The Boyfriend Who Never Existed: Inside The "Bed Trick" Trial

Phoebe interviews author Izabella Scott about an unusual trial in England. One woman, referred to as Miss X, accused her best friend Gayle of posing as a man and tricking her into having a sexual relationship. But Gayle said there was no deception – and that Miss X knew who she was with the whole time. Izabella Scott's book is called The Bed Trick: Sex and Deception on Trial. You can also watch this interview at ⁠youtube.com/criminalpodcast⁠. Phoebe is going on tour this fall! Get tickets and see all of our tour dates at thisiscriminal.com/live. Say hello on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Sign up for our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠occasional newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Follow the show and review us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Sign up for Criminal Plus⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠This is Love⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Phoebe Reads a Mystery⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠our online shop⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Phoebe Judge?

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• 0:34Speaker 01

  I'm Anna Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. We talk all about attending a fashion show in Paris together, throwing dinner parties, and making her Broadway debut in other desert cities. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 1:12Phoebe Judge?

  This episode contains mentions of suicide and goes into detail about sex and sexual assault. Please use discretion.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  She ends up taking off her blindfold and seeing the person she's having sex with for the first time. And she describes this moment as a devastating discovery. She says, "It's not Kai behind the blindfold." She says, "It's her best friend, Gayle."

• 1:43Phoebe Judge?

  This is Criminal. I'm Phoebe Judge, and today I'm joined by writer Isabella Scott. Isabella, you wrote a book titled The Bed Trick: Sex and Deception on Trial, and it's about a trial that began in September of 2015 in northern England. Let's talk about the trial. There's someone named Miss X, and they're anonymous. And then there's another woman named Gail Newland, the defendant, who is not anonymous. Why?

• 2:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that's a great place to start, because in the UK, in sexual offenses cases, complainants are automatically given lifetime anonymity. And this actually came about in the 1970s. And it means that it's a criminal offense to publish a complainant's name or anything that can lead to them being identified. So in this case, which is a trial about sexual deception and perhaps intimate misrecognition, but you have this imbalance where Miss X is anonymized, at least in all the reporting, and Gail is very exposed. She's photographed outside the court, and her name, her age, her home address is all captioned in those photographs.

• 2:57Phoebe Judge?

  One evening, Miss X had called 999, which is 911 here. And a little later, she reported Gail Newland to the police. What did Miss X say happened on the night she called 999?

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is really where the complaint really begins. And Miss X says that she tells a much wider story than this final evening. And it's a story that begins at university, where she has a best friend, a woman named Gail, and she also has a boyfriend, whose name is Kai Fortune. And she describes getting a Facebook request, a friend request, that came really out of the blue, from this handsome man who was also a student. And this was Kai Fortune. And she describes really falling in love with this boyfriend over two years, but it's

• 3:58Speaker 02

  all through his phone, it's through his profiles, it's online. But they do eventually meet, and when they begin to meet up, he has this one request. He asks her to wear a blindfold. And they begin to meet up this way over five months. And really, we arrive at the night you mentioned, Phoebe, which is this night where something comes to a head. And in Miss X's account, that night, she meets up with Kai as usual. And by now, it's been a two-year relationship, at least five months of meeting up. And she says, they have this routine. He comes over to her house, and she puts a blindfold on before he arrives.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  And they spend time together. They cuddle on the sofa, they listen to music, but they also have sex. And this is the evening that she says, for the first time in all these months they've been together, that something doesn't feel right for the first time. And she's in love with this guy, but she's never seen him with her own eyes, but she trusts him so much. But she says, her ring, it gets caught on the back of his head. And she says she suddenly feels this hair. And she always thought his head was shaved. And she says, for the first time, her trust is slipping away. And she ends up taking off her blindfold and seeing the person she's having sex with

• 5:28Speaker 02

  for the first time. And she describes this moment as a devastating discovery. She says, "It's not Kai behind the blindfold." She says, "It's her best friend, Gayle." And in that moment, she realizes that Kai doesn't actually exist. And all along, it's been her best friend. And this is where she says she runs from the room, and she makes this 999 call.

• 5:57Phoebe Judge?

  And what does she say on the 999 call?

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so she calls up, and this call lasts about 20 seconds. And when you call 999, the first thing I ask is whether or not it's an emergency. And so she's asked this question, and she says it's not an emergency. And they tell her to call the police instead. And she doesn't end up calling the police that night. And I think, in her description, it's this confusing moment, this thing that's happened in her narrative. It's something that's quite difficult to name and describe. She's not in danger of violence. She's at home, and she's with her boyfriend, who is unveiled to be someone else.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  So she ends up not quite being able to communicate that down the phone. And they end up fighting in the flat, and they run out on the street. And the next moment is that they're caught on CCTV, fighting in the street. That's the next record of them that night.

• 7:02Phoebe Judge?

  And let's just talk about that night. What does Gail Newland say happened that night?

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Gail really tells a very different story about this relationship. And in some ways, it begins the same way. They're two best friends, they're in their early 20s, they're students, and they meet at university. And over two years, they become extremely close. But in Gail's version, she says that quite early on, in fact, the very evening they met, they met in a gay bar, and they came out to each other. And she says, the beginning of their relationship, it begins with the fact that both of them are in the closet. And what she tells us is really a story about the closet, a story about shame and hidden sexuality.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  And she says, over these two years, they're in a secret relationship, they're falling in love, and they hide this relationship from the world, they pass as friends. And nobody knows that behind this friendship, they are girlfriend and girlfriend. But the story does get a bit more complicated, because Gail explains that even though they've come out to each other and they're in a closet together, things don't necessarily get that much easier, and they really struggle with their sexuality. And they begin to use this figure, Kai Fortune, this fictional boyfriend. They begin to use him in a number of ways. He's a cover story, a way to hide their relationship.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  But also, he's a shared fantasy, and they begin this dialogue through which Kai allows them to make their relationship, for them, a bit more bearable. And by the time we get to this final evening, they've begun having sex and meeting up. And it's a similar story to Miss X's, but there's one key difference, there's never a blindfold. And that's one of the big, the most fundamental differences between these stories, is that Gail says, everyone's eyes were open, Miss X always knew who she was having sex with. But on this final evening, it's been two years, they're in this secret relationship,

• 9:21Speaker 02

  and Gail, by now, she really wants to come out to her parents. And she's close to them despite her secret, and she wants to tell them she's a lesbian, she wants to tell them about Miss X, and she wants to tell them about Kai. And just a few days before this final argument, she says this to Miss X, and they really disagree on the subject. Miss X is not ready to come out. She's just not ready for it. She feels that Gail is breaking the pact, and they have this big argument. And by the time we get to this Sunday together, Gail describes the same routine, that she

• 10:01Speaker 02

  comes over, and they're being together in private as lovers. But she says, they seem to make up after this argument, but she says, Miss X, she just seems very quiet. And she keeps asking if she's OK. But Miss X says she's fine, and they end up having sex. And Gail says, just as she's putting away the dildo, that Miss X starts shouting.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  And she says that Miss X switched, that's her word. She says she's shouting and accusing her. She's saying, what the hell is this? And she says, Gail says she's confused and she's, she's really starting to get scared. And they end up fighting and pushing each other with Miss X calling 999 and with them running into the street.

• 10:57Phoebe Judge?

  What happened? What does Gail do once, um, once she drives away?

• 11:02Speaker 02

  She drives around manically. Um, she says she has a panic attack. She's, she's completely distressed about this argument, these terrible things they've said to each other on the street. And she, she ends up, um, driving to a canal, um, outside the town they live. Um, and she, she actually, um, makes a suicide attempt. She, she jumps into this, um, this body of water.

• 11:32Phoebe Judge?

  She's okay?

• 11:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, she's okay. Somebody sees her and the canal isn't as deep as she imagines. And she's pulled out and she's given clothing and an ambulance comes and she's taken to hospital, but she does really, um, she's, she's really damaged her ankle. But, um, she, she survives.

• 11:50Phoebe Judge?

  And so initially, Miss X calls 911, but they say, she says, it's not an emergency. But Miss X does follow up with the police, um, and, and does report, uh, that a crime has been committed. What crime was Gail Newland accused of committing?

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Well, Gail is accused, um, and prosecuted for this quite rare and actually quite old offence that's known as sexual fraud or rape by deception. And it's quite a complex crime. The idea is that you consent to sex at the time, um, you enjoy it, but you later discover something about that person. Um, perhaps you were lied to or you were, you were misled in some way. And, um, that means your consent wasn't informed. And in British law, there are certain deceptions which, um, if proved in court can make consent invalid and they can retrospectively turn sex into rape.

• 12:57Phoebe Judge?

  Gail Newland had tricked, uh, Miss X into thinking that she was male and that this was heterosexual sex. And Miss X had no idea that, that, that, that isn't what it was.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's exactly what Miss X is saying. She believes she was meeting up with her handsome boyfriend, a man whom she'd fallen in love with. She believed that every time she had sex, she was having sex with this man and she was having heterosexual sex. She was having straight sex and that she was completely deceived by Gail each time. She didn't know that it was her best friend. She didn't know it was a woman and she didn't know it was a dildo.

• 13:40Phoebe Judge?

  You mentioned that they, they had met a few years before. So this is, this is where the two, the two stories diverge, which is that Gail Newland, uh, says that from, from very early on, they had a romantic sexual relationship. And, uh, Miss X says that she had a very close friendship with Gail Newland, but it was always a friendship throughout the, the whole time of, of them knowing each other. That's what she believed.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's exactly right. So in Miss X's story, there's these two completely different relationships in her life. She has this friendship with Gail, um, as students, as best female friends. They describe each other as besties and they do all these trips and rituals together and they play sports together. And she has this other relationship with her boyfriend, Kai Fortune. And that's sort of how the stories really diverge. Um, but according to Gail, it's all one thing. She says when they first meet, they speak about their sexuality. And these two stories that are divided in Miss X's narration are united.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Gail says they're best friends and at the same time, they're having a secret relationship and a kind of private dialogue and almost a role play that's developing through this, this figure that is Kai Fortune.

• 15:08Phoebe Judge?

  Who was Kai Fortune?

• 15:11Speaker 02

  One of the sort of complex parts of this story is that Kai wasn't a figure that was invented after Gail and Miss X meet. Kai has a much longer story and that story is related to Gail and related to the closet. And she describes, um, first using Kai, uh, in, as a teenager, when she's 13 years old. And so she knows she's a lesbian and she's struggling with her sexuality. And she begins to enter chat rooms and to speak, um, first as a boy and then as Kai. And he really develops over many years.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  Um, he begins to get social media profiles and he also gets a phone number. She uses pictures of guys she finds on the internet. He makes friends. Um, she speaks to girls, but Gail insists that before she meets Miss X, she's always had these online relationships with people far away. She's never had this encounter and she claims Miss X is the first person she tells about Kai. But Kai, by the time these, these friends meet, this first encounter between Gail and Miss X, Kai is, is quite a sort of fleshed out figure. Um, he's a persona, he's an identity and he's handsome.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  Um, and he's, uh, charming and he's, he's really quite a romantic guy. He writes love songs professionally. He's into poetry. Um, he's got these gentleman ways. Um, he's popular and, and gorgeous in, in a way that Gail feels she can't be and in a way that Miss X really desires.

• 16:58Phoebe Judge?

  So Gail will say, I created this other persona. It was an online persona. How, there's no, she's not denying that. Uh, but how, how did Kai Fortune, this idea or this so-called, uh, man meet Miss X?

• 17:20Speaker 02

  Miss X's story is, is, is very different to Gail's. Gail says they met at a gay night. And although Miss X agrees that she went to that night in the summer of 2011, she says she doesn't remember meeting Gail there. And she says, it wasn't Gail she met that summer, it was Kai. It begins online with this Facebook request and that's really how it develops, this online relationship. Um, they're speaking on the phone, they're texting every day. Um, and she's frustrated that he's not on campus. He's, he's never around. Um, and she says that Gail she meets later. She actually says that Kai, um, introduced them.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  He said that Gail was an old friend.

• 18:06Phoebe Judge?

  Why is he never around? I mean, you know, what, what, what does, what is, why can't they see each other for 18 months?

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Well, that's the thing. Kai is often making excuses. Um, there's a few key reasons and, and, and one is that he's, he's bunking off. He has a, and a rich uncle in Monte Carlo, um, that he's always visiting. Um, another is that he's sick. He gets very ill when he's at university. And another is that he develops this great shyness, um, especially after his illness. Um, and he's often making excuses and Miss X finds this, this really frustrating, but she loves him and she overlooks this. And in fact, she loves him so much that in December 2012, before they even meet for the first time, Miss X and Kai get engaged. He sends her an eternity ring in the post.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  It's a, a, a ring that's a symbol of never ending love and, and, and they're engaged. And, and this makes her even more keen to meet him. She's, she's told her friends that she's met him already. She's sort of fibbed to them and she's, she's just desperate to meet him. Um, and he suggests meeting up with a blindfold. And the first meeting happens on Valentine's Day, 2013. Um, Gail also describes this part of the relationship. You know, they've got this public friendship and they're also falling in love. And what I find so moving is, is she often describes Kai in, in, in exactly the same way, this, this tenderness towards him. Um, this way she can be with Miss X, this dialogue they have that makes them feel comfortable,

• 19:43Speaker 02

  that makes them feel normal even.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  But she says, you know, by 2013, she wants to meet up in person with Miss X too and be Kai for her, but she doesn't really know how. She's nervous because she's a virgin, she's never kissed a girl before. And she says, you know, how can I meet as Kai? She doesn't know how to do it. But in Gail's Tale, she says, you know, Miss X wants to so badly. She wants to try this way of meeting. She talks about a dildo and eventually they meet on Valentine's Day. Of course, in Miss X's story, it's the first time they meet and she wears a blindfold.

• 20:29Phoebe Judge?

  Why did Miss X say that Kai had asked her to wear a blindfold?

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Miss X says that Kai, he's delaying meeting. He's had this illness. And he says to her that his muscles have wasted away. So in his pictures, he's this kind of dream guy. He's handsome, he's muscly, he goes to the gym, he's gorgeous. And he says he's embarrassed. He's embarrassed that his body isn't what it used to be. And there's a lot of dramatic things happening in his life. And one of these is this illness he has. And another is a car crash. And from this crash, he has scars over his body.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  And he feels that he, you know, initially, he doesn't want Miss X to see these right away. And he's so self-conscious that he asked for a blindfold. And in fact, you know, Miss X says that when they meet for the first time, she thinks he's come from the hospital to see her. And she says that, you know, she's wearing a blindfold, but she believes he's got bandages on parts of his body and that he's on lots of medication. He's very sick at this time. But she wants to meet him and she loves him and she's willing to overlook all these conditions just to have this moment with him.

• 21:57Phoebe Judge?

  And she never takes the blindfold off?

• 22:00Speaker 02

  She says, actually, that first time on Valentine's Day, when Kai had come from the hospital and he'd climbed the stairs and had had this first kiss in her bedroom, and then he leaves, she says that she decides to look out the window and she wants to catch a glimpse of him on the street. And when the defense barrister says, what did you see? Miss X says that she saw Gail. And it's a strange moment. She says that she believed that Gail was picking Kai up. She said Gail was helpful like that.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  She said that she thought Kai was in the passenger seat already and perhaps she couldn't see him. But it's a strange moment and it's something that the defense barrister, you know, he says to her, like, you know, this doesn't make sense. You know, Kai leaves and you look out the window and you see Gail. But she says she thought Kai was in the car already, Gail is driving off and that she never tried to look again.

• 23:22Phoebe Judge?

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• 23:35Phoebe Judge?

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• 25:44Phoebe Judge?

  At one point, Miss X says that she went on a trip with Kai.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, they both agree that one Sunday they did something different and they go on a trip in Gail's car. And according to Gail, they're going to her parents' house. And her parents' house is not so far away from the city they live in. And she says her parents are away and this time they're going as Miss X and Kai. And it's a kind of day trip together. Miss X's account of this trip is much more strange and bewildering. She says that Kai wants to take her on a trip, but she's got to wear the blindfold.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  And she describes getting into his car, the car he's borrowed from Gail. And she describes putting sunglasses on top of the blindfold, which they did because they were worried that drivers by might think she was being kidnapped or something when they saw the blindfold. And she describes going on this trip in a car, but she says she doesn't know where she goes because she can't see. And she says they drive for a little while and she gets out and she doesn't even know if it's a house. She says it's a building.

• 27:13Speaker 02

  And he takes her in and there's some kind of outdoor area and they end up sunbathing. And the defense barrister, he says, you know, as a friend, you've been to Gail's family home many times. You knew, you knew where you were going. And she vehemently denies it. She says, I didn't know. I had the blindfold on. I thought I was with Kai. I could have been anywhere.

• 27:39Phoebe Judge?

  The defense and prosecution are both talking a lot about different identities, about blindfolds. But they also, the legal teams also spend a lot of time focused on the specifics of the sex that Miss X and Gail Newland had. Why was that in very, very detailed ways? Tell me a little bit about why that was so important to both legal teams.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it becomes a really big focus of the trial. And there were these two kind of key exhibits, really. One is a black eye mask found in Gail's bedroom. And the other is a dildo. And this dildo is actually held up in court. It's held up by the barristers. And it becomes really a key focus of the trial, this question of whether Miss X should have known that she was having sex with a dildo, whether she could have been fooled in the way she alleges. And so the dildo is very important to the defense team.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  And, you know, one of the arguments the defense team make is that this allegation is just ludicrous. It's, the defense barrister says, it's literally incredible. It's incapable of belief. And one of the factors of this kind of impossible story, he claims, is the dildo. And so across the trial, Miss X is cross-examined about the feel of the dildo, about her previous sexual history and the other penises she's had sex with, the idea being that, you know, she should have known what's what. When it comes to the prosecution, the blindfold is really important because of course, Miss

• 29:35Speaker 02

  X's story only made sense if Miss X never saw Kai, who would have been instantly recognizable as her friend. And there's a focus on the blindfold, which Miss X wears, and the fact that Gail was just such a skillful storyteller, that she created such a vivid character of Kai with all these stories about the illness and the stories about his shyness, that by the time that they meet in person, she's in control of the situation and she's able to not only

• 30:13Speaker 02

  allow Miss X to believe that, you know, this figure, this Kai, is real, but also it accuses her of wearing a sort of costume. And this costume consists of a hat, which Gail wears on her head to hide her long hair. And it consists of a swimsuit that she's accused of wearing.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  Which is Miss X says she believes is some kind of medical contraption. And also the dildo, which is a sort of worn as a strap on. And the prosecution alleged that these kind of devices were able to trick Miss X, who didn't always touch Kai. She says sometimes her hands were tied behind her back. But she also says they clasped hands and she she rubbed his arms up and down. And the myopic focus on on sexual acts, it's really a feature of a sexual offenses trial, because these crimes, these allegations, these offenses that have to be to be proved, come down to this question.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  You know, despite this relationship, despite these two years, it comes down to whether or not Miss X knew she was having sex with a dildo or a penis.

• 31:32Phoebe Judge?

  And her best friend?

• 31:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, and her best friend. And that's what's so important to the defense in a way. This idea of despite all the strange evidence that is brought against Gail, there's a dossier which shows two years of text messages as Kai. And there's a lot of there's a lot of circumstantial evidence. There's a lot to make sense of that's difficult to make sense of. But when it comes to these meetings in person, this idea, and this is what the defense argue, that any sensible person would have known that their best friend and their boyfriend were the same person.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  And the defense, you know, it draws out the similarities between Gail and Kai, who ultimately had the same body, they had the same voice, they had the same smell. And this was a body that Gail knew very well, a person that she was hanging out with as a friend almost every day.

• 32:36Phoebe Judge?

  In the in the following days, after the 999 call, after the confrontation on the street that has Gail going off and ending up going off the bridge, are Miss X and Gail in contact with each other? Are they are they texting often?

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Gail, you know, after her her attempt at suicide, after she's out of hospital the next day, she's calling Miss X over and over again. And she's also sending her desperate text messages apologizing. And Miss X doesn't answer any of these texts at first. And she does end up writing back to Gail and saying, you raped my heart, you raped my soul, you should be locked up. And so she sort of accuses Gail. And really what she writes in these messages is is very close to the story she tells at trial, which makes them very important evidence.

• 33:39Speaker 02

  And meanwhile, Gail is is furiously apologizing. She she begs Miss X to take her back. And she says that she told lies, to hide lies, and that she will pay for it, and she already is. And these become really kind of important messages for the prosecution, who try and argue it's a kind of confession of sorts, that she is admitting that she's done wrong. She's admitting to the deception. And they become a huge part of debate at trial, you know. The defense and also Gail say that, you know, she's talking about the closet, she's talking about the secret life.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  Gail also says she's, these are the worst days of her life, you know, she's just tried to kill herself and she's just panicking and she'll say anything to get Miss X back. But of course, the prosecution say these are messages that that reveal Gail's guilt.

• 34:38Phoebe Judge?

  What did the jury end up deciding?

• 34:41Speaker 02

  Well, after this sort of trial, it's about a week and a half long, and eventually they go to deliberate. And they deliberate for about six hours, which is a moderately long time. They they ask for the dildo to be examined in the in the jury room. And eventually, they deliver their verdicts and they find Gail guilty. And these are shown to be majority verdicts. So 10 jurors agreed and two dissented. And this is a feature of this sort of UK justice system. Since the 1960s, you can have a majority verdict, but this is the legal limit. And there has to be at least 10 jurors who agree.

• 35:22Phoebe Judge?

  And what was Gail Nuland's sentence?

• 35:26Speaker 02

  She's sentenced about a month later, and she's given eight years. And this is seen to be a very high conviction rate. She's she's put on the sex offenders register and she is sent to a maximum security prison. But commentators, you know, immediately noticed that the judge had given more lenient sentences to pedophiles in his court. And just the year before, for example, a former schoolmaster who'd been convicted of abusing 24 boys under the age of 13, he was given six years and nine months.

• 36:05Phoebe Judge?

  There was a retrial. What what happened?

• 36:09Speaker 02

  So Gail insists she's innocent, even at the moment of the verdict. She's sobbing in the dock. She's saying, how can you send me down for something I haven't done? And from jail, she immediately launches an appeal. And this is heard a year later. And the appeal is successful, which is quite unusual. And the appeal judges, they they rule that the conviction is unsafe, which means there's a flaw in the proceeding. And they actually point to Judge Dutton's summing up. They say he put too much focus on intentional deception. And it leads to a retrial that happens another year later, so in June 2017. And in lots of ways, the trial is very similar.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  Of course, you have a new judge, you have a new jury, you even have a new prosecuting barrister, although Gail's defense barrister stays the same. The dildo is brought out again. This time, Miss X gives evidence from behind a curtain, which is a sort of measure that's available for especially vulnerable witnesses by request. And eventually, the jury go to deliberate. And this time, the deliberation is much longer. They deliberate for 17 hours and 25 minutes. So this is this is really a significant deliberation. And eventually, they deliver their verdicts and Gail is found guilty again.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  And this time, it's also a majority verdict, but it's 11 to one this time.

• 37:40Phoebe Judge?

  And the sentence was the same?

• 37:44Speaker 02

  Her sentence is slightly reduced by the new judge Stockdale. And this time, as at the last trial, there are mitigating factors, which is when the defense will will sort of show psychiatric reports. And at the last trial, there were there were similar reports, but this time, there are more diagnoses. And Gail is diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, which is a form of autism, and also with gender dysphoria. And her sentence is reduced to six years.

• 38:18Phoebe Judge?

  Well, thank you very much for speaking with us.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me on on the show.

• 38:26Phoebe Judge?

  Isabella Scott's book is The Bed Trick: Sex and Deception on Trial. You can find a link in our show notes. And don't forget that in addition to listening here, you can also watch all of these Tuesday conversations on YouTube. Just go to youtube.com/criminalplus or click the link in our show notes. I'm Phoebe Judge. Thanks for listening.