As a woman who has been mugged and sexually assaulted by strangers--not a completed rape, thank goodness--I have a slightly different perspective.
1. A small woman cannot possibly outrun a taller man. Faced with a flight-or-fight choice in a remote area when confronted by a belligerent man, Amy Cooper may have felt fighting--by approaching him or calling the police--was her only option. Therefore, I believe it is incorrect to say that she could not have been afraid. She may have been very afraid.
2. I have two dogs--I bought my first dog after I was mugged--and the reason I go through the hassle and the expense is that as a woman living alone, I feel safer having them. When Christian Cooper tried to separate Amy Cooper from her dog, she, not unreasonably, might have interpreted that was a threat to her safety, if not to the life of her dog--after all, she had no way of knowing if the treats had been poisoned.
3. Amy Cooper has been rightly criticized for making a racialized threat, but Christian Cooper was implicitly using his maleness--his larger size and superior strength--to be combative about a civil infraction with a woman in a wooded area with no other people around.
4. By Christian Cooper's own admission, A. Cooper did not make the incident racial until he started recording her on his cell phone and AFTER he made an implicit threat. Recording someone is an aggressive, nasty thing to do, one that has greater repercussions than getting a park officer and getting that person to write a ticket. And why didn't C. Cooper choose that option?
5. The 911 recordings show that A. Cooper mentioned race twice to the dispatcher because the recording was bad and the dispatcher did not hear her words the first time.
6. In spite of my understanding the fear that Amy Cooper must have felt, I still think she reacted in precisely the wrong way. Using Christian Cooper's race as part of a threat was still wrong, even after he had behaved in a threatening way toward her.
7. Women like Amy Cooper make it harder for women to come forward about mistreatment because they create a climate of skepticism about such claims. This is yet another reason to disapprove of her conduct.
8. Amy Cooper was polite to Christian Cooper--telling him nicely that she was exercising her dog there *because* one dog park was closed--possibly due to COVID-- and the other one wasn't safe. This answer implies that USUALLY Amy took her dog to the regular park first and then found it closed. Given the extenuating circumstances of COVID and the closure of many public places, C. Cooper should perhaps have been a little more flexible.
9. You write something like "thank goodness for the video" but that video does not record Christian's threat, the polite nature of the Amy's response before C. Cooper started recording,--that is on his social media page--and the fact that Amy's threats occurred only AFTER C Cooper did two threatening things--saying he would do what he wanted to do AND recording a woman alone in a remote area.
