Blade Silvano, who had two-year relationship with victim, given year sentence at Cambridge crown court. Blade Silvano, 41, met the victim on the online dating site Plenty of Fish in November and they got engaged as man and woman, Cambridge crown court heard. 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 and February , 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.
Silvano also lied about being a vet, about having a PhD and about being a British army veteran, the court heard. Blade even suggested adopting my [children] when I was going through the court system with their biological dad. And my whole world then came tumbling down. By this point the victim had already paid a deposit on the venue and tried on wedding dresses, the judge said. After February , 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.
The victim turned up at the hospital once, only to be told by nurses that no one called Blade Mendez was there. 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. 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.
