NY- Spurned women, seeking payback, can turn into toxic revengers

6-20-2008 New York:

Payback's a bitch, all right.

Kristina Caban, 23, was understandably ticked off when Samir Sara didn't call her after they had sex. But the hotheaded School of Visual Arts student took her vengeance too far, literally scarring her ex for life.

Caban was sentenced to five years behind bars last Friday for masterminding an assault in which she lured Sara to the Chelsea Inn and had accomplices shock him with a Taser before branding the letter "R" on his torso with a scalding piece of metal.

This twisted sister has plenty of women scorned to keep her company. Last month, New Jersey police reported a Trenton teen torched her ex's house after hearing he took another girl to the prom. Shanta Dargbeh, 19, was locked up on $250,000 bail and hit with 10 felony charges, including aggravated arson, after leaving the family of 10 homeless.

And who could forget the Williamsburg "Herpes Avenger"? The unlucky lady contracted the STD after an unprotected one-night stand, and effectively killed the offender's sex life in a smear campaign, after plastering the hip nabe with posters of his photo reading "I have herpes!"

The city is rife with everyday women turned vengeful vigilantes. "I freely admit that I peed on my freshman-year boyfriend's porch after he dumped me," says Jessica Gross, 26, associate editor of women's gossip and entertainment blog Jezebel.com. "Women want their feelings to be heard, and a lot of guys will just dismiss them without giving them a closure conversation or letting them express their displeasure. So these women figure the only way to get a dude's attention is to do something outlandish."

Revenge was sweet for Lakisha Atkinson, 31, a probation officer from Newark. She baked one ex an Ex-Lax cake after she found he'd been two-timing her for more than a year. "He ate the whole thing. He thought it was delicious," she crows, adding that he was sick for three days. "I'm sure he'll never forget it! And that was my goal."

"We look at revenge as sort of therapy that you can do at home," explains Christine Gallagher, founder of RevengeLady.com. " You're giving somebody their karma in this lifetime."

Gallagher personally tormented one former flame by unscrewing the door panel of his prized Audi GT and putting a marble inside. The car rattled for weeks. "It drove him berserk," she says. "He kept taking it in, and nobody could find what the problem was. Finally it was torn apart, and I'd left a little note in there saying, 'Oh you finally found it, f-er!'"

Yet even the Revenge Lady thinks there's a fine line between "an eye for an eye" and all-out "bunny boiler," such as Kate Dehnel, 22, from Brooklyn, who was dumped via text message and freaked out when she saw her ex, now engaged, in a bar. "I threw a full beer bottle at him and hit him in the head to get his attention," she says. "He tried to walk away then, so I threw another beer bottle at him and my vodka tonic before my friends got me to stop."

Gallagher references her "Rules of Revenge" in deciding how to pay it backward. "The punishment must fit the crime," she says. You don't go nuclear over something trivial, and obviously you don't do anything illegal or that could hurt someone. "That's crazy, because you'll just cause trouble for yourself."

Some contend that revenge is never okay, no matter how heinous the crime may seem. "It's never justified!" exclaims psychologist Cooper Lawrence. "It feels good in the moment, but when you have a chance to really think about it in the long run, not only do you always regret it and realize what a stupid move it was, but now you become the psycho ex-girlfriend."

Lawrence recommends taking a step back and confiding in your friends before doing something drastic. "You have to really think about how this is going to look to other people in a year from now," she says. "Do I want this to be my legacy?" ..News Source.. by NICOLE LYN PESCE AND LEAH CHERNIKOFF