A LESBIAN who was jailed after posing as a man to trick her friend into having sex with her has won her appeal in court.
Gayle Newland, 26, from Cheshire, was sentenced to eight years behind bars last year, but wept today as she won her appeal.
Ms Newland appeared via videolink from prison to hear she would be released on bail before a retrial.
Lady Justice Hallett, sitting with Mr Justice King and Mr Justice Dove quashed the conviction as unsafe and allowed the appeal on the basis of the directions given to the jury by Judge Dutton.
Newland is said to have posed as a half-Filipino, half-Latino man called Kye Fortune in order to seduce her victim.
The former marketing manager is said to have made up an elaborate backstory in which Kye was recovering from a brain tumour and didn’t want his lover to see his scars, requesting that she turned up to romantic trysts blindfolded.
At Newland’s hearing last year, the court heard that the pair had sex up to 10 times until the complainant took her mask off and discovered Newland wearing a prosthetic penis.
But Newland claimed in court that she and her friend were engaged in consensual role play while her accuser struggled with her sexuality.
She maintained that her accuser was fully complicit in the lesbian seduction, led by her as she has identified as a lesbian since primary school.
At Miss Newland’s trial last year, which was held at Chester Crown Court, Judge Roger Dutton described her as “scheming”, “deceitful” and “highly manipulative”.
She was convicted by a jury trial of three charges of sexual assault.
At the time of conviction the judge said: “To successfully pass off a deception of this complexity was a major undertaking involving dedicated mobile phone lines as well as regular texts from you purporting to be Kye’s relatives.
“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.”
Newland allegedly bound her chest and wore a wooly hat and swimsuit to disguise her appearance while she ‘dated’ her friend for two years.