Ekaterina Romanovskaya froze. It was a warm, sunny day in late May 2000, and the 25-year-old performer had just dropped her 3-year-old daughter off at daycare in her hometown of Volograd, a city in southwestern Russia, when a man at that she had never seen before appeared behind her. “We need to talk about the girl,” the stranger said. Romanovskaya looked over her shoulder.
She didn’t recognize the man and there was no obvious reason to run, but Romanovskaya sensed something was wrong. Without saying a word, he began walking towards his parents’ apartment, his childhood home. It was a route I could travel blindfolded; perhaps he would lose the disturbing stranger in the crowd.
When she arrived at the building, Romanovskaya took the stairs instead of the elevator. It was the kind of small decision that women make hundreds of times a day: instinctive, automatic. But today, decades later, Romanovskaya, now 45, says the decision saved her life.
Because when the same strange man who had so unnerved her on the street broke down the building’s door and cornered Romanovskaya on the stairs with a hunting knife, she had a chance to scream. “The only thing I had to fight for my life was my voice, so I screamed,” Romanovskaya says. “I asked for help as loud as I could.”
Then the man pointed the knife at him and the wall next to him turned red.
“A fountain of blood gushed from my neck,” Romanovskaya recalls. “I raised my hands to stop the blood, but my body was totally unprotected. He tried to reach my heart with his knife three times, but my bones saved me: my ribs, my collarbone.” When a neighbor entered through the stairs and the attacker fled, Romanovskaya had nine critical stab wounds to her neck, chest and torso.
Her yoga pants were the only thing that had kept her internal organs from spilling onto the floor.
Decades after the attack, in 2016, Romanovskaya, along with co-founders Nikita Marshansky and Leonid Bereshchansky, launched Nimb: a “smart ring” designed to act as a panic button and inform friends, family and law enforcement if the user is in danger. danger.
When the man attacked Romanovskaya in 2000, she did not have a cell phone to call for help. “I asked myself: What if I had had a gun?” she says. “But I decided that a gun probably would have made the situation worse. I realized that the most important thing is to ask for help.”
