On this day, June 3, in 1968, radical feminist Valerie Solanas shot and nearly killed artist Andy Warhol in his New York City studio.
Solanas, a graduate from the University of Maryland, wrote a manifesto calling for the extermination of all men. She tried to get Warhol to review a script. Warhol, who had already been busted on obscenity charges, found the writing so pornographic that he believed he was being set up by police, so he put it away.
Solanas waited for Warhol in the lobby of his studio, the Factory, then shot him in the chest. Solanas turned herself in to a rookie police officer. She spent three years in a psychiatric hospital and prison. She died in 1988.
Scott McCabe
