Sex Attacker Went After a Woman ... She's a Kickboxer

A UK woman who'd been taking kickboxing lessons for two years didn't cut off Mark Willis' oxygen flow because she thought she'd get some cash out of it; she did it because she was trying to survive. But a judge awarded $785 to the unnamed woman as a "tiny token of the court's appreciation of what she has done"—specifically, wrapped her legs around her attacker Willis' neck and squeezed until she rendered him unconscious one night last August, the Telegraph reports. The woman had been walking home in Cheltenham around 2am that night when the 39-year-old Willis suddenly jumped out, pushed her over a garden wall, and climbed on top of her, per the newspaper. The woman wasted no time in trying to escape.

"Be quiet and do as I tell you and you won't get hurt" were Willis' words to her, she told the Gloucester Crown Court. Instead, she says she cursed him out ("I think I said something like 'go f--- yourself'"), then tried to break his arm with an armlock. That move failed, and Willis started pounding on her face. The "stunned" woman then completed the move that would make Willis pass out: a scissor-like hold. "I closed my eyes and held it for as long as I could, hoping he would pass out in a few seconds," she told the court. "Then I felt his body go limp. … I flipped him off, rolled over, and crawled through the bushes to the door of the house." Willis was convicted of sexual assault, and the judge ordered $785 paid directly to the woman, saying, "He bit off slightly more than he could chew with this young lady. … I think she has to be singled out in some modest way by the court." (More kickboxer stories.)