Hell hath no...
From India to Alabama, stories of women who exacted revenge on the men who wronged them
IN Rome, a few decades back, a then 20-year-old Elizabeth Flock and friends hired a male tour guide to show them the city. Elizabeth remembers everyone taking a shot with the guide at a local bar but nothing after that — he'd roofied her. She woke up to being raped by the man at an unknown location.
Elizabeth didn’t fight back and didn’t report the crime because she doubted Italian police could help. Later she fantasized about having had a weapon during the attack. Years later, Internet sleuthing revealed her assailant owned a store near her and Elizabeth dreamed of torching it. As she writes in “The Furies: Women, Vengeance and Justice” (Harper, out now), a wronged woman’s revenge no longer seemed unreasonable.
“This book is the product of that continued search for women who took matters into their own hands.”
Brittany Smith killed Todd Smith (not related) in Alabama in 2018 because Todd was fixing to kill her first. Brittany was getting her life on track after drug problems and contacted Todd about adopting a puppy. Meetings between the two went without incident, but when an innocent aside triggered Todd’s temper he head-butted Brittany before strangling and raping her.
When Brittany’s brother, Chris, stumbled upon the scene he fired his pistol at Todd and began punching him, but Todd quickly subdued the portly, video-gamer Chris. As Todd choked Chris and verbally threatened the siblings’ lives, Brittany shot Todd dead with Chris’s revolver. “I did what I had to do,” she said.
While objective attorneys believe hers was a classic “Stand Your Ground” case, local authorities charged Brittany with murder. Because her rape kit had no identifiable sperm sample, they doubted the sexual assault though nurses found 33 wounds on her body. Prosecutors ignored the DNA evidence under Brittany’s nails and Todd’s “prior bad acts” — more than 80 arrests — before eventually convicting the rape victim of murder. Her mother, Ramona, wasn’t surprised.
“They hate women around here,” she said.
In India, Angoori Dahariya would’ve agreed. Born in 1963 and married off at 15, she was fated to live as a servile housewife. But in 1999 when a high-caste landlord tried to kick Angoori’s “untouchable” family off the land they’d bought, Angoori beat the man with a bamboo pole (a “lathi”). Enjoying that more than making her husband’s nightly dinner, Angoori created a gang of green sariwearing women wielding sticks.
Angoori believed India’s patriarchy was the problem and wanted to “take on anyone who dared hurt a woman,” Flock writes.
The “Green Gang” first beat a local engineer wildly overcharging local families for electricity. But mostly the “Green Gang” defended women from domestic abuse. Angoori interviewed victims, alleged perpetrators, and relevant witnesses before wreaking vengeance, either intimidating the guilty into stopping or beating them with lathis.
Many Indian women joined Angoori’s crusade, Flock writes, because “the cops, courts, village councils, and politicians had failed to deliver justice.”
Police and politicians knew how favorably the “Green Gang” was viewed so let them run amok, until Angoori and her minions went too far.
When one “untouchable” woman in 2010 said upper-caste Indians had her husband killed by police, Angoori lit the police station on fire. In 2015 a teenage girl was raped by two men, with Angoori solving the case by kidnapping the victim’s mother until she begrudgingly identified the attackers.
At its peak the “Green Gang” had thousands of members, but its emphasis on physical violence (and starting to charge fees for help) led to dwindling support. By the time COVID-19 struck the “Green Gang” was inactive. Angoori’s dream was dead — today she works for Herbalife.
In northern Syria, “Cicek” fought the same war. Born in 1996 and raised a Kurd in a culture that forbade girls playing soccer or riding bikes, Cicek did both. She dreamt of joining the Syrian army though they didn’t accept women, but as Kurdish forces defended their lands from ISIS in 2013 a 17-year-old Cicek joined the YPJ (Women’s Protection Unit), an all-female regiment where warrior-women took up arms. Defending her homeland for years from ISIS and then Turkey, Cicek finally felt equal to a man.
“I went to the YPJ and started my life as if born again,” she said. She killed her first enemy in Kobani. “She raised her rifle and shot him in the heart, then in his belly,” Flock writes of the teenager becoming a soldier.
Cicek would register another dozen kills in the battle for Kobani, and many dozens more all over northern Syria after that. She always knew she might be martyred, but that was the cost of being equal in protecting her land and people. “I do what is true to me. Wherever there is war, I should be there.”
For nine years Cicek battled with the YPJ, but then she unexpectedly quit the fight. She’d been hit by enough bullets, blown up by enough bombs, lost enough friends, that her “soul was shot.” She retreated to a bedroom and spoke to no one except the picture of a favorite YPJ commander.
“Her bravado [was] gone and replaced by madness,” Flock writes. Ultimately, neither Brittany Smith nor Angoori Dahariya nor Cicek got their happy ending, but to Elizabeth Flock their efforts weren’t in vain.
“Three women — three furies — fed up with a world of injustice, fought for something different. If only we could all fight so hard.”