Violet Gibson's Fascist Assassination Attempt

0:00On April 7th, a century ago, on April 7th, 1926, an Irish woman named Violet Gibson stepped out of a crowd in Rome and fired at. Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator, the Bullegas grazed his nose and her gun jammed on the second shot, making it the closest of four attempts on his life. Violet came from a wealthy Anglo-Irish family. Her dad was Baron Ashborn, Ireland's top legal official. She rebelled hard, converting to Catholicism, turning socialist and heading to Italy for charity work among the poor. But she battled severe mental health issues, including breakdowns after losing her fiance and a prior knife attack. Folks saw her as a little old lady no one noticed, getting within yards of Mussolini before pulling the trigger. Her family and the British government wrote letters thanking him for surviving and stressing her instability, while he spun it that way too, to look. Invincible, like he was divinely protected. After the shot, police saved her from the furious crowd, then Italy jailed and deported her to England, where she spent 30 years in a psychiatric.

1:04Hospital until dying in 1956. Mussolini kept ruling until partisans executed him in 1945, while he fled the Allies. These days, Violet's story lives on through books, a film, and a plaque unveiled in Dublin in 2022. Her great niece admires her courage and beliefs against fascism, but rejects political violence outright, calling it no solution.