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.