Prosthetic penis sex attacker Gayle Newland jailed

A woman who wore a prosthetic penis and tricked her blindfolded friend into sex has been jailed.

Gayle Newland, 27, of Willaston, Cheshire, created an online persona pretending to be a man and continued the deceit for two years.

A retrial jury found her guilty of committing three sexual assaults, which she denied, using a prosthetic penis without her victim's consent.

She was jailed at Manchester Crown Court for six-and-a-half years.

Sentencing her, Recorder of Manchester, Judge David Stockdale QC, said: "Truth can sometimes be stranger than fiction.

"The truth, the whole truth, here is as surprising as it is profoundly disturbing."

He added: "It is difficult to conceive of a deceit so degrading or so damaging for the victim upon its discovery."

Newland was originally jailed for eight years in November 2015 after she was convicted of the same offences, which happened in 2013.

But the conviction was later quashed on the grounds the trial judge's summing up of the case was not fair and balanced.

During the retrial the victim, who gave evidence behind a curtain, told the court she was persuaded by the defendant to wear a blindfold at all times when they met.

She said she only found out she was having sex with a woman - rather than a man - when she finally took off her mask.

The victim told the court she thought she was having sex with Kye Fortune - a fake Facebook profile Newland originally created when she was 15 years old, using an American man's photographs and videos.

She said: "There was no point until the day I took the blindfold off that I thought for one second that a woman was the person behind this."

Newland denied concealing her gender and claimed both women were gay and struggling with their sexuality when they met and had sex, with her as Kye, during role-play.

The defendant received concurrent terms of six years for three counts of sexual assault.

She was jailed for an extra six months for defrauding her former employers - an internet advertising agency - of £9,000 by creating fake client profiles between March 2014 and September 2015.

The court heard she had held a senior position at the firm, which paid bloggers to post content.

Simon Medland QC, prosecuting, said Newland "manipulated" the firm's payments system in which contributors were rewarded with small sums for posting content.

Judge Stockdale earlier lifted reporting restrictions on the fraud.

The retrial jury was not told of the fraud conviction until it returned its verdicts.