A decade ago in northern England, a young woman named Gayle Newland was convicted—twice—of an unusual crime. Another woman, who was known variously as “Chloe” and “Miss X” in court documents and media reports, reported that she’d been a victim of sexual fraud. Newland, she said, had posed as a chronically ill man named Kye Fortune in order to become her lover; the gender deception was enabled by the use of a blindfold during sex. But whenever Newland took the witness stand to testify, she shared an entirely different version of events. She and Miss X were best friends and closeted lesbians, she said, and Kye was their shared fantasy, sustained over several years.
According to the British newspapers, particularly tabloids such as The Daily Mail and the Daily Express, the story was simple: Newland was a predator, carefully tricking her heterosexual friend into a lesbian relationship by pretending to be a man. The legal system and the juries affirmed this reporting, finding Newland guilty twice (the original conviction was overturned on a technicality). Newland’s actions resembled the kind of madcap fiction in which someone pretends to be the opposite sex and hijinks ensue (as in Twelfth Night or The Rocky Horror Picture Show); pretends to be someone’s husband in the dark (as in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales); or changes sex outright, raising deeper questions (as in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando).
But Izabella Scott, whose new book, The Bed Trick, is an astoundingly well-calibrated mixture of legal reporting and literary analysis, knows full well that a heavily publicized trial is hardly the best venue for understanding other people—especially how other people have sex. “Trials are storytelling contests,” Scott writes. “They are making a case, producing stories—competitive stories that use extremes in order to win.”
Scott is rightfully less interested in figuring out whether the verdict was correct (because it’s been litigated already) than in what the case illuminates about gender and truth. What preoccupies her is how the narrative device of the “bed trick,” so common in fiction and so rare in real life, came to fruition as a contest of wills between two young women. She wants to understand how two wildly disparate stories were created, what those stories tell us about ourselves, and what continues to make many people so anxious about relationships and behaviors that defy traditional norms.
The Newland trials are rich texts, and Scott pores over every transcript page, looking for meaning. The case, one of sexual assault with elements of fraud, was developed in line with the U.K.’s most recent Sexual Offences Act, which was passed in 2003 and nullified consent in situations where “the defendant intentionally deceived the complainant as to the nature or purpose of the relevant act.” Scott defines this version of rape as “a violation of sexual autonomy—that is, a violation of personal freedom, of choice, and thus a violation of selfhood, identity, perhaps even humanity.”
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Rape cases are notoriously difficult to prosecute; only a sliver of those reported (themselves a likely undercount of incidents) go to trial, and few result in a conviction. The Newland case was even more unusual, because the first conviction hinged on Section 76 of the Sexual Offences Act—the clause about deceit. (The second conviction drew on a different case, R v. McNally, which ruled that “deception as to gender can vitiate consent.”) What Miss X alleged was more complex than a simple violation of “no means no”: Because Miss X had been deceived, her yeses were built on a lie.
This deception was multilayered, as Scott discovers and analyzes. Miss X came from a religious background, was estranged from her parents, and had reportedly ended an abusive relationship recently, making her especially vulnerable—whether as a closeted queer woman, as Newland attested, or as, according to Miss X, a straight woman in love with a chronically ill man whose face and body she never saw during sex. Newland first concocted the “Kye Fortune” character online at the age of 13, swiping pictures and videos from a half-Asian man named Carlo over several years. Other women reported having been duped by “Kye” online before discovering that their correspondent wasn’t a man. And after the 2017 conviction, jurors learned that Newland had also been convicted of financial fraud.
But Newland stuck to her story, claiming that she and Miss X met at a gay bar, came out to each other, and shared in the “Kye” fantasy together, although they still felt compelled to stay in the closet. (The evidence for this narrative is not strong.) Newland grew up with loving parents, owned a car, and had an allowance, but she claimed that at the all-girls private school she attended, the word lesbian was a slur, conditioning her to feel lasting shame about her sexuality. She sobbed repeatedly while on the stand, even as her story wavered in its details.
Scott is merciful toward Newland, affording her the benefit of the doubt that the media, and especially the legal system, couldn’t or wouldn’t. The legal acceptance of queer relationships is still a recent development, and delineating the ways in which queer sex can work—with objects and implements, with kink and other proclivities not traditionally associated with heterosexual relationships—seemed to baffle the barristers during direct questioning and cross-examination.
For Scott, reading through the transcripts became an exercise in the absurd, more like Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose” than a typical true-crime tale. How could it not, with almost every controversial issue—race, class, queerness, gender, disability rights, consent—under the bright lights? “To read their stories is to find both” Newland and Miss X “entering a topsy-turvy world,” Scott writes, “their reason clouded by fantasy and hope, blinkered and madly doting. Both stepped over some line and their reason evaporated.”
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The loss of reason wasn’t exclusive to these young women, once so intimate and now such bitter adversaries. The Newland trials foreshadowed later debates about gender fluidity and sexuality, culminating in the 2025 U.K. Supreme Court ruling that the legal term woman refers to a biological woman. The Newland case featured an extreme manifestation of Britain’s cultural discomfort with shifting gender norms, but in the years since, that unease has led to decisions that are damaging the lives of many people who simply want to be left alone to be themselves.
In spite of Scott’s rigorous forensic examination of the case, it is impossible to know with certainty what happened between Newland and Miss X. Their stories diverged markedly, but that divergence remained largely consistent across the trials: two irreconcilable versions of one relationship. Scott suggests that Newland and Miss X found the plots they needed to make themselves whole, as individuals and as a couple—whether they were best friends or closeted lesbian lovers.
Scott knows that she, too, is telling a story. “In my attempt to know, I construct a plot,” she writes. “In a way, this book is a shadow trial.” She writes that she is “using literary tools, like suspense and points of view,” and implores readers never to forget this. In the process, she puts storytelling itself on trial: “I think about the stories that grip us in life, but also in court. I wonder why some stories are more believable than others.”
Wisely, she doesn’t offer a grand unified theory of what happened between Miss X and Newland. She cannot. She knows the limits of narrative too well to do so. Still, the crime reporter in me latched on to a particular narrative contradiction, one that might point to the inciting incident that pulled the thread of deception and unraveled what was supposed to be the shared story.
Newland and Miss X agree that it all fell apart one night. In Miss X’s version, “something just felt different.” Newland had insisted on oral sex; Miss X was reluctant, and the act was rough. Shortly afterward, she testified, she took her blindfold off and realized “Kye” was a woman—and had been using a prosthesis. In Newland’s version, their fight that evening resulted from Newland’s decision to come out as gay—a violation of their “pact.” Although Newland denied having oral sex, I wondered why Scott doesn’t spend more time exploring a third narrative: that this was a moment of muddled consent in a complicated situation. It seems plausible to me that Newland went ahead with a sexual act her partner simply didn’t want. And in the aftermath, she might have realized that the game had gone too far, and that the trust she’d been so careful to build was broken forever.
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When she began working on The Bed Trick, Scott thought it would be primarily an exploration of rape law, but by the end, she realized it had more to do with the relationship between the law and fiction. In the process, she also dug up her own buried memories of a long-ago assault in a different country, an incident that proved to be so emotionally painful, and the bureaucracy involved in pursuing the case so burdensome, that she ended up dropping it. But the connections between her experience and the Newland case aren’t simple, just as the trial she writes about occupies all manner of messy borders. “There is no final answer,” she writes, “to what is deception and what is true.”
Newland ultimately served a total of six years in prison. In 2024, a fashion influencer took to TikTok to recount her own astounding story: Her girlfriend, whom she’d featured in at least one video, had been revealed by various commenters to be Newland. The influencer ended the relationship. Newland, it seems, won’t be allowed to move on from her past. Miss X, at least, has the cloak of privacy to protect her.
The post The Problem With Putting Sexual Deception on Trial appeared first on The Atlantic.
