On a February evening last year, a Libyan woman confronted two patrons at the Bohemian Biergarten in downtown Boulder, Colorado. She poured her beer on one of the customers and later threw a glass at the other, leaving a bloody gash serious enough for sutures.
Boulder police arrested the Libyan woman on a second-degree assault charge. It was not her first scuffle with the law in America. She'd been arrested three times before for disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and assault.
She'd had brushes with authorities in her homeland as well. But back then, inMoammar Gadhafi's Libya, she was the victim, not the aggressor.
Eman al-Obeidi burst into Tripoli's Rixos Hotel on the morning of March 26, 2011, six weeks after a Libyan uprising against Gadhafi erupted in the eastern city of Benghazi. She howled in front of foreign journalists staying at the hotel, bared the bruises and scars on her body and pleaded for help.
Look at what Gadhafi's men did to me," she cried.
The images of al-Obeidi were seen instantly around the world. She personified courage as the woman who broke Libyan societal taboos in speaking openly about a horrific s6x crime. She defied an iron-fisted dictator and in doing so, she became for a moment, however fleeting, the face of revolution.
More than four years later, al-Obeidi is just another inmate in the Boulder County Jail. Now she is the one branded as the aggressor.
She has been confined to a small cinder-block cell since January on $40,000 bond after violating the terms of a work-release program on an earlier charge. At her trial for the Biergarten assault, al-Obeidi claimed self-defense. The jury did not believe her, and she was found guilty in May.
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