Self-Defense Experts Teach Avoiding Violence by Staying Calm : ‘It makes sense for us to have a plan’

SAN DIEGO —  “And then there was the purse-snatcher who told me he always went to work disguised in a wig, and wearing an athletic cup supporter. He was so afraid that someone whose purse he was snatching would kick him in an awkward place,” Nicole Reynolds said.

Laughter from an audience of 50 women bounced around the Imperial Bank Tower’s conference room. Reynolds was describing one of the interviews she held with prison inmates as part of the research--10 years of it--that led to her becoming an expert on women’s personal safety.

“But I’m serious,” she said, waving her hands expressively as the laughter died down. “Criminals make plans before they go out to commit crime. It makes sense for us to have a plan for our safety.”

Reynolds emphasizes nonviolence. Women, she feels, should avoid fighting with a man--”Because, let’s face it, most of the time the man will win”--and should resort to some form of well-rehearsed defensive action only as a last resort.

“How many of you have ever hit a man?” she asked the audience. Nobody moved. The potted plants behind her moved slightly in a draft from the air-conditioning.

“How many of you have ever negotiated with a man?” she asked. A hand rose from everyone in the audience. Reynolds smiled. “It’s what women grow up doing. Most of us are very good at it.”

On this particular evening she had brought along her brother-in-law, Jim Lawson, and a friend, off-duty policeman Randy Triviz--both sturdy, healthy looking men in their mid-30s--to play the roles of burglars and muggers and rapists.

Standing beside the two men Reynolds, 5 feet tall, her white suit a size 3, her dark hair curling to her shoulders, looked child-sized. Her size, she feels, is an advantage for someone teaching seminars on self-protection.

“When women see me,” she said, “they usually think, ‘Well, if she can protect herself . . .’ ”

“She’s so lively,” Liz Moffat, who works at Great American Savings, murmured to the woman next to her as Reynolds was asking Lawson to grab her from behind as she pretended to be unlocking the front door of her condominium.

As her brother-in-law’s arms clamped around her, Reynolds suddenly rolled her shoulders forward, turned her head to the side, screamed, “Oh, my God!” and slithered limply down through his arms in a mock faint.

“ This you have to practice, with another person, to get right,” she explained, propping herself on one elbow on the conference room’s charcoal gray carpeting. “But it’s effective.

“Remember, only about 2% of rapists are weird psychopaths. The rest are just angry men who’ve been humiliated and want someone they can humiliate back.”

If a woman is one step ahead of them--”If she can do the humiliating to herself, by vomiting, wetting her pants, drooling down her chin as she pretends to be having a fit,” Reynolds explained--she can often lose all her “appeal” as a victim. Rapists, after all, are people, too.

Some would-be rapists, she said, can even be talked out of it.

“I remember one woman who came to one of my seminars,” Reynolds said. “She was in a Laundromat, quite late at night, when a guy threw her behind the Coke machine and started running his hands up and down her body.”

The woman, Reynolds recalled, thought about kicking him in the groin.

“But instead she tried saying, in a severe voice, ‘I’m a decent Christian woman. I won’t have this!’ The guy was so surprised he said ‘OK, lady,’ and backed off.”

“What if talking doesn’t work?” a plump woman in a turquoise sweater asked.

“If it doesn’t work, what have you lost? You’re no further behind,” Reynolds said. “And someone may have come along while you were talking. But once you take that first step into violence--once you strike or kick him, or whatever--there’s no going back. He’ll respond with violence. And he’ll do what he has to do to get what he wants.”

Michaleen Sawka was there, she told the group, because she had seen Reynolds on the television news in April. (She was being interviewed on women’s personal safety after a 27-year-old Solana Beach woman was found killed on her way home from a job interview.) “I’m often the last person to leave my office,” Sawka said. “And to get to my car I have to pass a lot of bushes. On dark nights it’s easy to imagine someone lurking behind every one!”

From the depths of a bulging carrier bag, Reynolds fished out a “screamer.” A tiny silver tube of pressurized air--”Small enough to clutch in your fist or tuck in your jogging shoe”--it emits an ear-piercing shriek.

“Great for chasing off mean dogs, too,” Reynolds said. “And a real easy device, one you can fix as soon as you get home tonight, is to fill a plastic pill bottle with ordinary kitchen pepper. Carry it with you if, like Michaleen, you have to cross dark areas to get to your car.”

Mace, Reynolds said, is something she’s “not crazy about.” It has a short shelf life, and is affected by hot weather.

“I’ve seen guys sprayed in the face with Mace who didn’t even blink,” she said. “But pepper in the face will stop anybody.

It was Reynolds’ own experience with a rapist--a nightmarish night in which her jaw and nose were broken and all of her front teeth were smashed--that propelled her into researching personal safety.

It happened 20 years ago, when she was 23.

She was living in the East then, working in personnel training for a nightclub chain. One night, when she was leaving work very late, an accountant with whom she had worked for three years offered her a lift home. When she refused his advances--”He asked me for sex, and I laughed at him. I did everything wrong”--he dragged her into a motel room by her hair.

She said his anger, his corrosive inner need to “humble” her, drove him berserk. “My experience was not typical. He was one of the 2%.”

After that night, Reynolds’ life fell apart for a while. She was in the hospital for three months. The rape ended her marriage.

“My husband never felt the same about me,” she said. “And I never felt the same about him. I was angry with him. I felt that he should have protected me.”

Her husband, she said, was not even in the country when she was attacked. “He was in France, on business. But your feelings afterward have nothing to do with logic.”

When she returned to work with the nightclub chain, her job required frequent travel to large cities.

“I was scared all the time. Those long, often-empty corridors at (Los Angeles International Airport), where all you can hear is the echo of your own footsteps . . . At home I was paranoid about the safety of my 3-year-old daughter, Kelli, and myself. We had bars on the windows. Two large dogs. I didn’t even start dating again until Kelli was 11.”

It was obviously “no way to live,” she told her audience. Learning how to plan for her personal safety has set her free, she said, almost as though she had been let out of prison.

“Write down your secret fears,” she instructed the audience. Forty heads, silver, blonde, reddish, dark and in between, bent over as the women scribbled.

Having the car break down on a dark road at night turned out to be a common fear. Reynolds nodded. They were wise to be scared, she said.

“Henry Lucas, who (claims to have) murdered 300 women, said women who were stranded by the roadside were his best ‘source’ for victims,” Reynolds said. “He used to cruise around hunting for them, and then go up and offer to help. ‘They were always so pleased to see me,’ he said.”

Her solution, she said, is her “security bag.” She whipped it out of the carrier bag to show the audience. It contains a sign for the back window that reads PLEASE CALL THE POLICE, a heavy-duty flashlight (“to shine in the face of anyone approaching”), a can of flat-tire fixative and a fire extinguisher.

“Jim . . . come up and be a man approaching a woman in a stranded car,” she said.

When Lawson, in his role, asked if she needed help, she pointed to the sign.

“If he’s on the level, and you thank him for stopping but say the police are already on their way, he’ll leave,” she said. “If he keeps on coming, take out your fire extinguisher and tell him if he doesn’t leave you’ll squirt it right in his face. And yell it at him,” she shouted, waving the extinguisher threateningly at Lawson.

“Poor Jim,” she said, laughing. “He’s probably thinking, ‘And all I did was marry into this family!’ ”

The audience was laughing with her. Laughter always plays a large part in Reynolds seminars, in spite of the serious subject.

“When I first began teaching this at National University, in 1983,” she said, “all the office staff trooped down the stairs to see what was happening. They couldn’t understand how self-defense could be funny. But I like presenting a heavy subject in a light way.”

Reynolds calls her seminars “Alternatives to Violence.” The name is registered as a business. It has been since 1983.

“But it’s only on a part-time basis. I don’t earn my living teaching self-defense. I wouldn’t eat if I just did that,” she said.

Since she moved to San Diego seven years ago, she has been working as a consultant, focusing on training personnel. She develops employee guidelines for a client list that includes 7-Eleven, Sheraton Harbor Island restaurant facilities and the Professional Vision Care Group.

Another common fear that the women at the Imperial Bank Tower seminar wrote down was that of being asleep, alone in the house, and waking to find someone in the room.

Randy Triviz, the off-duty policeman, helped Reynolds dramatize this scenario.

Triviz said he believes he has a chance to help people by taking part in these seminars. “From my job experience, I’ve found that most untrained people aren’t cautious enough,” he said. “They don’t stop and think about what could happen.”

Reynolds informed him as she lay across two chairs that tonight he would be a burglar desperate for drug money, who is in the act of rifling through a jewel box when a woman in her home wakes up. Panicking, the burglar seizes the woman by the throat.

“Randy, try and look a little more desperate!” she whispered as Triviz’s hands closed around her throat. His mustache quivered as he began to “strangle” her.

“Now it’s life or death. Now it’s time for last-resort measures,” Reynolds gasped.

Reaching up, clasping Triviz’s head to keep it steady, she demonstrated how she would gouge the burglar’s eyes. At the same time, she explained, she would knee him in the groin, and smash his kneecap with her elbow.

“When you go for it, you go for it,” she said.

“I don’t think I could ever gouge somebody’s eyes out,” Liz Moffat said, as the class practiced eye-gouging on each other. Many others said they felt the same way.

“Every woman has to ask herself what she is capable of, both morally and physically,” Reynolds explained. “We’re all different. How old are you? How strong? How fast can you run? Can you act? There are some women who’d rather be raped than tell the rapist they have active herpes. Others can fake going into labor so convincingly that the guy runs for the hills. You have to have an individual plan of safety that you know you, as the kind of person you are, will be able to carry out.”

Older women, she said, may seem more vulnerable, but their life experience can be an asset.

“This is a true story,” she said. “A 65-year-old woman, who happens to be deaf, has just said goodby to her husband, who has gone to play cards for three hours. As she walks into her hallway she sees a man, tall, muscular, about 35, standing a few feet in front of her. What do you think she did for creative defense?”

The women murmur among themselves. Run? But she’s 65. Obviously, if she is deaf, she can’t use the telephone. Hit him on the head with something heavy, perhaps? But then he might kill her.

“She played the mother role with him,” Reynolds said. “She told him he looked tired and hungry. She led him into the kitchen and cooked him a meal. She listened--lip-reading--while he told her all his problems, and she patted him on the shoulder and sympathized. By the time her husband got home, the man was asleep on their bed.”

He turned out to be a truck driver who had raped two elderly women in Utah.

“I’m very familiar with that story, because that woman was my mother,” Reynolds said. “She was wise enough to know that people who hurt are usually hurting themselves.”

There are no guarantees, Reynolds said. The criminals are as individual as the people they pick to be their victims. “But with a plan you dramatically increase the odds in your favor,” she said.

After three hours, in which she has covered everything from travel safety to stun guns, Reynolds is ready to wrap up the seminar.

“There’s only one disadvantage to teaching this,” she said as she dusted fluff from the carpet off her white suit. “Whenever I go out on a date with somebody new, and I tell them that I teach self-defense, they say, ‘Oh, er . . . are you going to throw me across the room?’ ”