8 years in jail for British woman in fake penis sexual assault case

A British woman who pretended to be a man and duped another woman into having sex, using a fake penis, is going to spend the next eight years in jail.

Gayle Newland was sentenced Tuesday in the U.K. after being found guilty of three counts of sexual assault last month, stemming from her two-and-a-half-year relationship with the victim.

According to BBC, Newland set up a Facebook account under the name “Kye Fortune” and interacted with her accuser for two years before finally meeting in person in February 2013.

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The 25-year-old from Cheshire, wanted the woman to wear a blindfold whenever they met in person and when they had sex because “he was insecure about his looks following supposed life-saving brain surgery,” the Irish Times reported.

It was only when the accuser took the blindfold off during a sexual encounter in June 2013 that she said she realized “Kye” was a woman using a prosthetic penis. Police arrested Newland the next month.

“Every time I met up with Kye Fortune, I either had the mask on already or he would wait outside the door and I would put it on. I was so desperate to be loved. It’s pathetic, so desperate for love, so desperate,” the Guardian reported the woman testifying Sept. 9.

The woman said she and “Kye” got engaged even before they met in person and began having sex.

The accuser also became friends with Newland herself; she told the court “Kye” suggested they meet and they went on to become friends.

Newland denied any deception and claimed she met the woman in a club in the city of Chester and that the victim knew she was “Kye” all along. She claimed she told the woman she hadn’t come out as gay to her family and used the “Kye Fortune” alter ego to meet girls online.

Judge Roger Dutton called Newland an “intelligent, obsessional, highly manipulative, deceitful, scheming and thoroughly determined young woman” in handing down the sentence.

“You pursued this course of conduct over a lengthy period during which you played with her affections, acting entirely for your own sexual satisfaction and choosing to ignore the devastating impact that the eventual discovery of the truth would have on her,” he said.

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While the verdict may be justice for the victim, some legal experts have questioned the impact the case could have on court cases involving transgender individuals.

“This particular, and now all too familiar, criminal justice and media trope is alarming for a variety of reasons,” Keele University law professor Alex Sharpe wrote in an article published by the New Statesman. “These include legal inconsistency, in that gender identity is singled out as the piece of information or slice of subjectivity that demands revelation, the ease with which desire-led intimacy and consent are legally uncoupled, and problematic conclusions of deception in cases involving transgender defendants.”

Nottingham Trent University lecturer Samantha Pegg believes the case raises “very thorny questions about gender and sexual consent – and about what, exactly, we are required by law to reveal to our sexual partners.

In a column published in The Week, she suggested people living in the gender role with which they identify may fear they could be committing a crime if they don’t reveal their “gender history” to new sexual partners.

“We should all have the right to consent to sexual activity with a person who is the gender of our choosing, and the law should uphold this right,” Sharpe wrote. “But it gets tricky when we consider the lies that are so often told to attract a partner. People often lie about their marital status, income and age, for instance. These lies don’t make any sexual activity that ensues unlawful.”