“Strippercising” may be practically mundane these days—there’s even a “Pole Dancing for Jesus” class in Spring—but it turns out there’s a downside to the now-widespread availability of suitable-for-home-use stripper poles, whether you obtain them from Carmen Electra or a sporting goods distributor.
As Phillip Jankowski of the Killeen Daily Herald reported, a Killeen woman may have used one as a weapon.
Sarah Howell was charged with assault with bodily injury after a domestic violence incident that culminated, Jankowski wrote, when she “beat her boyfriend with a stripper pole.” (Editor’s note: We have no indication that the stripper pole pictured at left is the model Howell owns.)
Police found the home ransacked, with Howell crying and claiming that she’d been assaulted. But her boyfriend, who was covered in sweat and grass, with scratches all over his upper body, showed police a mobile phone video that seemed to suggest otherwise.
(Also possibly suggesting otherwise: in 2010, Howell was accused of assaulting her boyfriend—it’s not known if it was the same man—with “a three-pronged gardening tool,” according to Louis Ojeda Jr. of NewsChannel 25.)
The video footage shows Howell slapping her boyfriend four times and splashing cooking oil on him. Then, after the video stopped, she allegedly broke out the stripper pole to use as a blunt object. As Jankowski wrote:
She grabbed a pink, steel stripper pole and tried to hit him in the head. The man used his arms to block her from hitting his head with the pole, the affidavit states.
No word on which sort of pole dancing workout Howell favored, or if it was in fact a professional training tool.
