hiddenmidden:

baseln:

thekeri:

(Innocent until blah blah fuck it)

I was getting off the Red Line at Harvard Square on Tuesday when, out of the corner of my right eye, I saw this man slap a woman across her face.

The woman, a tanned, fit Asian lady in her mid-thirties, immediately punched him right in the face, at which point he yelled, “DID YOU SEE THAT? SHE JUST ASSAULTED ME!”

She dashed out of the car and, as he began to follow her, she shouted that she was getting the cops. As I walked down the ramp behind them both, I watched him smirking as he looked at her stomping away. His smirk faded as she grabbed a T inspector, and he tried to blend into the crowd as she whipped back around to look for him.

“He was just here!” I heard her say, and he was. He was right in front of me. And he had slapped a woman across the face for what had, to me, seemed absolutely unprovoked. Fuck that motherfucker.

I ran over to him, pointed, and said, “Yo. This is him. Right here.”

---

As the inspector held the two of them and waited for Transit Police to arrive, he asked me if I’d actually seen him hit her. “Not clearly, but yeah,” I said.

“Would you mind giving a statement?” he asked. I said it wasn’t a problem and called my shrink to say yo, giving a witness statement, sorry I’ll be a little late. (“Totally fine. Don’t bitchslap women. It’s a basic rule,” he replied.) As we waited, the man turned to me and said, “Did you really see what happened? I don’t think you did.”

“Yep. I saw it. I’m not talking to you,” I replied, because I don’t think you did are you fucking kidding me?

“She assaulted me, you know,” he said, as he pulled that day’s New York Times out of his bag and calmly read section A while we waited.

---

There are multiple sides to just about every story, as you all damn well know. You’re not kids. This ain’t new.

She says he was taking up two seats on the T. That she tried to sit in one of the seats and that he shoved her. That she put her backpack in her lap to assert her space, and that he pushed it out of her lap and onto the floor. That as she got up to exit the car, he stood up, said, “You can’t do things like that,” and slapped her across the face.

He says he was punched, unprovoked, by this crazy lady, and that he hadn’t done a thing to deserve an assault.

I know I saw this dude slap a stranger out of the blue, that she hit him right back, and that she was not going to let that shit slide. That I wish I’d seen it more clearly, but that I’m almost positive that’s what happened. “Good for her,” said the cop taking my statement, with a grin.

---

“I don’t want to press charges,” she said. “He keeps staring at me. It creeps me out. I don’t want him to know who I am. I just want someone to tell him he can’t do things like that.” I saw him. I understand.

“Officially, if there’s no victim, there’s no crime,” the cop said. “We’ll contact you if she changed her mind. But I’m gonna talk to him for a little bit. Tell him it’s not okay to do that kind of thing.” Because it’s not.

---

$10 says he does it again.

WOW THAT IS NOT OKAY. PLEASE REBLOG THIS POST SO THAT THIS MAN DOES NOT GET AWAY WITH VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN.

It’s not often that I sincerely, in my heart of hearts, wish physical violence on someone I’ve never met.

But.