WHEN KATHLEEN ZELLNER was little, she had a friend across the street who kept a pet duck. Toothbrush was a peaceful soul who liked to eat wasps and paddle around a backyard kiddie pool in small-town Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in the late 1950s. Zellner was definitely not a peaceful soul—she regularly ordered martial arts guides out of comic books, then hid them behind the covers off her doll books so she could study judo and jujitsu moves without her mother noticing. Zellner put those punches and kicks to practical use. One day, a mean teenage boy grabbed Toothbrush and threw him to hunting dogs penned in a neighbor’s yard. Zellner, about 8 at the time, was furious. “Kathleen was so mad she went over and beat him up. She was fierce,” says her brother, John Hall Thomas, a defense attorney in New Orleans, who remembers the boy’s nose bleeding as an adult pulled his sister off the boy. “Nobody messed with Kathleen after that, I’m telling you.”
Zellner says that same feeling of righteous protection still motivates her: “What drives me is the abuse of power—the bullying and the victim. I have such a strong reaction when I see people who can’t defend themselves.”