"“You felt fear?” I asked.

“Danger,” she said. “Clearly my body was telling me, ‘You are unsafe.’”

[...]

“You talked about danger,” I said. “What were you imagining might…?”

“Have you ever heard that thing, men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them?” she replied. “So. Yeah.”

from http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/21/internet-s...

Quoting a witty Margaret Atwood line two years after the fact is not the same as saying "my life was threatened by someone". She's clearly describing a physical reaction to anxiety, hair standing up on her neck at the thought of a confrontation, which reminded her of school. If not she could have answered the simple question "You felt fear?" with "Yes, I feared for my life".

That seems an excessively charitable interpretation.

You can read her own blog post, that she wrote immediately after the incident, but before all the media hullabaloo started up:

http://butyoureagirl.com/2013/03/18/forking-and-dongle-jokes...

Who's interpretation fits better? The "I was literally threatened with death" version or the "I was anxious because I was confronting people who were behaving boorishly"?

At best you can claim that 2 years after the fact she suddenly decided that she was threatened with death, and just happened to announce this new interpretation in an article that she is on record (in the article I previously linked to in another comment) as feeling misrepresented by the author of.

"What could be worse than someone taking what you've told them and portraying you as the aggressor? It was a sucker-punch to the gut. This is what Jon Roson's article in the NYTimes did. I simply become an agitator affecting the man's life, no more, no less."

So, no, I don't think I'm being very charitable in my interpretation.

hsod quoted what I was referring to, and whether you buy my interpretation or not, what I said was not an "easily disproved lie".

Also, hsod didn't even quote the entire thing, and context only makes it look worse for her. The interviewer gave her plenty of chances to clarify her position, that the quote was just talking about anxiety. But she stuck to what she said. She definitely believed that she was in physical danger.