Help us! We’ve fallen into a Hawthorne novel and we can’t get out!

OK, not really. But get this — a New York woman recently arrested for lewd conduct after she was allegedly caught having sex in a park with her lover is facing an additional charge: adultery.

Suzanne Corona, 41, was busted getting down on a picnic table with Justin Amend, 29, last week, The New York Daily News reports.

“[The police officer] asked them what they were doing, and they said, ‘Just talking,’ and obviously they weren’t just talking,” said Officer Eric Hill, of the Batavia Police Department, where the crime took place.

They were charged with public lewdness and when it was found that Corona was married, the adultery charge was added. She faces up to 90 days in jail or a fine of $500.

Corona did not enter a plea at court on Tuesday. She vows to fight the constitutionality of the charge.

“One of the reasons you don’t see this charge more often is that the law in New York State requires that there must be corroboration,” Genesee County District Attorney Larry Friedman told the Daily News. Of course, in this instance, the infraction happened in a public park and there were witnesses.

“The police are not out conducting investigations looking for people committing adultery,” Friedman assured the public. “At this point, the charge is still pending.”

According to ABC News, nearly a dozen others have been similarly charged statewide — Scarlet Letter, much?

Creative individuals can incorporate a lot of objects into sex successfully — even those not meant for sex at all. It’s important, however, to remember that some objects do involve an incredibly high degree of risk and it’s vital that they be used with care and never under the influence of a substance.

The following is a cautionary tale coming out of the state of Washington, where recently a 25-year-old was arrested in the shooting death of his 22-year-old girlfriend. According to the Seattle Weekly, the man told police that he and his girlfriend were drunk when they began getting down and that soon, he pulled out his gun to intensify foreplay.

This wasn’t the first time they’d done it, but this time, the gun went off, killing the woman.

The man has been booked on investigation of first-degree manslaughter.

Information from the Seattle Weekly.

“Crashes Car While Shaving Vag” was a trending topic on Twitter in the United States last night and our commitment to informing you here at Sex and the 405 prevents us from ignoring it simply based our distaste for the term “vag” and out undeniable urge to projectile vomit every time we look at it in text. Yeah, we’re cool and devoted like that.

So get this — according to Florida’s Keys News, a two-vehicle crash occurred last Tuesday on the Keys because one of the drivers, a 37-year-old woman, was shaving her bikini area at the wheel.

According to reports, her ex-husband, who was with her at the time of the incident, took the wheel from the passenger seat to accommodate the process.

The woman, Megan Mariah Barnes, was shaving because she was about to meet with her boyfriend in Key West.

That’s right, her ex-husband, instead of telling her to knock it off, took the wheel for her so she could groom to meet some other dude.

“Amazing.”

Fortunately, no one was severely injured.

Barnes has been charged with driving with a revoked license (related to a previous incident), reckless driving, leaving the scene of a wreck with injuries and driving with no insurance. Her ex-husband, Charles Judy was not charged.

We think he should be taken in for being a push-over with no balls, but if that was enough to get a man locked up, who’d run the country?

Just kidding!

Sort of.

Images from Twitter. Information from Keys News.

In case you’ve been living under a rock or having the kind of epic sex we’ve been having, you know that Roy Ashburn, a Republican senator from Bakersfield was arrested last week for a DUI after leaving a hip Sacramento gay haunt with a younger man.

Ashburn “has a flawless record of voting against every single LGBT bill during his long tenure in office. He has raised countless wads of campaign cash by cuddling up to the right wing of the Republican Party and has spewed out hateful anti-gay rhetoric to his conservative constituents,” writes the editor of the San Diego Gay and Lesbian News.

And now he’s caught drunkenly cruising with gay men. Oops!

Juicy, juicy political sex scandal — just the way we like it.

But it gets juicier: apparently, the mayor of West Sacramento, Christopher Cabaldon (who came out during his State of the City dinner in 2006) tried to out Ashburn about six months ago on Facebook — which is either really hip or really juvenile. We’re leaning toward juvenile.

Cabaldon posted: “It wouldn’t bother me so bad to see Roy Ashburn at Badlands (a gay bar) with a boy if he didn’t have such a bad voting record on gay rights.” Nobody noticed.

According to Cabaldon, Ashburn frequented gay bars often and “everyone” already knew he was gay. People have their panties up in a bunch because The Bakersfield Californian — which, by the way, is the largest newspaper in the senator’s district — decided that Ashburn’s merrymaking with the gay community was not relevant to readers.

“The Californian has asked Ashburn about his sexual orientation in the past,” writes Christine Bedell, the paper’s government editor. “He has either questioned the relevance of the issue or dodged it altogether. The newspaper did not report the comments at the time, also deciding it was not relevant.”

Should the paper have reported it?

Image and information from The San Diego Gay and Lesbian News, via Riese.

In 2006, a West Covina police officer and sex crime investigator by the name of Tyler Kennedy self-published a 180-page book entitled The Magic Triangle: Coping with the Differences Between Men and Women, to help hapless men seeking “entrance to the magic triangle” (i.e., a woman’s vagina. Insert tired and tragic euphemism-induced angina here).

“In my opinion, women are devious and vindictive and should be left alone like a rattlesnake on a hot summer day,” Kennedy says at the end of chapter one.

This is a man working with victims of sexual assault.

West Covina Chief of Police Frank Wills said he’d never read the self-published book before the current investigation into the officer, which came about as a result of allegations that Kennedy had sexually harassed and propositioned a sexual assault victim over the course of his investigation.

According to the San Fernando Valley Tribune, Kennedy was suspended from the force in a separate incident last year when investigators found he had become intimately involved with a 39-year-old alleged victim of sexual assault.

“After taking a look at it, the book is an embarrassment to the profession and to the West Covina Police Department,” Wills said.

“Men will accept any woman, on the other hand, that is chasing them around because the power of the Magic Triangle makes it very difficult to say no,” Kennedy says in the last chapter of his book. “The bottom line is that the Magic Triangle rules and men find it too hard to resist.”

Apparently.

Information from the San Fernando Valley Tribune.

Last week, the interwebz went ballistic over a YouTube video wherein a woman confessed to infecting some 500 people with HIV.

“Just because something looks good, it could be dirty on the inside,” the masked woman says, talking to the camera in almost a sing-song voice. “Like a fruit. If you see a shiny red apple — you should have learned from Snow White. Just because the apple was pretty and inviting, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t harmful.”

It’s the scariest thing we have ever seen. Naturally, everyone went into a panic. The woman has since been identified as Jackie Braxton, an adult star on the web. She confessed to the Detroit News later that she does not have the virus.

“I made the tape because I wanted to raise awareness about AIDS,” the 23-year-old said.

Police picked her up at the Detroit college she attends and immediately took her to the city’s health department to be tested for HIV. The results are confidential, but Deputy Chief James Tolbert told the News “we are 100-percent positive it was a hoax.”

More from the News:

Braxton said she feels “bad” about making the video that has spread panic among Metro Detroiters and others around the country. But, she said she felt her tape served its purpose when she went to the city’s health department this morning and saw people waiting to get tested for AIDS.

Braxton, who uses the stage name “Fame” and has a 5-year-old daughter, admitted she made the videotape to market her own porn site, which she says she operates with her husband. Braxton’s video on the Mediatakeout.com site had recorded more than 430,000 hits by Thursday evening.

Police do not know yet if criminal charges can be levied against Braxton because they don’t know if she has broken any laws. Failure to disclose to a sex partner that you have HIV/AIDS is a felony.

Here’s the video for those of you who can’t take our word for it on how terrifying this is:

OK, so we here at Sex and the 405 know there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but… just the thought of HIV/AIDS makes it impossible for us to even think about getting down. Fame’s a cute pornstar name — very Lady Gaga — but Braxton will forever be “AIDS Girl” in our minds.

Good job on freaking everyone out into getting tested, though. According to WCTV, Michael McElrath, a spokesman for the city’s health department, said that the number of walk-ins for HIV testing more than doubled in Detroit on Friday.

That’s gotta count for something.

Image and information from the Detroit News, via @miamirotica.

On Christmas Day, 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up Northwest Airlines flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit. He had tailored his briefs to hold a pouch containing 80 grams of pentaerythritol tetranitrate, a powerful, if difficult to detonate, explosive.

The New York Post, always eager to get to the root of things went through postings on gawaher.com, an Islamic forum frequented by Abdulmutallab.

“The bomb wasn’t the only thing burning in his pants,” they report, offering the following selection of posts from the knicker-bomber:

“As i get lonely, the natural sexual drive awakens and i struggle to control it, sometimes leading to minor sinful activities like not lowering the gaze [in the presence of unveiled women].”

“And this problem makes me want to get married to avoid getting aroused . . . But i am only 18 . . . It would be difficult for me to get married due to social norms of getting to the late 20’s when one has a degree, a job, a house, etc before getting married.”

“The hair of a woman can easily arouse a man.”

“The Prophet advised young men to fast if they can’t get married but it has not been helping me much and I seriously don’t want to wait for years before I get married.”

“So usually my fa[n]tasies are about islamic stuff. The bad part of it is sometimes the fantasies are a bit worldly rather than concentrating in the hereafter.”

Information from The New York Post.

He is more than the Grinch who stole Christmas. He’s stolen something far more sacred for a lot of the patients whose parents trusted him with their children’s well being.

Evidence seized from the Georgetown, Delaware, office of Dr. Earl Bradley suggests that he sexually abused many of his young patients.

Alexis Slutsky, a deputy attorney general assigned to the state’s Child Predator Task Force, told the Associated Press that the volume of evidence seized from Bradley’s practice and home, which include video tapes and digital files Bradley recorded himself of the attacks, makes it hard to accurately estimate the number of victims.

“I’m comfortable in saying probably well over 100 potential victims,” Slutsky said at a news conference with Attorney General Beau Biden and other law enforcement officials.

Bradley, 56, was arrested last week and is being held in prison on $2.9 million bond. So far, he’s been charged with 33 felony counts relating to seven victims. A preliminary hearing has been postponed until January 14.

Here’s the hard lesson: you can’t trust anyone. Even those who have taken the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm.

We here at Sex and the 405 sincerely hope he suffers disfigurement, dismemberment and the last gasp at a hangman’s noose.

Information from the Associated Press via The Sphere.

Jaquetin Fox, 18, has been charged kidnapping, armed robbery, first-degree burglary and grand larceny after he broke into a woman’s South Carolina home, cut cords off her blinds and appliances, collected some knives and sat down to watch porn on a computer as he waited for his victim to get home.

When the woman arrived, Fox approached her with a knife. Not one to be spooked, his victim remained calm and convinced him he let her use the bathroom. Once locked inside, she phoned the police.

I’m not sure why the media is calling him the porn-watching burglar, as it is evident to anyone reading about the incident that Fox had something much more heinous in mind. I’m assuming the label is related to the fact that he stole a car to make his getaway.

Whatever. I’m glad he’s been apprehended.

I’m down with cords and knives–but only where there is consent.