobbing and yelled out “No!” when the judge sent her to jail for a second time.
Newland was accused of emotionally manipulating a vulnerable student to have sex with her between 10 and 15 times as she posed as a boy.
As Judge David Stockdale QC sentenced her, six years for the assaults and six months for scamming her employer while on bail, he said: “It is difficult to conceive of a deceit so degrading or damaging to the victim on its discovery.”
“It was only when your control of her was absolute that you put your deceit to the ultimate test,” he added.
“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 to this case might find the facts difficult to comprehend.
“In this case the truth, the whole truth, is as surprising as it is profoundly disturbing.”
The Mirror reported that Newland created a fake identity of a boy called Kye the internet when she was 13, because she wasn’t sure how to approach girls in real life.
In 2013, she persuaded one her online friends – who thought she was a boy – to meet her in real life.
The court was told that Newland wore a mask to the meeting and persuaded her friend “to put on a blindfold” when they finally met up, because “he” was embarrassed about his appearance after surgery for a brain injury.
According to testimony, they spent more than 100 hours together, with Newland in her mask and the victim in a blindfold, watching TV and even sunbathing.
They had sex 10 times, but on the final occasion, the victim ripped off Newland’s mask, and her own blindfold, and saw Newland wearing a prosthetic penis.
Newland was also sentenced to six months after it emerged she had defrauded her internet ad agency while on bail from her first trial.
She’d created at least 10 fake blogger profiles that received money from her company to advertise clients’ goods, allowing Newland to pocket at least £9000.
In 2015, Judge Roger Dutton at Chester Crown Court described her as ‘scheming’, ‘deceitful’ and ‘highly manipulative’.
“He said the crime was so unusual he could depart from normal sentencing guidelines,” The Mirror reported.
“You were so convincing in your cruel deception of [the victim] she thought she had finally found a man she could love and be with.”
The prosecution said it was an “unusual case” set against an “extraordinary background” in which the defendant targeted the “naive and vulnerable” complainant.
In 2015, Newland’s legal team said the victim’s account was simply “impossible to believe” and that “a woman of her sexual experience could not have been tricked into thinking she had had sex with a man.”
Newland will now be on the sex offenders register for life and is banned from owning a device that can access the internet as well as seeking to befriend anyone using a fake identity.
