The Boyfriend Who Never Existed: Inside The "Bed Trick" Trial
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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She ends up taking off her blindfold and seeing the person she's having sex with for the first time. And she describes this this moment as a as a devastating discovery. She says It's not Kai behind the blindfold. She says It's her best friend Gail.
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. Um Let's let's talk about the trial. There's uh someone named Miss X and um and they're anonymous. And then uh there's another woman named Gail Newland, uh the defendant who is not anonymous. Why?
Yeah, well that's a that's a great place to start because in the UK, um, 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 um 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.
One evening um Miss X had called nine nine nine, which is nine one one here, um and a little later she reported Gail Newland to the police. What did Miss X say happened on the night she called nine nine nine?
Yeah, so This is really um where kind of the complaint really begins. And Miss X says that she sort of tells a much wider story than this final evening. And it's a story that begins at university, um, where she um 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, friend request that came Really out 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 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 sort of arrive at 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 um meets up with Kai as usual. And by now, you know, it's been a two-year relationship, at least five months of meeting up.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–8:14
2
How does Miss X describe the night she discovered Kai wasn’t real?
8:14–10:01
3
What is the “Bed Trick” trial and why is it significant?
10:01–13:23
4
What evidence did the prosecution use to prove sexual deception?
13:23–14:00
5
Why were the blindfold and the dildo central to the legal arguments?
14:00–16:34
6
What was the jury’s verdict and how was the majority decision reached?
16:34–17:18
7
How did Gail Newland’s appeal succeed and what flaws were found in the original trial?
17:18–17:33
8
What changed in the retrial and how did the second jury reach a verdict?
17:33–39:08