Izabella Scott – författare

A riveting, brilliant account of a court case in which a woman accused her best friend of impersonating a man during sex, and won-a study of desire, performance, truth, and the stories we tell about ourselves in public, online, in love, and in law.A woman falls in love with a man. His name is Kye Fortune. They meet online and begin spending time together every weekend, in hotel rooms or at her apartment. Kye is doting, and funny, and handsome-at least in his photos, since he won't let her see him in person (she agrees to wear a blindfold, even during sex). Years go by before the blindfold slips off, and she's shocked to encounter not a man named Kye but a woman named Gayle Newland, who happens to be her best friend.A woman named Gayle Newland falls in love with another woman, her best friend. Both of them are closeted. Their relationship must be kept a secret. Together they invent a persona known as Kye Fortune, to make their relationship bearable, make it normal. It's a role-play, a script they write together, with props (a dildo, a blindfold). Eventually Gayle's best friend breaks character and turns on her.These two stories collided in a famous court case in Manchester. The trial captured national attention and challenged some of our most basic assumptions about sex, consent, gender, and identity. In her riveting and forensic examination, Izabella Scott interrogates the case from every conceivable angle, exposing the slippery side of consent law, the many myths and archetypes that crowd the courtroom, and the shifting rules of deceptive sex to ask: Whose narratives are heard? Who is seen as a credible victim and what is considered a credible crime? The Bed Trick is a lucid, vivid story about stories-their limits, their merits-and the ways we lie in love, in life, and in law.

'This is probably the weirdest story I've ever heard, but Izabella Scott lays it out with her clear intelligence, warm empathy and gentle grace' Helen Garner 'A brilliant analysis of the trial of Gayle Newland...Scott is a supremely good guide to this complex terrain, thoughtful, nuanced and agile' Olivia Laing, GuardianShe said she wore a blindfold at all times. She said she didn't know who she was really having sex with.Two former best friends face each other in court at a sex offence trial. Miss X, making the accusation, claims she was tricked into queer sex, many times, by a best friend pretending to be her boyfriend. But that friend, Gayle Newland, tells a different story. They were secret lesbians, she says, lovers in the closet. The boyfriend was imaginary, and part of a role play that had been going on for years.This astonishing case reached UK courtrooms twice in 2015 and 2017, capturing national attention. At both trials, Newland was convicted of a rare and controversial crime known as 'rape by deception'. In literature, the plot has been named 'the bed trick'. Shakespeare made it famous in plays with lovers switching places in the dark, but in real life, a consummated bed trick is rare. As The Bed Trick unfolds the riveting story of Newland's trials - a case where reality was stranger than fiction - it also reveals the malleability of courtroom narratives, and the many myths, archetypes and stories embedded in the law.