In September 2015, Gayle Newland stood trial accused of sex by deception. It was alleged that she created an online identity as a man and used this character, Kye Fortune, to lure another woman into a sexual relationship, which was consummated repeatedly with the assistance of a blindfold and a prosthetic penis. The woman believed she was having sex with Kye until one day her ring caught on his hat and she felt long hair. Tearing off her blindfold, she realised her male lover was actually her female friend. As these lurid, almost fairytale details seeped out, the case went viral. “Sex attacker who posed as man found guilty” was one of the milder headlines.
The trial caught Izabella Scott’s attention because it was a real-life example of a plot device she recognised from literature. The bed trick can be found in folk stories and operas, in Chaucer and Shakespeare. Often told for comic effect, it concerns sex by trickery and deception, under cover of darkness. “The plot suggests,” Scott writes, “that, in bed, anyone might be mistaken for anyone else.”
It dropped out of literary fashion with the invention of artificial light, but here it was again, unfolding in a 21st-century court of law.
According to Newland, there was no bed trick. She claimed the two women, both in their early 20s, were closeted lesbians. She’d invented the online alter-ego of Kye Fortune in her teens, as a way of expressing her inadmissible sexuality. She claimed that her friend, who was granted anonymity and is designated Miss X, was aware at all times that Newland and Fortune were the same person. After all, they had the same birthday, same job, same pet dog and were studying the same course at university. It was a shared fiction, a way of managing the clandestine fact of the two women’s sexuality. The fight that led to Miss X going to the police was caused not by the discovery that Kye was Newland, but because Newland wanted to come out of the closet and tell her parents she was gay.
Miss X disputed all of this. She said she was lured into a romance at university by a handsome young man on Facebook, who repeatedly postponed a physical encounter by claiming a series of outlandish injuries and health emergencies. He had cancer, had been in a car crash, was in a coma: all classic features of a catfishing episode. But most catfishing is enacted entirely online, without the high risk of exposure that accompanies a real-world date. In this unusual case, Kye’s supposed illness was used to create a framework of deception in which a full-blown relationship could be carried out.
Kye claimed he was so badly injured that he was embarrassed to be seen. At his request, Miss X wore a blindfold at all their dates, from brief encounters in hotels to long lazy weekends of cooking and watching movies at home – something the defence lawyer found particularly implausible. Kye also claimed he wore a woolly hat to protect his damaged skull, and a body suit to secure the wires in his failing heart. Miss X believed all this, apparently never recognising her friend’s voice, her body, her smell.
A trial, especially one for rape or sexual assault, is in Scott’s words a “storytelling contest”, in which one person must be lying and the other telling the truth. It is exposing, often cruel, and gladiatorial in style. In 2015, Newland lost. She was found guilty of three counts of sexual assault. After an appeal, she was found guilty again at retrial in 2017. She served six years in prison and was placed on the sex offenders’ register.
Scott is less interested in whether this was the correct verdict than she is in investigating the larger meanings of this strange, sad trial, which exposed the private lives of both participants to ridicule. Though the bed trick appears in literature as a joke, it turns out to have a significant presence in the history of rape. Rape is notoriously difficult to prosecute. According to a 2021 government survey, only 1.6% of rape reports result in someone being charged, while fewer than one in five rapes are even reported.
UK rape law is based upon the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, which means Victorian attitudes to women’s sexuality and value still shape present-day law. Because the Victorians had a powerful belief in women’s physical inability to undergo unwanted sex, the crime of sexual fraud – rape by deception, by husband impersonators or immoral doctors – became a credible route to prosecution.
Although the 2003 Sexual Offences Act was a reframing of sexual offences according to the principle of consent, it absorbed much of the old law, including the crime of sexual fraud, now known as Section 76. This rarely used clause obviates the need to prove the defendant knew consent was lacking, meaning a prosecution is far easier to obtain. It was on this that Newland was convicted in her first trial.
Scott is a supremely good guide to this complex terrain, thoughtful, nuanced and agile. She holds unusual objects up for clear scrutiny. Female husbands, Victorian quacks, statues sentenced to death, prosthetic limbs, witches with stolen penises fattened up on oats. A lesbian herself, her deepest interest lies in how the court’s binary vision – of truth and lies, deception and innocence – collides with more complicated narratives around queerness and gender, as well as the necessary secrecy of the closet.
It turns out the case was not such an outlier after all. Newland was the fifth in a sequence of recent convictions for what has become known as “gender fraud”. “All suspects were accused of falsely presenting as men; some identified as trans, others as lesbians.” These convictions were not achieved by way of Section 76, but by case law known as the McNally principle, which states that “deception as to gender can vitiate consent”. Lies about wealth or status, or having a vasectomy, don’t have this special power to obviate the role of consent as a defence in rape and sexual assault, meaning even a willing yes can become a retrospective no. The McNally principle is how Newland was convicted at retrial.
Newland never described herself as trans and it wasn’t brought in as a defence by her lawyers, though by the time of her retrial she’d been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. But as Scott pores over the trial transcripts, she finds repeated scenes of Newland explaining her existence as Kye in ways that are allied to trans narratives – not as a falsehood or deception but as a way of being real and authentic, of expressing something true. (When I first heard about the trial I was struck that Newland wore her swimsuit under her clothes, a not-uncommon practice for gender dysphoric people.)
Whatever the facts of Newland’s own case, the McNally principle has clear implications for trans people, particularly in light of the 2025 supreme court ruling on biological sex. To put this focus on gender into context, the so-called spy cops, undercover police officers who carried out long-term relationships with more than 50 women as a way of deliberately shoring up their false identities, have still not been prosecuted. Rape by state, their victims called it.
• Olivia Laing’s most recent novel is The Silver Book. The Bed Trick by Izabella Scott is published by Atlantic. To support the Guardian order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
