I had a dream life in Dubai till I discovered myself on trial for having intercourse with my boyfriend – and, unbelievably, they put me by means of the ordeal simply after he died in a tragic accident…

Whenever I remember it, my blood runs cold. The moment I sat in a UAE courthouse on trial for adultery, a six-year prison sentence hanging over me – and all for having sex with my boyfriend.

Worse – far worse – I was all alone in the court as, just weeks before, my beloved boyfriend had died in a tragic accident. If it was the plot of a TV drama, you’d scarcely believe it, but this was my life at the age of 31.

When the news broke about Marcus Fakana, 18, being sentenced to a year in a Dubai prison for a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old British girl on holiday, the terrible memories of my own traumatic brush with United Arab Emirates law flooded back.

Poor Marcus, now starting the new year in prison after handing himself in to the Dubai authorities, suffered awful consequences for what’s perfectly legal at home in the UK, having been put through a legal process he must barely have understood.

I know how that feels. In 2007, I was living in Dubai and working on a magazine for English-speaking residents and visitors. It was a pampered existence. I was better paid than I ever had been, my job got me into plenty of good parties, and I drove a huge SUV that I couldn’t have afforded to run back home.

And then I met Stuart Meyer at a bar after work. He was a Yorkshireman from Wetherby – tall, kind, funny, who did not tolerate fools or bullies. We hit it off at once.

However, our budding romance was hampered by a problem. Premarital sex was effectively decriminalised in Dubai in 2020 (except for under-18s like Marcus Fakana’s holiday girlfriend), but when Stuart and I were dating, it was illegal.

Not that this stopped us – or most Westerners. The relevant law was seldom enforced and if you didn’t get pregnant out of wedlock, refrained from sex on the beach or – again unlike Marcus’s unfortunate case – you weren’t reported to police, you could essentially get up to what you liked behind closed doors.

And there were plenty of high-profile examples – a very unwed Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt visited Dubai in 2007, and I’m pretty sure they enjoyed their hotel suite without a visit from the authorities.

Stuart and I had a happy few months together. In that time, we celebrated his 38th birthday with friends by the beach in the neighbouring emirate of Ras Al Khaimah, spent a weekend in the more sedate city of Abu Dhabi, and enjoyed the blissful bubble of a new relationship.

I had no idea that tragedy lay just around the corner.

When ten of us decided to go on a short trip to a cheap and cheerful beach resort in the Emirate of Fujairah, 75 miles from Dubai – at first the laughs and beers flowed.

The law is a bit stricter there. Parts of Fujairah belong to Sharjah, the most conservative of the seven Emirates that make up the UAE, meaning you can be in one hotel that serves alcohol but walk up the road to another and find it’s dry.

We’d booked ourselves into a hotel with a lively bar and stayed there pretty much all weekend.

On our last morning, everyone basked in the August sun, putting off the two-hour drive back to Dubai. But Stuart, who seemed impervious to hangovers, went for a swim. 

Fujairah is known for Snoopy Island, a large rock off the coast that looks like the Peanuts cartoon dog taking a nap. He’d swum to the island and back the previous day and kept saying he wanted to do it again, even if his pallid English torso caught the sun in the process.

Before he set off, I emptied a bottle of sunscreen onto his back and the last thing I ever said to him was: ‘Don’t you get sunburnt!’

Stuart had been gone for a while, but nobody thought much of it until an ambulance arrived on the beach and someone yelled something about bringing in a dead body. This is when my memories turn into a dizzy, blurred slideshow.

Pictures scroll through my head like photos with a retro Instagram filter – everyone running to the water through morbid curiosity, four skinny lifeguards carrying a strapping body to shore…

My knees buckled beneath me as I realised it was Stuart. I have a vague memory of friends comforting me as I screamed. Then a sobbing phone call to my parents in my native Australia, and Mum saying she’d get on a plane as soon as she could.

Stuart had fainted in the heat on Snoopy Island. A man found him sprawled on a rocky ledge and sent his son to raise the alarm. but while his back was turned, a wave knocked Stuart off the ledge and to his death, landing headfirst on rocks below.

Then, the horror of the day turned into a nightmare of Emirati bureaucracy. My friend and I, along with the owner of our hotel, were ordered to Fujairah police station, where our passports were inspected. When the officer refused to hand mine back, I became argumentative, saying the passport was the property of the Australian government.

Finally, an officer emerged with a document written in Arabic for me to sign. It was now I would come to regret not learning the language.

Assuming it was protocol before my passport could be returned I foolishly signed – without asking for a translation. My request for the return of my passport was openly laughed at and dismissed.

There was nothing to do but return to Dubai, heartbroken and in shock.

Stuart’s best friend got in touch with a company that deals with the bureaucracy involved in repatriating bodies when expats and visitors die in the UAE, and a patient, calm man called Vivian from Middle East Assistance reassured me I’d get my passport back soon.

A few days later, we were summoned to the court. Naively, I thought there might be one last avalanche of paperwork and my passport would be returned.

At this point of course I was still reeling from Stuart’s death. I couldn’t work and burst into tears at every little frustration and hurdle. Mum arrived from Australia within about 36 hours, and helped me begin to process my grief, but the feelings were profound and difficult.

We hadn’t known each other long, but Stuart was still my partner and when your partner dies, the sheer finality of it can be almost impossible to comprehend. I missed him. I couldn’t believe this had happened.

Turning up at the court on the appointed day at 9am, we were told the judge wasn’t in yet.

Vivian left his number with them and we waited at a nearby hotel, drinking endless cups of coffee. I nearly jumped out of my skin when the phone rang at midday.

And yet now came a shock to rival that of the accident. What I hadn’t known when I signed that document in Arabic on the day Stuart died was that I hadn’t just surrendered my passport, I’d agreed to stand trial for adultery.

Under Fujairah law, adultery didn’t – and still doesn’t – mean married people being unfaithful. It’s the term applied to anyone having sex with someone they’re not married to.

Unlike Dubai, Fujairah hasn’t modernised that law and I’d be surprised if they ever do.

At the court, I was sent to the judge’s office. Still, nobody told me why I was there or suggested I might need legal representation and consular assistance.

The judge sat at a large desk covered in autopsy diagrams and photos of Stuart’s dead body. I felt ill looking at them. I wanted to say to him, ‘Is it really necessary to have these pictures all over the desk, you utter ghoul?’, but thought better of it.

On one side of the desk sat a small chap taking notes, on the other side was an unnervingly smiley young man. He was the translator. I had to sit in the middle of the room on a plastic chair, facing the stern-looking judge.

Over the course of the most surreal and terrifying two hours of my life I had a circular conversation via the interpreter with the judge about how Stuart died and whether I thought it was anything other than an awful accident. Once we’d finished talking about it, the questions came thick and fast about my sex life, whether I was a Christian, whether I believed Stuart had gone to heaven and whether I drank alcohol.

The room was stiflingly hot. I felt only pure adrenaline as my survival instincts kicked in, keeping me alert and responsive.

I knew enough about Fujairah law to know that if I admitted Stuart and I had been sharing a hotel room – which we had – I’d risk going to prison.

Fortunately, I recalled the hotel manager on the day of the accident telling police I was sharing a room with a female friend. I suspect he was worried he’d be in trouble for letting unmarried couples share rooms.

So when I was asked about hotel sleeping arrangements, I prefaced my answer with, ‘as the hotel manager told the police last week…’, rather than sharing the anecdote about housekeeping barging into our room when we were still in bed on the last day of Stuart’s life.

As well as convincing the judge that I was a 31-year-old Australian virgin, I said Stuart and I hoped to get married in a church – although he probably would have been more of an elope-to-Vegas kind of guy – and that I didn’t drink alcohol.

Under UAE law, non-Muslim expats are permitted to drink, but they should get an alcohol licence if they fancy a tipple. The amount you’re allowed to purchase is tied to your salary.

But the fact is many expats don’t bother with the paperwork. I was never asked to show a licence at any bar in the five years I lived in the UAE and there were shops which sold booze to drink at home, no questions asked.

When the interpreter, still grinning inanely, told me the autopsy revealed alcohol in Stuart’s system, I figured he couldn’t be charged with unlicensed alcohol consumption, so I said he did indeed have a few beers the night before he died.

But I said I wasn’t drinking alcohol, and was driving that weekend, so it would have been a very irresponsible thing to do.

Looking back, I am amazed I was able to think on my feet like this, given the terrible stresses of the previous few weeks.

Finally, the strange, unsettling interrogation ended abruptly. The interpreter told me I was free to go. When I asked for my passport back, I was handed a piece of paper and told to write in capital letters, ‘I, Georgia Anne Lewis, declare my passport was returned’ with the date and my signature.

I’ve never been so relieved to hold my passport. All I cared about was getting on the flight I had booked to the UK so I could be at Stuart’s funeral.

It took me a while to realise just how big a bullet I had dodged in the judge’s office. If the odds had not been in my favour that day,

I could have faced a minimum of six months and maximum of six years in prison, followed by deportation.

As a non-Muslim, I could not be subjected to corporal or capital punishment under UAE law, which would have been the case if I’d been found guilty of adultery in neighbouring Saudi Arabia.

Marcus Farkana will not be having a pleasant experience in jail, but the reality is he got off relatively lightly with a one-year sentence.

We must hope he’s fortunate enough to receive a pardon from the ruler of Dubai – after all, his country’s tourism industry relies heavily on non-Muslims who have been sold the dream of a sunny, consequence-free holiday, such as the one Marcus and his family hoped to enjoy.

But my cautionary tale – which could have been so much worse – serves as a reminder that being in love or being a pampered expat won’t mean much if you end up on the wrong side of the law.

Four months after the accident, Stuart’s best friend told me over Christmas dinner in Dubai that he’d been back to Fujairah to sort out some final paperwork in relation to Stuart’s death and saw ‘a very interesting document at the courthouse’.

It was a transcript of my two hours in the judge’s office headed: ‘The adultery trial of Georgia Lewis’.

That’s when it finally dawned on me that if I hadn’t been so demure and convincing in Fujairah, I might not have been hearing this revelation in a friend’s Dubai garden. I was so lucky to avoid prison in the remote Emirate.

Despite my experience with its laws, I don’t bear any ill will towards the UAE. It was a land of amazing opportunities for me and I made great friends from around the world.

And I’ll never forget Stuart. After his death, I stayed for another four years, moving from Dubai to Abu Dhabi. After grieving for him and what could have been, I eventually met my future husband at work in 2009, and we moved to London together, where we still live today.

In an alternative universe, I can imagine him and Stuart being mates. In fact, friends who are perhaps more spiritual than I, believe Stuart led me to my husband. I guess it’s true in a way.

The happy months I spent with Stuart taught me the importance of finding a kind partner who always has your back.

He’d have been aghast at my treatment and the first to comfort me. But the reality is, in some parts of the world, you shouldn’t take for granted your freedom to pursue a romance at all.