One would hope that this will one day go without saying, but there are all sorts of reasons why groping someone you don’t know is not a very strong play.
For male nightclub patrons in the San Francisco area, Leslie Smith just added another reason. That reason is Leslie Smith.
On Saturday night, UFC fighter Leslie “The Peacemaker” Smith and a friend were heading into a San Francisco club called The Mint, when a man allegedly grabbed the friend’s butt. According to Smith, the two exchanged words before he tried throwing a punch at her.
Smith also spoke to the MMA publication. She said that she was compelled to step in and defend her friend.
“I never meant to fight him, but I couldn’t let my friend get disrespected like that, and he escalated it from there. I make mistakes, but I try (and sometimes fail) to live by a policy of non-initiation of violence,” she said.
That’s when she ducked the punch, shot a double-leg takedown, and got the guy to the ground. In her own words:
“I started to take his back, but his hair was really gross and it didn’t quite feel right. I let go of that and just dropped elbows on him. He turned over and I just dropped elbows on him from mount against the building until he started saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ Then I stopped as soon as he said sorry, because that was really the only thing I went over there for.”
According to Smith’s head trainer, Cesar Gracie, fellow UFC fighter Heather Jo Clark was also at the club, and got involved during the altercation:
“Heather, without missing a beat, delivered a running soccer kick to the man’s nether regions.”
Smith, who considers herself a pacifist outside the cage, added:
“It has given my friend and all of my female friends so much pleasure to know that happened. It’s not an unusual thing for a woman, a good-looking woman in public to get grabbed and fondled by strangers. At first, I was trying to keep the whole thing on the down low and not say anything about it, but after seeing how happy it has made so many women, I changed my mind.
It’s happened to me before. I don’t think I know a single woman who hasn’t been in a situation where there was a dude who came too close to her and violated her personal space.
It’s a situation where if a dude did that to another dude, there would be a fight. That wouldn’t happen in the first place. When I saw people reacting to it so happily, I was like, OK we can share it. Let’s share it.”
So far, the police haven’t been involved in this incident, but more importantly, video of this hasn’t surfaced yet, which is a shame.
Source: AWM