Woman Stands Up To Flasher

INSIDE EDITION talks to the petite woman who's become a folk hero for standing up to a flasher on the New York subway.

An outraged woman takes action when a flasher exposes himself on the subway. 38-year-old Nicola Briggs is just five-feet, but in the video she's standing tall.

Briggs said, "I was like, 'Why is this person keep pressing up against me?' and I realize that you have all this space here. Then I see his penis out."

Another passenger captured the face-off on a cell phone and posted it on Youtube, where it's become a phenomenon, getting more more than 700,000 hits. And the fed-up passenger has become a hero to women everywhere.

On the video, Briggs is seen saying, "Oh you're getting (expletive deleted) arrested. I'm not leaving your side. My plans are done for tonight. I'm escorting you to the police station, ok? Oh yes. Oh (expletive deleted) yes."

Briggs said to INSIDE EDITION, "It's not an easy thing for me to watch because I can remember the emotion I had at that moment. But I feel very justified in reacting the way I did and handling it because I needed to take care of business."

INSIDE EDITION's Paul Boyd asked, "How did you muster courage to stand up to this guy?"

"I just couldn't see myself walking away and remembering that that had happened and let this person perhaps do it to somebody else," said Briggs.

It happens every day, men exposing themselves to women who they think won't do anything about it. But this guy messed with the wrong gal.

Briggs recalls, "I turned around, looked down and I saw this person exposed."

Briggs says that what you don't see on the video is the man apologizing to her, trying to silence her rant, saying, "I just thought, 'No, you're not sorry. You're not half as sorry as you're going to be, as you should be."

It turned out that Briggs, a Tai Chi instructor in New York City, was facing down a repeat offender. 51-year-old Mario Valdivia has been accused of public lewdness twice before. After Briggs got him arrested, he pled guilty and is now serving four months behind bars.

Briggs said, "I had to keep yelling so he wouldn't get away."