@89, that's where you're wrong - Your body CAN fail you in a self-defense situation. I've been teaching traditional karate AND practical self-defense for the last 8 years so I know the rigors that self-defense training has on the body over the long-term [IE enough time training where techniques become implanted as opposed to thought about]. Additionally, depending on the attacker, whether he has a knife or a gun. . The distance from him you are, whether he is in front of or in back of you and the location of where you're mugged all make a difference in a self-defense situation. The OP isn't playing the defenseless woman situation - She's playing a situation where she prepared herself in one way and didn't expect some idiot friend of her husband to be dumb enough to waste what is essentially a canister of what could potentially save somebodies life. . .It's like walking into a retail store, spraying all of their fire extinguishers, not notifying anybody and blaming them when there is a fire the next day. . . The situation that happened is EXTREMELY RARE [not the mugging the emptying of the peper spray] and there was no way the OP would be able to account for that - She relied on something she expected to have - Just like you or I would rely on our bodies and more than likely be taken back if we were injured.

You have a point and I may have over reacted a little but I had a friend that was killed because her a- hole family wouldn’t let her learn to defend herself because it was “un lady like”. Regardless if she had something she thought would work she should still have a backup plan for when the pepper spray doesn’t work. I’ve been stabbed twice in the chest (single attacker) had my knee blown out twice and broke my arm and I can still defend myself in an attack without needing to rely on anything but my body. Beside that you can’t carry pepper spray in some countries, I can use pepper spray for work but I don’t even carry it, by the time you have it out and ready to use you’re dead.

That may be so and I won't argue that any self-defense mechanism should be checked regularly [especially after loaning it out], just as if you'd clean a gun regularly but these are all pretty COMMON oversights and not something you wouldn't expect to happen. However, we can't run around blaming victims of assault based upon 3 sentence assumptions on their lives. Frankly even with my training and my aptitude for avoidance if I were caught in a mugging situation and I happened to determine that my body wasn't enough [based on location, what i'm carrying, weapons involved, environment around me and body type of the attacker] I may just give up my money. For alll we know about this girl is what said - She could very well be a triple black belt with 40 years of martial arts and self-defense experience whom determined that based on the circumstance that the best option was the 'never before used' [again assumption, but a pretty good assumption] pepper spray. Obviously an exaggeration of circumstance but its hits the bat close to home that we can't go around blaming people without knowing what actually happened.