The Charleston Police Department isn’t ruling out the possibility of charging restaurant owner Mike Ray in connection with his exposing himself Friday night at a cocktail reception hosted by four woman-owned businesses.

Police spokesman Charles Francis said Ray wasn’t immediately arrested because officers didn’t arrive until Ray had already left One Broad, his downtown restaurant where housewares company The Shelter Collection had rented private event space to host Parlour: Charleston. Ray also owns Normandy Farms Bakery.

“He left the scene,” Francis said. “People do it all the time.”

Francis confirmed the incident is under investigation. He declined to say what kind of charges might be brought against Ray, saying speculation would amount to "putting the cart before the horse," but a police report classified the incident as "sexual exposure."

According to the report obtained Monday by The Post and Courier, three women at the event were posing for a picture when a man wearing a blue “Normandy Farms Bakery” shirt positioned himself between the friends and the camera. He then “dropped his pants around his ankles exposing his buttocks and genitalia.” One of the women estimated the man’s “bare buttocks (were) approximately five inches from her pelvic region.”

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One of the women, Britt Bates, identified the man as Ray and provided police with his phone number. “Everyone had this startled, violent reaction,” Bates later told The Post and Courier. “Nobody wanted to tackle him, because they were kind of wondering if it was somebody’s friend.”

Bates, one of the featured artists, was posing with another graphic designer and an employee of The Post and Courier’s business department when Ray barged into the photo booth. Speaking by phone the day after the event, Ray said people have always responded positively when he pulls down his pants. “But this attempt didn’t go over so well,” he said, adding the maneuver is henceforth “out of the repertoire.”

But neither Ray’s promise nor his apologetic phone calls to organizer Erin Reitz’s husband or Bates’ boyfriend have mollified some leaders of Charleston’s food and beverage community, who feel Ray’s behavior was out of line. Award-winning pastry chef Cynthia Wong on Life Raft Treats on Monday morning called for a boycott of Normandy Farms Bakery, which supplies bread to many Charleston restaurants.

“Unless all the talk last year of bettering our industry was just a bunch of hand wringing and lip service, it’s time to put our foot down....supporting this man with your money is saying that it’s OK for women to endure this garbage and enabling it to continue,” Wong wrote on Instagram. “No more.”

Wong’s post garnered more than 100 likes, but no restaurant has publicly cut ties with the bakery.