Before we begin, let’s be clear about one thing: sometimes a massage, even one where the masseuse uses her teeth, really is just a massage.

As Clifford Levy writes today in The Times, the opposition on Georgia is hoping to use mockery as one part of their arsenal to force the country’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, from office.

Unfortunately for Mr. Saakashvili, the opposition recently happened upon a virtual gold mine of material for their campaign on the racy personal blog of a female American massage therapist, who flew to Georgia to treat him in February.

The masseuse is named Dorothy Stein, but she goes by the nickname one of her many famous clients, Frank Zappa, gave her years ago: Dr. Dot. As she explained in a VH1 profile some years ago, her massage career began at the age of 14 when she offered to give members of the rock band Def Leppard back rubs as a way of getting to hang around with her idols backstage. With that early start, she set about compiling the impressive list of “satisfied customers” on her professional Web site, which now includes hundreds of famous rock stars and celebrities — like the Rolling Stones, Sting, Mariah Carey, Russel Crowe, Jay-Z, Juliette Lewis (who could play her in a biopic), Lauryn Hill, Ice-T, Eros Ramazotti and Bruce Willis, for starters.

It is not clear exactly when Dr. Dot added her most unusual massage technique — biting her clients backs — to her arsenal, but that certainly attracted the attention of Russia Today, the state-supported satellite channel that deals with Mr. Saakashvili roughly the way Fox News dealt with President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. In this recent report, Russia Today sought to portray Dr. Dot’s visit to Georgia as a sign that Mr. Saakashvili is using his office to live a life of at least mildly kinky luxury, fit for a rock star:

As Dr. Dot complains on her blog, the footage in this report of her at work was taken from her YouTube channel, but the key image, for the purposes of some part of Georgia’s opposition movement, is the still of Mr. Saakashvili with his arm around Dr. Dot at the start of the report.

That image, which was taken from the first blog post she wrote about massaging Mr. Saakashvili, mirrors the dozens of similar snapshots she has of herself with famous rock stars on her distinctly R-rated MySpace page, but opponents of Mr. Saakashvili are using it as the basis for a kind of viral poster campaign against him. Posters featuring the image, and the word “Why?” in Georgian, started appearing on walls around the country’s capital, Tbilisi, recently — and were waved at a rally against his leadership on Thursday.

The New York Times

As an article on a Georgian news Web site explained last week, the posters are reportedly the work of an opposition youth group:

The group has been hanging posters in the streets of Tbilisi showing a picture of President Saakashvili together with an U.S. masseuse Dr. Dot. The picture was posted on the latter’s blog, where she was writing about her “favourite client” President Saakashvili. The story became talk of Tbilisi after the Georgian tabloids reported about it and after it was picked up by two Tbilisi-based small television stations, Maestro and Kavkasia.

You don’t need to read or speak Georgian to understand that this opposition group is clearly trying to use innuendo to suggest that Dr. Dot’s apparently legitimate, if unconventional, massage therapy is something Mr. Saakashvili should be ashamed of having taken part in.

You also don’t have to understand Georgian to see how bad this report on Kavkasia TV, featuring clips of Dr. Dot with her rock star clients, might look to Georgian voters.

In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Dr. Dot told The Lede that the Georgian media and opposition were distorting the contents of her blog by taking things out of context. For instance, she said, the images of her in sexy clothing used in the Kavkasia report came from photographs of her taken to accompany her column in Penthouse magazine, and were not at all like the kind of clothes she wears during her massage work. “I wear a stupid T-shirt and sneakers 99% of the time,” she said. She also added that there was nothing illicit about the massages she had given Mr. Saakashvili: “I don’t shag my clients — I didn’t even bite him.”

Dr. Dot also said that if she thought there was something to hide in her relationship with Mr. Saakashvili, she would not have blogged so extensively about her trip. She added that she she did not take down her blog posts, photographs or video of the trip after the media coverage in Georgia because she thought that would give ammunition to people who are trying to hurt Mr. Saakashvili.

My colleague, Mr. Levy, is in Tbilisi, and on Tuesday he asked one of Mr. Saakashvili’s top advisers, Giga Bokeria, to comment. Mr. Bokeria repeatedly emphasized that the government did not spend any money on Dr. Dot, and said the president’s opponents were trying to smear his reputation.

“The story was that the president sent his plane to — I don’t know, the United States was one version, another was to Germany – to bring her to Georgia. And, of course, this is serious, I mean, this is like some kind of banana-dictator type of behavior,” Mr. Bokeria said. “And that, of course, was always a lie. She came to Georgia, and she hung out with some security guys and she gave a massage to the president, and maybe stayed for some hours or a day in the residence.”

“If there would be any information out there that there were government resources spent for that kind of private endeavor, that would be damaging,” he said. “But this is not true. And no one thinks that it’s true. Except for someone extremely critical of the government – that’s one more thing to mention. But seriously, no, of course, everybody knows that that is not the way that President Saakashvili or anybody else is running this country.”

Mr. Bokeria has probably been spending less time than the country’s opposition reading Dr. Dot’s account of her trip to Georgia on her blog, but his statement about the duration of the trip does seem to be at odds with the first words she wrote there: “I am here for a week massaging my favorite client on earth (sorry Simon Cowell, you’ve been bumped down a notch from my #1 spot for now), President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakaashvili, who invited me to his interesting country.”

As for Mr. Bokeria’s assertion that the president did not send his plane to bring Dr. Dot to Georgia, it should be said that while the first shot of the three-part video diary of her trip to Georgia she posted on her YouTube channel, “DrDotIsLovinLife,” shows her view of the plane on the runway at the airport in Batumi, Georgia, her narration says: “You see that plane? I flew from Berlin, Germany to Batumi, Georgia with the president of Georgia.” So, according to Dr. Dot, the plane was not sent for her, she flew with the president. [Note: Dr. Dot’s videos, like much of her blogging, do contain some strong language.]

While Dr. Dot’s lengthy account of the week she says she spent in Georgia massaging Mr. Saakashvili in February is far too full of colorful language for us to link to it, those who are eligible to attend R-rated movies can check it out for themselves.

Here though is a flavor of Dr. Dot’s chatty blogging style, taken from the first post she wrote about treating Mr. Saakashvii, last year in Berlin, headlined: “A Different Georgia on My Mind.” In this post Dr. Dot explains how the photograph that has caused him so much grief recently came about: