In the middle of the night on a quiet, residential street in Halifax, a 28-year-old man climbed the steps of a white house with a red door. In the apartment upstairs lived a 30-something woman he found on Craigslist a couple hours earlier. The ad said, "I need it."
He replied by email. He was "polite" with "little to no boundaries when it comes to sex." What was her kink?
"I dunno if you can handle my kink," read the email back. "It's a rape fantasy. I really want to leave my door unlocked and have a boy come upstairs, come quietly in my room. Grab my hands, tie me up.
"I will fight, I will squirm, I will try and cry out, but I must be dominated. In fact, take pics of me. Send them to me. My most vulnerable moments."
He emailed her to put a sock on the doorknob so he would know he had found the right woman. At 3am on July 23, 2010, an email arrived with her address and a description of where her second-floor bedroom was located.
An hour later, he stood in front of the red door. He tried the knob. Sure enough it was unlocked. But there was no sock, so something didn't feel right.
"I see no sock," he emailed from the stoop.
"I thought my roomies were still up," was the reply a few minutes later.
"No, no one is up. Put a sock on the front door knob if you are serious."
"If you're there, why didn't you just go in?"
"Because this could be fake and I think it is."
He was right. The woman upstairs, Nicole, didn't know a stranger stood outside her house contemplating whether to act on a rape fantasy she didn't have. The email address belonged to her ex-boyfriend. He had likely posted the ad, Nicole believes, and replied to the man. Nicole's ex knew her lock had been broken for a while.
Though she didn't know it back in 2010, the emails were the beginning of years of harassment and stalking directed at Nicole that began online and spilled over into her offline life.
