Gayle remembers this moment differently. For example, he says that the girl was not blindfolded. He says his online persona, Kye, which he describes as a “coping mechanism” for more than a decade, was brought to life as a “role play” he wrote with the girl so they could be together while keeping one foot in the closet. They had argued in the days before that Sunday because Gayle wanted to come out to her family. As they finished having sex, the girl suddenly started screaming. “It just changed,” Gayle says.
The girl runs to the bathroom. According to one recording, he calls 999, the British emergency number, but tells them it’s not an emergency. He pushes Gayle down the stairs. They go out into the street and have a heated argument; Although there is no sound, the video is recorded on CCTV. Gayle gets in her car and drives to a nearby bridge, where she jumps into a canal. Police found him wet and shivering after hurting his ankle in the brief fall.
The girl texts Gayle, “You’re sick.”
“I love you,” Gayle texted the girl.
In the days after the fight, the girl receives an email from Kye’s address. “You will never understand what it is like to not be able to be yourself physically,” Kye writes. “And living as someone who wasn’t who you were meant to be. I never planned to go this far with you. It grew from a seed to a tree and I was stuck. I felt guilty every day, but I couldn’t let you go because you needed me.” A few hours later, the girl went to the police and reported that her best friend raped her multiple times.
The inconsistencies between the two friends’ stories are striking. Leaving aside the presence or absence of a blindfold, for example, there is the story of how they met. Gayle remembers meeting the girl at a “gay night” at a bar (the theme was Gender Mixing) and that she was the first person she dated, and then they became close because they were both in the closet. The girl (British law prohibits naming the complainant in sexual assault cases) admits to frequenting such events with a gay boyfriend. But he says he and Gayle met in a library and assumed Gayle was “normal,” a heterosexual like him, even though they had never discussed their sexuality. “It’s dangerous,” the girl later told police. “He’s mentally ill. He could do this to someone else.”
In “Bed Trick: Sex and Cheating on Trial,” a new book about Gayle Newland’s 2015 trial and 2017 retrial, British author and editor Izabella Scott goes to great lengths to avoid calling Gayle or her former best friend “mental.” Scott is wary of the adversarial nature of a sex crime case; Whether this gets to the truth or not, it sure makes everyone look bad. He’s concerned about the narratives put forward by the lawyers involved: that Gayle was a scheming lesbian who manipulated her naïve friend over the years, or that the girl Scott calls Miss In both narratives, “there is a cooperative woman,” Scott says.
In contrast, Scott tries to “be on both sides.” Like Gayle, Scott is a lesbian and is sensitive to the disgusted criminalization of homosexual desire. Like Miss Scott’s efforts to “create a scenario where neither is lying and both stories could be true” make “The Bed Trick” a strange kind of legal drama. The usual pleasures of reading about the courtroom—the vicarious thrill of being both detective and jury—give way to the slower burn of cultural analysis. Scott treats the story of Gayle and Miss X as a rich and layered text; The inconsistencies here are not lies to be triumphantly exposed, but symbols to be iteratively interpreted.