A woman has been sentenced to 10 and a half years in jail for sexual assault after pretending to be a man to dupe a woman into sex using a blindfold, a sex toy and a “wholly fake persona”.
Blade Silvano, 41, met the victim on the online dating site Plenty of Fish in November 2016 and they got engaged as man and woman, Cambridge crown court heard.
She was found guilty in May of two counts of assault by penetration, and was sentenced on Wednesday for what the judge said was not a case of “gender dysphoria” or “anyone’s sexuality”, but about “deception, skilfully carried out and maliciously maintained”.
Using a fake name, Blade Mendez, Silvano presented herself as a man throughout a two-year relationship with the victim, who was a mother of small children. She would send the victim photos of herself shaving her face and would pretend to urinate standing up. She also lied about having cancer treatment and being trampled by cows when she in fact was on holiday, the court was told.
When she and the complainant were intimate, in December 2016 and February 2017, Silvano refused to be seen naked, wearing a long sleeved top and pulling her jeans down only slightly, before turning away to pretend to roll on a condom, Mr Justice Philip Grey said on Wednesday.
She would not allow the victim to touch her genitals, claiming to be “body conscious due to injuries sustained in the army”, the prosecutor, Julie Whitby, told Cambridge crown court.
The judge said Silvano used “either a strap-on penis or double-ended dildo” to penetrate the woman, who went to the police after uncovering Silvano’s deception after finding her on Facebook in September 2018 “in a completely different living situation”.
Another partner of Silvano’s later told the woman “You are not the first and won’t be the last”, the court heard.
Silvano also lied about being a vet, about having a PhD and about being a British army veteran, the court heard.
The woman said that her family did not believe that Silvano had cancer, but she stood by “him”, only to realise her family were right all along.
A victim impact statement was read to the jury by the woman, who said: “The relationship with Blade was a loving, caring and nurturing one, where there were dreams and aspirations for the future, and grand gestures of car giving, house buying, wedding planning and child rearing.
“There had to be upsetting and difficult conversations about having children together on account of Blade receiving chemotherapy for his cancer because of its links to infertility. Blade even suggested adopting my [children] when I was going through the court system with their biological dad.”
She added: “These hopes were dashed when I found Blade accidentally on Facebook in a completely different living situation that he had made me believe. And my whole world then came tumbling down. The person I’d been in love with, and stood by for nearly two years, had lied to me about everything, including the basics of his gender.”
Whitby noted that the victim still refers to Silvano as “he”, despite knowing the truth about her “wholly fake persona”.
The victim only discovered Silvano’s true sex through Facebook nearly two years later after they had postponed a planned wedding because of the defendant’s supposed illness. By this point the victim had already paid a deposit on the venue and tried on wedding dresses, the judge said.
After February 2017, their relationship continued solely online, with Silvano repeatedly cancelling meetings for increasingly far-fetched reasons, claiming to have been diagnosed with cancer and cystic fibrosis. On one occasion she invited the victim to an army officers’ ball, only to cancel at the last minute after claiming to have been trampled by cows.
The victim turned up at the hospital once, only to be told by nurses that no one called Blade Mendez was there. Silvano then told her that her name would have been withheld “for security reasons” because she was in the army, Grey said.
The woman told the court: “I consented to having sex with a male for the penis. Not a female penetrating me with something – I’m still unaware what it was. They took that right away from me, when they could have been honest with me from the start and I could have made an informed choice.”
She said she suspected Silvano had duped others. “The way Blade was so fluid and confident around me and my children, even walking into my oldest child’s bedroom, now makes me feel like I wasn’t the first person Blade has potentially done this too.” She was especially convinced of this, she said, after receiving the message from one of Silvano’s other partners, saying: “I’m not the first and I won’t be the last.”
Sentencing Silvano, Judge Grey told her: “Some the circumstances of this case are to say the least unusual, but let me make it clear at the outset [what] this case is not about. It is not about any person’s sexuality. It is not about gender dysphoria. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the current arguments and debates about the issue of gender identity. This case is at its heart about lies, deceit and procuring sexual experiences by grossly misleading another person. It is about a carefully created, cruelly maintained deception that you practised on your wholly innocent victim for the best part of two years.”
He added: “To engage with others in those fantasy lives is also not inherently wrong, not criminal, unless or until you start to use that fantasy life to deceive another person in the real world. Your deception, skilfully carried out and maliciously maintained, was acted out in the real world with appalling consequences.”
