The 37-year-old commuter was prompted to speak up against the unidentified subway rider when he spread his legs so far apart that she was essentially "pressed against the wall."
So when Saia asked the rider to give her room, he didn't exactly apologize and scoot over. The scarfed-up man responded with: "B*tch, you ain't nothing! I've raped white b*tches like you, f*cking c*nt! You ain't nothing, you f*cking b*tch!"
Rather than responding to the man, Saia chose to ignore the situation and just put in her earbuds; however, not even that made the encounter stop.
"I told him to relax and [I] put my [earbuds] in," Saia wrote in a Facebook post. "He yelled at me to not ignore him, called me a b*tch and c*nt again, and punched me in the face and banged my head against the wall."
Though the punch was not captured on video, Anthony Macca did record the moments just after the alleged hit.
"She said, ‘You hit me!' And then I heard a loud bang to my left," Macca, recalling the moment a good Samaritan stepped in, told the New York Daily News. "The man grabbed the other guy [and] I started recording."
"Get the f*ck off the train," the "off-duty" stranger tells the assaulter. "Get off the train, bro, you just f*cking hit a lady."
With several other commuters jumping into the conflict, the manspreader was then inspired to apologize to Saia, to which she says, "I'm bleeding, you asshole."
Once the altercation was over, Saia's tribulations were not: she had to jump through several hurdles just to file a police report about the incident.
First, she went to the cops at the 17th Precinct close to her job in midtown Manhattan, but they directed her to the Transit District 34 headquarters in Brooklyn. When the battered commuter called HQ, officers there informed her she would be wasting her time to go there and just told her she could file a report at any precinct.
"My next step was blow this up on social media," Saia told the Daily News. "This took me by surprise. It's just a matter of safety. I want my neighborhood to be safe. I don't want this to happen to other women or men."
The New York Police Department announced on Friday that an investigation has been launched to see why Saia was discouraged from both departments to file a report. No word yet on the status of the punching commuter.
