by Kim Johnson

I'm the last person who'd want to heap more worries on the plate of the innocent public. Especially in this time of murder, mayhem and STDs.

But there's a new danger on which I feel obliged to comment because of the enormous threat it poses to the population, especially the male half. That is the conviction last Monday of 57-year-old carpenter Roy Dubay of rape.

His trial was exhaustively reported for public delectation, but the facts are sufficiently remarkable to bear summary repetition.

Mr Dubay persuaded a young woman that he was a Surinamese seer man, with an unusual application of the Rorschach ink blot test.

Invented in 1921, that method of psychological diagnosis involves analysing what a patient sees in an arbitrary smudge of ink.

Armed with this knowledge the talented Mr Dubay, on the morning of January 14, 1995, inveigled his victim into a parlour where he purchased a bottle club soda, and poured some of the beverage over a piece of paper.

He crumpled the paper, opened it out again, and, voila! There was an image of a devil's face.

The enlightened amongst us would have realised at once that what the viewer sees in a Rorschach blot is whatever's in his or hear mind.

But although the young woman was a librarian with five CXCs and three A-levels to boot, she was an innocent 21-year-old.

She became convinced he knew what he was saying, that she was possessed by a demon which would kill her in ten days, and which only he could exorcise.

She became putty in his hands; metaphorically, insofar as he was able to send her home for money to purchase Rosemary Oil; and literally, because she allowed him to lead her to a room in the appropriately-named Venus Hotel, where he removed her clothes and massaged her with the Rosemary Oil she had so obligingly procured.

Apart from his facility with soda water, Mr Dubay must have also had some ability in the art of the masseur, because it seems that he then was able to persuade the young lady to submit to an extended (25 to 30 minutes, she recalled) roll in the hay, so to speak.

I don't know if the huffing and puffing was sold as part of the exorcism. Maybe it was just an outcome of the rub-down ritual, you know, something like the patient-therapist love which often accompanies but is not part of psychotherapy.

Either way, by any standards Mr Dubay's sweaty method of exorcism strikes one as among the less unpleasant ways to evict one of those devils that can inhabit a woman. After all, as Oscar Wilde once pointed out, the best way to get rid of temptation is to succumb to it.

Certainly Mr Dubay's technique is to be preferred to that of another exorcist whose method I dimly recall involved the victim wandering about the forest at night yelling.

Mr Dubay thought enough of his contribution to the young lady's continued good health to charge her $2,600 for his services, and she was clearly sufficiently satisfied with the services he had provided, because she paid him for them.

Poor Mr Dubay. For his efforts he has been tried for larceny once (without success), and four times for rape. He has spent three years in jail awaiting trial, and now has been given an additional five years by Justice Alice York-Soo Hon.

On the basis of what? Rape, in the Sexual Offences Act, includes sex obtained by false and fraudulent representations as to the nature of the act.

Did Mr Dubay misrepresent the nature of the act? I think not.

Such misrepresentation would be, for example, a claim, made by a gynecologist, that he was conducting an internal examination on his patient with a specially sensitive instrument.

In one actual example that I dimly recall, a music teacher informed his young pupil that he was opening up her “wind passage” so as to improve her voice.

Justice York-Soo Hon didn't punish Mr Dubay for pretending that he and his victim weren't having sex; the judge punished him for the untruths he used to persuade his victim to have sex with him.

Such a definition of rape must send shivers down the spine of every Don Juan. After all, who hasn't stretched the truth, or abandoned it completely, when under the thrall of an urgent desire?

How many scoundrels, while harbouring ulterior — or interior, if you may — motives, have claimed an impending divorce, promised eternal fidelity, and threatened to die of heartbreak if their love wasn't reciprocated?

Mr Dubay's argument had the even more compelling premise that she, not he, would die if she didn't extend her favours.

But how different was it from the normal, much frowned upon but perfectly legal lyrics men often perpetrate?

And indeed, such is the game of love that no few women have willed themselves into credulity, not because of the inherent persuasiveness of the lyrics but because they deeply wanted to believe.

A man tells a woman she's the most beautiful one he's ever seen in his entire life. In his more lucid moments he actually thinks she's an ugly old bat, but he hasn't had it in months and, as the saying goes, hunger is the best gravy.

For her part she knows she isn't any oil painting but, what the hell, it's a nice thing to believe.

Next morning, what? After the sweetness turns sour only a fanatic would then say he had raped her and should be jailed.

Justice Stanley John sensibly threw out the charge that Mr Dubay had robbed the silly woman. Sadly, such commonsense was shared by neither young librarian nor learned lady judge.