Venice: I am a woman that was verbally and physically assaulted by a man due to my sexual orientation
Asked me not to put her name out there.
I want to recount an incident I experienced on the night of September 25, 2020 around 11:00pm. I was at Linksters in Venice, where I experienced a hate crime; being verbally and physically assaulted due to my sexual orientation. I have experienced various forms of homophobia since the age of 13, but never to this extent. I drove separately from my group due to working the next morning. When I decided to leave, my group went inside to pay their tab while I started walking to my vehicle across the parking lot; we had walked to Linksters from Off The Wagon. My group had run into some friends of theirs at Linksters and one of the males they were speaking to before we separated had decided to follow me when I said I was leaving. As he follows me through the parking lot, he is yelling various homophobic slurs at me and trying to take me off my path to my vehicle using his body. So seeing that this man is trying to isolate me, I turn around and walk back to the bar so that hopefully someone in public will hear and see what he was doing. It was really hard for me to think clearly with all the verbally offensive and homophobic words being yelled at me and no one seemed to care or notice. Later I find out that this man is friends with the bouncer and the group near us at the time of the incident was his group. Seeing he isn’t stopping I try to just remove myself from the situation ignoring him and attempting to leave a second time. He again starts using his body to block me from leaving, all the while not stopping with his verbal insults. At this point I’m terrified and starting to fear for my safety, even my life. Beginning to see no one cared to try and help me, I tried to scare him away with a kick, not even touching him. Then he immediately hit me with a hook punch to the head. I realized then that he was trying to antagonize me to do something to defend myself, so that he could hurt me. After this punch I thought I was going to die and instantly knew I had a concussion. I stopped my head from hitting the ground with my palms and then got kicked on my back right thigh finally being granted a path to my vehicle. He got what he wanted and he finally allowed me to leave. I reached my car and locked it and hiding inside struggling to keep consciousness. I couldn’t think clearly or even at all at that point I had never been hit like that in my life. All I need is witnesses to come forward and identify him as the one that assaulted me so the police can tie him to the crime. He is around 6 feet tall, 300lbs, Puerto Rican ethnicity, brown eyes. He has curly dark brown hair reaching his shoulders in the style of a mullet. I am 5’2, 105 pounds, blond hair, blue eyes, and 23 years old. The next day I went to urgent care and got sent to the emergency room for cat scans of my head and neck. I was diagnosed with a concussion and neck strain at Sarasota Memorial Hospital, I am still recovering from the head injury and the bruising on my lower extremity.