By 1969, Jackie Kennedy Onassis had spent nearly a decade under the relentless glare of press cameras. She had buried a president, remarried one of the world’s wealthiest men, and still could not walk down a New York City sidewalk without a lens pointed at her face. Most of the time, she endured it. One evening in Manhattan, she did not.
That night, Jackie attended a screening of the Swedish film ‘I Am Curious (Yellow),’ a sexually explicit art-house movie that had caused controversy across the United States after its release. It was hardly the kind of film a former First Lady was expected to be seen entering, which made it exactly the kind of tip a paparazzo would act on fast. Photographer Mel Finkelstein received word that Jackie was inside the theater and positioned himself outside with a group of other photographers, all of them waiting for her to walk out.
When she emerged, the photographers swarmed. Finkelstein stood five feet ten inches tall and weighed 168 pounds. He was not a small man, and he was used to pushing into tight spaces to get his shot. He got close to Jackie and snapped her picture. Then he got close again. That decision changed his evening entirely.
Jackie closed the distance between them quickly. Finkelstein later recalled his exact thought in that moment: he assumed she was going to say something, maybe complain or ask him to back off. Physical confrontation never crossed his mind. He was wrong. Jackie grabbed his right arm, extended her left leg, and used his own momentum to flip him clean over her thigh. He hit the Manhattan sidewalk. She walked away without a word.
She did it wearing a leather skirt and heels. The throw was not a shove or a stumble — it was a deliberate judo-style technique, executed cleanly on a crowded public sidewalk. Finkelstein admitted he never saw it coming and was completely thrown off guard, in every sense of the phrase. Jackie’s version of events, offered afterward, was brief and unapologetic: she said he slipped.
Finkelstein did not take the matter to court. He never filed a lawsuit, never pursued any legal action against her. The incident became a story people passed around rather than a case that wound through the legal system. For Jackie, that was the end of it. For anyone who covered her after that night, it was a reminder that the woman they were photographing was not simply a target — she was someone who had decided, at least once, exactly how much was enough.
