A British teenager claims she was punched unconscious after telling a group of creepy strangers following her in the street, “I’m sorry, I’m not interested.”
Gabrielle Walsh, 18, said she was with a male friend in the early hours walking home from a club in Manchester when three men approached them.
“I’d taken my shoes off and this guy came over and said, ‘I like your feet’. I just said, ‘OK,’ and we tried to walk away,” she told the Manchester Evening News, showing off her horribly swollen left eye from this weekend’s alleged attack.
“They kept walking behind trying to talk to me. Eventually, I turned around and said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not interested,’ ” she claimed.
Walsh said the ringleader, in his mid-20s, kept harassing them — even calling her bespectacled pal Kyle McKeown “specky four eyes.”
“Then he hit me — he fully knocked me out,” she told the local paper.
“When I woke up I was on the floor and the three of them had jumped on Kyle as well. His glasses were gone — he’s got cuts and bruises.”
Warned there was a two-hour wait for an ambulance, Walsh said she ended up taking a taxi to a hospital.
“They didn’t do much, they basically just gave me some eye drops and told me to go home,” Walsh said, later discovering she has a blood clot on the eye. “It still can’t really see out of it, when I open my eye all I see is yellow.”
She said the attack has left her too scared to go out alone.
“I’m not a rude person, I just said, ‘Sorry, I’m not interested,’ ” she said. “I think it was a jealousy, ego thing because I rejected him in front of his friends.
“Girls feel like they can’t say ‘no.’ They feel like if they say ‘no’ then they might hurt you and in this case it was true.”
Great Manchester Police said it was hunting the “cowardly” attackers.
“This was a violent and unprovoked attack upon a young woman who was simply minding her own business during a night out,” Chief Inspector Cherie Buttle told the paper.