LET’S TRY to figure this one out: A 19-year-old woman claims to have been date-raped at the “Watts Motel” in north Everett. (There’s a “Waite’s Motel” in north Everett, but not a “Watts Motel;” but let’s continue.) She puts up a few web pages of semi-incoherent poetry and prose about her violent ordeal, and about her still-ambiguous feelings toward her assailant.

But here comes the weird part. She puts all this material on ThePlunge.com, a party-planning website. She adds bikini pix, supposedly of herself, and invites her readers to sign up for a gangbang orgy party (billed on her main page as “hot wild passionate sex”), in the same motel room, on the one-year anniversary of her date-from-hell. (She writes, “i am interested in men, women, sex, pleasure, sex toys, getting naked, walking around naked, touching you, feeling you…”)

Part of me wants to think, or to hope, it’s all a hoax. I want to reach out to either the victim or the hoax-writer, whichever is real, and tell her/him/them/whoever that life isn’t really so totally bleak/sick as to require either really planning such a “party” or joking about one.

But another part of me wants to go to the party.