Try to imagine spending eight months so fearful of being approached by men seeking sex that you spent most of your days fighting nausea, panic attacks, and struggling to sleep at night. That’s what two Connecticut women are alleging after a co-worker created accounts in their names on Adult Friend Finders, billed “the world’s largest Sex & Swinger” website, according to a recent lawsuit filed in Hartford Superior Court.

For Amellia Morelli and Rhonda Voytas, the nightmare began in March of 2009 when Joseph DeJoseph, a co-worker at Pratt & Whitney, obtained their personal information from work computers and employee files, the lawsuit said. DeJoseph used that information to set up profiles on the site, where he listed them as “bisexual, promiscuous, and willing to have or schedule sexual encounters,” it said.

DeJoseph went on to pose as the two women on the site’s chat rooms, where he would give out their locations, phone numbers, even set up meetings where sexual acts were supposed to take place, the lawsuit said.

Soon the calls and text messages began to come in, at all hours of the day and night, from men looking for sex, it said. Sometimes the men calling would request phone sex, others tried to set up meetings or invited them to engage in group sex.

The texts were just as disturbing, the lawsuit said, and were “offensive and harassing and included pictures of the male sexual anatomy.”

Before long, the unwanted correspondence began to take a toll on their personal and work lives, it said. Morelli and Voytas began experiencing severe anxiety, and had trouble sleeping. At work they had trouble focusing, the lawsuit said. They didn’t even feel safe in their own homes because they were afraid a stranger would arrive at their door looking for sex, it said.

This led to headaches, vomiting, uncontrollable panic attacks, and even social anxiety due to the fear of “being approached in public by men looking for sex,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit, filed on Dec. 1, seeks monetary damages from DeJoseph and from Various Inc., the company that owns Adult Friend Finders.

According to the lawsuit, Morelli and Voytas informed the company of the fraudulent profiles in March of 2009, soon after they were created, but the company took until November to conduct an investigation. For eight months as that investigation proceeded, the profiles remained on the site and the calls and texts continued.

The lawsuit notes that the company could have taken the profiles down while they were investigating the claims but failed to do so.

“A simple check into the payer of said fraudulent account would have revealed non-matching names on the account in relation to the credit card used to pay for said account, would have revealed differences in addresses from said credit card and account name or profile name, as well as different I.P. addresses for said account and payer of said account,” it said.

The suit’s next hearing will be on Dec. 9.