She Kills Me: The True Stories of History's Deadliest Women by Jennifer Wright

Author:Jennifer Wright [Wright, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781419748462
Google: j7svzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2021-10-26T23:58:02.644262+00:00

MARIA BARBELLA

(1868–AFTER 1902)

RAPE

When women discuss the prevalence of sexual assault, there is always a certain person, usually a man, who suggests women should respond with physical violence. They really think the problem can be solved by women taking self-defense classes or going about armed to the teeth. The notion that you could be suddenly assaulted and immediately effectively respond with physical violence is generally far-fetched. Men tend to be stronger than women, and even in less violent circumstances, responding to your boss’s creepy request to give you a backrub by punching him square in the jaw would probably result in your firing.

Still, there are some women who take justice into their own hands. Maria Barbella was one.

Maria was an Italian immigrant. Her family moved from the small town of Ferrandina (in the south of Italy) to New York City in 1892, where Maria found work as a seamstress. At the age of twenty-five, she had the bad fortune to meet a shoeshine man named Domenico Cataldo who was from the same area of Italy. He became enamored with Maria and began walking her home from work. Despite her family’s disapproval, he claimed he wanted to marry her.

One night she let him buy her what he said was a soda. The drink was drugged. When she was barely conscious, Domenico took her up to a room in a boarding house and raped her. When she woke, he congratulated her on having been a virgin until he raped her.

Horribly, for a woman in Maria’s situation, the only “respectable” option was to marry her rapist. She proceeded to ask Domenico to marry her. Indeed, her whole family begged this objectively horrible man that they had disliked until very recently to marry their daughter.

Domenico had a different idea. He claimed, “I’ll find you a young man willing to marry you. I’ll tell him you’re a widow. I’ll buy you a black dress. You’ll marry him because I want you to. Then I’ll come to visit you while he’s at work.”14

Gross.

Domenico was seemingly under the extremely incorrect impression that Maria enjoyed being raped by him and wanted to continue the experience. He had no intention of marrying her and taunted that he wouldn’t marry someone who looked like a monkey. When Maria confronted him at a bar where he was playing cards drinking with a group of his friends, derisive as always, he shouted, “Only a pig would marry you!”

She promptly slit his throat with a straight razor, right there in the bar.

At the trial Maria explained, “I did not know what I did. I was crazy with anger because he would not marry me.”15

An aside: In the course of writing this book, I have spent a lot of time thinking of good and bad reasons to murder someone. I’m hard pressed to think of anyone more justified than a woman who killed her rapist after he persisted in humiliating her.

So, I’m sad to say, it took only forty-five minutes for the jury to find Maria guilty.

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