“That woman knew what she was doing when she baited her abuser,” says Washington Post reporter doing a Marx impression.

“One morning I was attacked by a Muslim extremist in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I’ll never know.”

Gwangju Inhwa, the Korean woman who escaped her American husband after she was abused in the first year of her marriage knew what she was doing when she married him.

She chose to come to this country on a fiancée visa, making her immigrant status dependent on her future husband’s. She was a carefree college student in Korea when she met her husband, a man of Korean descent who was raised in the Washington area. They dated for a while, carried on an e-mail relationship when he returned to the United States and eventually got engaged.

If the marriage was intended to get her to the United States, it worked. She said he was loving, but she knew the kind of person she was dealing with. An American who goes out of country to find a wife does so for a reason. She took those risks, and endangered herself and her family in doing so.

After he discovered that she had lied about her reasons for marrying him, he started abusing her. He choked her until his hands made purple impressions on her throat, she said. He punched and kicked her, and slammed her head against the car door, sometimes smiling all the while. Once, she said, he flew into a rage and ravaged their apartment, pulling her clothes out of the closet and smearing them with soybean paste from the refrigerator.

“Women have every right to use men to come to the United States, as ugly as others, including me, think it is—without facing domestic abuse,” said Samuel Parris of the Society for the Prevention of Free Speech.

Still, “I think decent people would say, ‘Why would you need to do that?’” Parris said.

The abused women have accused their husbands of being beholden to “cultural norms that favor male dominance,” according to the society. They insist they are not “Koreaphobes”, but critics note that many of them are blatantly anti-Korean men. The women, too, have come under fire for dressing in a manner many viewed as purposely provocative to Korean mores after moving to the United States.

“The Korean Wife-Beaters community has been very nervous and scared,” the Reverend John Hale said. “Tension has been very high.”

And you know what happens when wife-beaters are tense. I hate wife-beaters as much as anyone, but you have to be realistic. If their dress and leaving their husbands was intended as bait, it worked.