With the Cashman Scandal, a Tale of Desperation in the City HE SAID, SHE SAID A complaint filed in Manhattan Criminal Court says that Brian Cashman, the Yankees general manager, was stalked and harassed by Louise Neathway, who says they had an affair. If you have spent any time in New York as a relatively sane, straight, single woman, you perhaps possess an intimate awareness of a certain subset of the human species known as Unavailable Guy, the kind of man who views you as a therapeutically dictated experiment, a shift from his usual type. Big City Book Club The next Big City Book Club selection is Dawn Powell's razor-sharp 1942 satire of the New York media world, "A Time to Be Born." Love, jealousy, petty resentments, rank social climbing and untrammeled ambition - the novel has it all. Join Ginia Bellafante, the Big City columnist, for a live online discussion of the book on the City Room blog Feb. 21 from 1 to 4 p.m. Taking part in the conversation: Candace Bushnell, the best-selling author who created the "Sex and the City" franchise. She'll comment on the book and answer readers" questions. Jefferson Siegel Mr. Cashman denies any relationship with Ms. Neathway. His type, in this instance, is the unhinged lunatic, the sort of woman who will call him panicked, a dozen times, at 3 a.m. and beg him to come over because she can't find her stapler. Many years ago, I had a close friend, a handsome and talented poet and painter who transitioned from a girlfriend who tried to light his living room on fire to another who ran down Second Avenue, naked but for a vintage fur coat, in the middle of the night. Some women acquit themselves ambitiously toward a registry, others toward a restraining order. Over the past several years, two memoirists, veterans of the Manhattan dating scene, have sought to dissect the proclivity for this sort of woman: Rick Marin in his book "Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor," and Steve Friedman in "Lost on Treasure Island: A Memoir of Longing, Love and Lousy Choices in New York City." It has been a good, long while since a sex scandal has produced anything close to sympathy for a male participant, but the past week has given us cause to feel twinges of compassion for the Yankees" general manager, Brian Cashman, who seems, above all, to have been a victim of his own injudicious tastes. According to a complaint filed in Manhattan Criminal Court on Feb. 2, Mr. Cashman got to know a TriBeCa woman, Louise Neathway, in April 2011. She eventually began stalking and harassing him, the complaint says. In the fall of last year, court documents say, Ms. Neathway demanded $15,000 for an undisclosed medical procedure and threatened to "assert facts" to the news media and Mr. Cashman's family if she didn't receive it. Ms. Neathway says they had an affair, and Mr. Cashman says they didn't. But he did turn over $6,000 to her, court records show, which does little to lend credence to his denials. Between April and January, Ms. Neathway called and texted Mr. Cashman "hundreds of times, sometimes calling and texting over 10 times in one night," according to the complaint. A day after Ms. Neathway was charged, Mr. Cashman's wife, Mary, filed for divorce. What, we might ask ourselves, could have tuned Mr. Cashman in to Ms. Neathway's instability? Perhaps the fact that she could not seem to settle on a single name: Known as Louise Neathway, she also calls herself Louise Meanwell. Additionally, as The Daily News reported last week, Ms. Neathway's ex-husband, his current wife and his mother all have orders of protection against her. When Ms. Neathway was arrested, she was a few weeks away from having harassment charges cleared in a case with an ex-boyfriend. Currently, 13 people have restraining orders against her. Perhaps Mr. Cashman's Google access was impeded when he was getting to know her, or perhaps he saw in Ms. Neathway the potential for drama that the failure to have acquired the Cy Young Award winner Cliff Lee could not alone supply. This story, though, is ultimately less about the alleged philandering of a powerful married man and more about the desperation that can afflict a certain kind of woman who comes to New York with glamorous ambitions and fails spectacularly to meet them. Until she relocated to Rikers Island, where she awaits indictment, Ms. Neathway, who is British, had been living in a luxury rental building on Leonard Street with a round swimming pool, all of which her status as an unemployed saleswoman could have hardly sustained. Pictures of her published on blogs and in tabloids show her as a beautiful young woman, an avid party girl, and now as the spent-looking figure she has become, at the merely post-adolescent age of 36. Ms. Neathway's drama is conveniently unfolding on the 50th anniversary of the publication of "Sex and the Single Girl," Helen Gurley Brown's loopy summons to erotic liberation. Having inaugurated a giddy new culture of urban single life, the book assured women that, with the right steps, dazzling careers and wealthy men would all be theirs. Twenty-five ago, the film "Fatal Attraction" temporarily reversed the high. But eventually, "Sex and the City" came along to erase that movie's bleak vision of the unmarried Manhattan woman, instead glorifying a lifestyle that the "80s had worked so hard to disparage. The mythology of the happy ending has endured ever since, kept alive by the popping up of one baby store after another, uptown and down, each with its flax bassinet sheets meant to suggest that fate chicly assumes the best. Ms. Neathway reminds us how baroquely untrue this can be, how many desires can go unsatisfied and how many resentments can foment. Last week, A. J. Daulerio, the Gawker editor who applied Woodward and Bernstein tenacity to the story for the sports blog Deadspin, told me that Ms. Neathway had been calling him from Rikers and asking him to come see her. When I spoke with him, he hadn't made the trip. The visiting lines in jail, he said, can get so long.