White supremacist lured female realtors to his home and exposed his genitals to them, two realtors say

It began no different from many of her other listing appointments: A series of emails, a detailed description of the house and a date set for her to take a look at the property the client wanted to list on the market.

But when she arrived at the small, white ranch on Riverside Drive, Janice* felt that something wasn’t quite right. The front door was halfway open, and through the screen door she could see the house was dark and dirty.

Janice knocked on the door. There was movement from the couch. She heard a man’s voice call out: “Oh, I’m sorry – I forgot about our appointment.” Through the screen, she saw him get up, walk around the couch – and approach the front door, wearing nothing from the waist down.

She quickly turned around and told him to get dressed.

“I thought maybe he had fallen asleep on the couch, that he works nights or something,” Janice recalled in an interview later. “People forget sometimes and we walk in on embarrassing situations.”

Still standing near the door, the man told her “not to worry,” Janice recalls, and that his girlfriend “says it’s not much to look at.”

Janice told him again to put some clothes on. He apologized and invited her inside while he went and dressed himself. He disappeared into another room while she stood in the doorway, taking in the man’s dirty living room.

Twice, he emerged into the living room, still not wearing any pants. The third time, he came out wearing boxers, but he had pulled his genitals through the front so that they were still visible. And this time, he was holding a camera.

“He said he wanted to video me,” Janice recalls.

At that point, Janice had had enough. “We’re done here,” she told him, backing away, and then fled to her car. He did not attempt to follow her.

That afternoon, she went to Riverhead Town Police to let them know about the incident. Although they took her report, she said they told her there was nothing they could do. “It’s not illegal to be naked in your own home,” she remembers the officer saying.

It was Wednesday, October 25. Two days later, another realtor would report to police that he did the same thing to her.

‘A thing against women’

Christopher Borsella, 38, lives in a home owned by his parents at 45 Riverside Drive. He is not listed on the sex offender registry, and he does not have any record of arrests in Riverhead Town.

Articulate and polite, Borsella’s emails to local realtors do not indicate that he is anything but a normal client.

“We must have written 20 emails back and forth – he described the home in great detail,” said Rachel*, a realtor from Southold who said she had a similar encounter with Borsella last Friday.

But beneath the surface, Borsella harbors a darkly racist and misogynist view of the world. He leads a double life on the internet, where he goes by several pseudonyms, among them Caius Marcus Ideus and Cristogianni Borsella.

Many of Borsella’s darker ideas can be found in his self-published book, which calls for the formation of a “new society” in which white people are “elevated to godhood,” and where women do not have access to higher education. One of his radio interviews describes feminism as a “Jewish-derived aberration of natural gender norms.”

Fiercely anti-Semitic, he also talks in interviews about “destroying World Jewry,” laments historians’ defamation of “the hero himself, Hitler,” and believes that white people should allow the “Jewish Question to be answered definitively,” a reference to the Holocaust and Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution.

Fragments of his online life as a white supremacist have also bubbled up in his encounters with Riverhead Police. In 2012, police found Borsella drunk and ranting about driving around black children playing in the street, calling them “animals.”

At the time, he told an officer that he was in the process of joining the KKK, according to Riverhead Police Lieutenant David Lessard.

More recently, Riverhead Police went to Borsella’s house on Friday to confront him, following the second police report that he had invited another female real estate agent to his home and exposed himself to her. A neighbor, who like both realtors would speak only on the condition of anonymity for safety, could clearly hear the encounter that followed.

“He was screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘I’m a white man, you need to treat me like a white man, go after the f***ing n*****s in the Greens instead,’” the neighbor recalled.

For Rachel, learning about Borsella’s white supremacist, anti-feminist online persona suggested why someone might want to terrorize women this way.

“He probably has a thing against women, especially successful women,” Rachel said. “Targeting realtors, he’s targeting women who are independent and successful.”

‘We’re like sitting ducks’

Almost a week after the first reported incident involving Borsella and a female realtor, Riverhead Police have not pressed any charges.

Lessard says that’s because the department is still investigating if any charges would be applicable in either incident.

The crime of indecent exposure requires the subject to be in a public place when he exposes himself, according to New York State Law. And harassment charges may be difficult to pursue since Borsella did not actually make sexual contact with either woman.

“There has to be intent to follow through,” Lessard said. “He didn’t chase her. And if he’s in his own home, he’s allowed to do that in his own home.”

For Rachel, however, that answer is not good enough.

“How many times does this have to happen before someone gets hurt?” she said today. “I just keep replaying it in my head – like, what if he raped me? What if an agent goes in there and he just grabs her and ties her up?”

She expressed frustration that she had not heard about the prior incident on Wednesday when she made the appointment with Borsella that Friday. “None of us knew about it,” she said. “Something really bad could have happened. I was in such a vulnerable position.”

After Rachel’s encounter with Borsella Friday, she contacted MLS Long Island, a regional organization for realtors, and alerted them to what had happened. On Monday, the organization sent out a notice to realtors advising them not to set up any meetings at 45 Riverside Drive.

“I’ve been talking to other agents about practices for open houses,” Rachel said. “This same guy had also contacted another agent, asking when he could see the house. She told him when the open houses were, and he never showed up. But what if he had?

“We’re like sitting ducks out there,” Rachel said. “Someone needs to stand up for us.”

Borsella did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article.

*The names of the realtors have been changed to protect their identities.