A lone female fights off her attacker. Is it inspiring or proof of inherent danger? Well, maybe it’s both
I was utterly transfixed last week by a moment captured on CCTV in a Florida gym. A woman – an Instagram fitness model called Nashali Alma – sees a man waiting outside the door and interrupts her workout to buzz him in. It is evening. The two are now alone, sealed inside the empty room.
After a few minutes the man approaches her and then, shockingly, starts to chase her around the machines. Then he catches her. You think: that’s it, she’s done for. But like one of those dramatic sequences in the very best David Attenborough films – a hatchling iguana evading a nest of snapping snakes, perhaps, or an impala struggling clear of a crocodile death-roll – it is not over. She fights and, eventually – unbelievably – she wins. The exhausted predator has been outdone by his wily prey.
