This was because she burst into the restaurant of the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli and told the international press corps there that Libyan troops had beaten and gang-raped her.
[4] She fled Libya with a defecting military officer, who helped her cross into Tunisia, dressed in a Berber tribal costume to hide her identity.
[8][9][10][11] She was later charged with a number of violent offenses, including a February 2014 assault on two patrons at a downtown bar in Boulder, Colorado for which she was convicted in May 2015 of a Class 4 felony.
[14] Al-Obeidi entered the Rixos Al Nasr hotel on March 26, 2011, later telling CNN she had gained entry by pretending to be a member of staff.
"[15] She told the journalists she had been stopped two days earlier at a checkpoint on Salahiddeen Road in Tripoli, while in a car with her sister's husband, later reported as Salih Hamid al-Aguri.
When the security personnel heard her eastern Libyan accent, she was ordered to produce her identity card, and when they learned she was from Tobruk—where rebel forces were active—they detained her.
Security forces punched Jonathan Miller of Channel 4 News in the face for coming to her defense, pushed Charles Clover of the Financial Times to the ground and kicked him, smashed a CNN camera, and pointed a gun at a television crew.
At a press conference on March 26, government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim said investigators had found al-Obeidi was drunk and possibly mentally ill, a suggestion that raised fears she would face indefinite incarceration in a government-controlled mental institution, continuing the list of forced disappearances the opposition charges the Gaddafi regime with.
"[23] Ibrahim expressed frustration about the international furore over al-Obeidi while Libya was suffering daily air-raids and massive civilian casualties.
[22] According to one rebel activist, Gaddafi government representatives telephoned her mother at three o'clock in the morning on March 27, offering al-Obeidi "a new house and a lot of money and anything she wanted" if she would change her story.
A state media reporter gave a copy to The New York Times, which described it as a homemade video of a belly dancer, relatively chaste according to the newspaper, and bearing little resemblance to al-Obeidi.
During an emotional interview, she told them she had been in government detention for three days, but had been released and was in Tripoli; she said the Attorney-General had refused a request for her to visit her family in Tobruk.
She said interrogators pointed guns at her, poured water on her face, threw food at her, and accused her of being a traitor, in an effort to persuade her to retract her statement.
[4] She said her life and reputation had been ruined by the assault and the subsequent allegations on state television that she was a whore, a prostitute, drunk, and mentally ill, and that people were laughing at her.
"[4] She paid tribute to her family for standing by her, saying they had allowed her sister to study overseas without a male chaperone, and had raised both women well.
She told NPR that, after the 16-year-old girl held with her untied al-Obeidi's hands and feet, she managed to jump out of a window, covered only in a tablecloth.
[32] According to CNN, after fleeing to Tunisia, she was met at the border by French diplomats, who handed her off to Transitional National Council officials who helped her escape to Qatar.
[33] On June 2, Sybella Wilkes, a spokeswoman for the UNHCR, said that al-Obeidi had been deported from Qatar and was back in Libya, in the rebel stronghold of Benghazi.
[39] The Libyan National Transitional Council released a statement on March 27, 2011, condemning the treatment of al-Obeidi as "criminal, barbaric, and an unpardonable violence against her dignity, the dignity of the Libyan people, and all of humanity" and demanding the immediate release of both al-Obeidi and all other women, children, journalists, and civilians being held by Gaddafi and his regime.
[40] Britain's Foreign Secretary William Hague said incidents of such sexual violence in Libya were a demonstration of Gaddafi government's "absolute disregard for any understanding of human rights.
"[41] The Human Rights Sub-Committee of the European Parliament demanded her immediate release, and said the incident was "emblematic of the situation of dissident women in Libya.
[23] Canadian journalist Neil Macdonald dismissed the Libyan government's response as "ham-fisted, dull-witted" damage control, based on his experience in the Arab world where "rape ... is routinely used as a punishment by security forces."
He called her act "not just incredibly courageous but near-suicidal", because of the social repercussions suffered by rape victims in societies like Gaddafi's Libya.
[45][46] Recognizing the prominence that Iman al-Obeidi incident gained worldwide, BBC included her in the list of "Faces of the year 2011", or women who made international headlines, for the month of March.
The list featured al-Obeidi along with US Congresswomen Gabby Giffords and Michele Bachmann, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, and Prince Albert of Monaco spouse Charlene Wittstock.
[47] David Kirkpatrick of The New York Times writes that rape is often seen in Libya as a crime against the honor of a woman or her family, rather than an attack against an individual.
Kirkpatrick writes that, according to one Human Rights Watch source, men arrive at the centers looking, in part, for docile wives.
[26] In February 2014, al-Obeidi was arrested in Boulder, Colorado on a second-degree assault charge after physically attacking two patrons at a downtown bar, seriously wounding one.
The following September, the charges were reduced to a single misdemeanor count of attempted third-degree assault to which al-Obeidi pleaded guilty, and the court imposed one year of probation and ordered her to seek mental health counseling and help for alcohol abuse.
In denying a request by al-Obeidi's attorney Eric Zale for reconsideration of the sentence after 120 days and possible probation, Judge Andrew Macdonald said, "It's terrible, I don't know how else to describe it...