A Nashville, Tenn., man was able to convince at least three women during whispered phone calls to unlock their doors and wait for him in bed wearing nothing but a blindfold.
After realizing that he was not the lover they expected -- and it took one woman two months of two visits a week to realize this -- the women went to police to file rape charges against 45-year-old Raymond Mitchell III, a husband and the father of two children.
One of the women knew the minute he touched her that he was not her boyfriend, but was too afraid to protest. Another thought he was someone she had just met and left her door unlocked for him twice until she discovered that he was not.
The third woman did not realize until the blindfold slipped -- two months later -- that this guy was not her boyfriend. (Can you imagine what that poor boyfriend has to say about all this? How can he explain her confusion to friends?)
Brad Schmitt, the reporter who broke the story for The Tennessean in Nashville, says 16 women have come forward to say they were called by Mitchell. Six of them claim to have left the door unlocked. Mitchell, Schmitt says, is cooperating with police.
"He says that when the women asked who he was, he answered, 'I'm anybody you want me to be, baby.' "
Mitchell claims to have done nothing more than fulfill the daydreams of these women. Police are calling him "Fantasy Man." Fantasy Man T-shirts are now for sale in Nashville.
Whose fantasy? His or hers? Kind of tough to tell, isn't it?
Nonetheless, the victims are being savaged over coffee and over the airwaves in Nashville. "Everyone is treating it like a big joke," says Schmitt. He said his newspaper wouldn't print the words people were using to describe these women.
But the victims say that when they asked Mitchell if he was "Bob" or "Tom" or whomever, that he answered, "Yes."
When I asked women here their reaction, there was nervous laughter and moral outrage aplenty. But few were comfortable answering the pointed question this news story asks: "If he called, and you thought you knew him, would you leave the door unlocked?"
"Absolutely," said one woman.
"I'm more a flannel nightgown kind of person myself," said another, demurely.
"How many partners did these women have that they couldn't tell one from another in the dark?" asked another friend, deflecting the question.
And one of my men friends volunteered: "My wife's idea of a Fantasy Man would be a guy who calls and says, 'Leave the door unlocked. I'll be right over to load the dishwasher and make the kids' lunches for tomorrow.' "
Don't kid yourself, I thought. Mitchell called, but the women waited in bed.
Whose fantasy? His or hers?
Some of my friends agreed that if their husbands found a strange woman creeping into bed with them in the dark, their first instinct might not be to call the police. And so the vilification of the women in Nashville is unfair.
"I don't know any man who wouldn't say yes to a phone call like that," said a friend. "Mine would wait naked in the middle of a four-lane highway if that's what you told him to do."
"As soon as he hung up the phone, my husband would yell, 'Honey? Where do we keep the blindfolds?' " said another.
"If he found out that it wasn't who he thought it was," said another, "he wouldn't go to the police. He'd think it was Valentine's Day."
Nashville police are at a loss to find a statute under which to charge this man. There was a law on the books in 1870 against "fictitious husband rape." You might remember the movie version of that law. It was called "Sommersby" and it starred Richard Gere.
Lawmakers recently updated that law to something called "rape by fraud," a legal concept that doesn't make immediate sense to me.
Nashville is ringing with judgments against these women, who believed Mitchell when he hinted during his telephone seduction that he was somebody they knew. But I think the world is missing an important point here. A point about women and their sexuality. A point that might not show up on a national sex questionnaire. These women had no objection to being vulnerable, naked and blind sexual playmates.
But they wanted it to be with someone they knew.