James Ransone ‘saved’ woman from sexual assault at hands of violent attacker two decades before tragic death

A woman says the late James Ransone prevented her from being sexually assaulted nearly 20 years ago in New York City, as an act of a Good Samaritan.

The news comes less than a week after The Wire actor, 46, tragically took his own life at a Southern California residence, authorities with the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s officials said. 

A woman named Molly Watts under the Instagram handle @mollyxxwatts, shared her account of how Ransone had saved her from being sexually assaulted in the Chinatown area of New York City.

‘I’m usually private but I want to publicly say I am so grateful that this man existed and don’t know if the trajectory of my life would be the same if he hadn’t,’ Watts said on the social media site, sharing a link for a Go Fund Me for Ransone’s family. 

Watts said she and Ransone were neighbors in Chinatown ‘with friendly, overlapping social circles’ prior to going into detail about the horrifying attack she suffered in 2006, which Ransone saved her from.

Daily Mail has reached out to Watts for further comment. 

‘I was attacked at the threshold of our building,’ Watts said. ‘I screamed for help. No one came. 

‘My attacker put his hands around my throat so I would stop making noise. I couldn’t breathe.’

Watts said she had a sense of ‘certainty that [she] was going to die or be raped as [she] was choked unconscious.’

Ransone ‘heard my screams and ran to help,’ Watts said, noting how the actor put an end to the situation.

‘He came running shirtless, carrying a bat or pipe – I’m not sure which, because I never saw him in action,’ Watts said. ‘He scared my attacker, who ran.’

Watts said that Ransone ‘chased [the attacker] to the building he fled to’ and that ‘because of the chase, the police were able to identify him, a repeat sexual offender.

Watts said Ransone ‘saved’ her, and thinks his actions changed the trajectory of her life as he spared her the trauma of sexual assault. 

Watts said, ‘I’m not sure if I would have the same life if he hadn’t run down that night. Even as an adult, I’m not sure how I would have handled the weight of what could have happened or how long it would take to heal – I was already emotionally fragile.’

Watts said she regrets not reaching out to Ransone ‘to reach out to him to let him know how grateful I was that he ran towards my screams.’ 

Ransone spoke publicly about the incident in 2016 on SiriusXM’s the Jim and Sam Show.   

‘I was watching TV with my then girlfriend at the time, and I was in just pajama bottoms,’ he said. ‘It was like April and it was raining a little bit, and I hear this scream for help, right? 

‘I hear this commotion downstairs, and I ran down … I could see my upstairs neighbor pinned down on the ground, face up, and this guy was like trying to rape her, basically.’

Ransone said he told his then-girlfriend to call the police and then ventured into the dangerous situation with a weapon to fend off the attacker.

‘I run downstairs and I open the door, and she’s on the ground, and the guy has left, and I grab a metal pipe – because I’m in a f***ing building in Chinatown, so there’s just s*** everywhere, right? – so I got this metal pipe.’

After an exchange in which he hit the attacker in the shoulder with the pipe, he wound up getting assaulted by the man, who slammed his arm in a door of a building he had ran into. 

The attacker was eventually caught by police and taken into custody, Ransone said. 

‘What happened was they picked him up a couple hours later, and then I had to go, like, pick him out of a lineup and then testify against him in court – I don’t know what ended up happening, but that’s the story,’ Ransone said. 

Ransone was best known for his portrayal of wayward young dock worker Ziggy Sobotka on HBO’s The Wire during the show’s second season. 

The sophomore frame of the enduring series from creator David Simon closely examined the economic issues Baltimore dock workers faced amid changing times.

It illustrated how the slow times at the docks led a few workers – including Ransone’s character Ziggy – to earn extra cash smuggling in contraband. 

Amid the items unwittingly smuggled in by the Baltimore crew included drugs, and women tragically trafficked into the U.S. to be sex workers.

Ransone had a number of other prominent TV roles, including on shows such as Generation Kill, Treme, Bosch and Poker Face.

He had also appeared in multiple motion pictures including 2019’s It: Chapter Two, 2021’s The Black Phone and 2025’s Black Phone 2.

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