At no point during the attack did the homeless woman attempt to fight back.

Instead, she simply covered her head with her arms and yelled out repeatedly in fear and pain. For each fresh blow that rained down on her head, back and shoulders, the 57-year-old woman screamed a little louder.

The attack lasted for maybe 20 seconds in a stairwell inside a downtown apartment house. Because the dozen or so blows she endured were awkward and open handed, the woman wasn’t seriously injured in the unhinged assault.

But she was clearly terrified. She was clearly stunned and perhaps a little bit embarrassed as a crowd drew close around her to watch the attack. When video of the attack began making the rounds, people would add anger on her behalf.

That anger raged for days.

If this had been just another downtown beatdown, the whole thing might have been forgotten 10 minutes later. The difference here is that some chipper woman with a smartphone filmed the attack and when that footage hit social media, the locals had a lot to say about it.

“This is completely unjustifiable,” one Lewiston woman wrote on Facebook. “Point blank period. Beating on someone who is clearly terrified and unable to fight you back is the most vile thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Disgusting!” offered another woman. “You fight a defenseless, homeless, elderly woman cuz you clearly can’t fight anyone else.”

Hundreds and perhaps thousands of similar comments rolled in for an entire week after the video went viral July 28.

The locals had turned their wrath on 33-year-old Kayla Grant, the woman who administered the beating and who unabashedly admitted to it in a video of her own.

“If you guys knew everything that took place, maybe you would have a different perspective, especially mothers,” Grant declared in a video posted shortly after the assault video went viral. “If your child is walking out into the shed to take out garbage and there’s someone doing drugs that’s in a part of your home, no. Absolutely not.”

Grant, wearing a light blue tank top and impressive press-on fingernails in the video, further insists that the homeless woman had also been stealing and that she had been repeatedly told to move on.

Why Grant had no alternative but to slap the woman repeatedly seemed to be the gist of her online confession.

Having seen both videos, Lewiston police came calling. They charged Grant with misdemeanor assault and posted that fact on Facebook in hopes of quieting the whole affair.

Nope. The raging on social media went on and on.

Part of the issue, many contended, is that Grant had lured the homeless woman into an apartment house hallway with the intention of beating her. Part of the issue is that the homeless woman — gaunt, frail and cowering — was clearly unable to defend herself.

It was clearly never meant to be a fair fight, and as more and more people watched the footage of the free-for-all thrashing, the enmity for Grant just grew and grew.

“You’re a horrible evil person and you’ll get what you deserve,” one woman fumed in the direction of Grant.

I’ll spare you any of the comments that followed because I fear I’d run out of asterisks trying to cover up all the four-letter words.

The woman who endured the beating is named Mary Jo, according to her family, and she’s been homeless for five years.

Many people say Mary Jo suffers drug addiction while others insist her problems stem more from mental illness.

She used to live in the Litchfield area, but now she’s one of Lewiston’s homeless, another ragged soul wandering the streets in the midday heat in search of a place to lay her head.

Mary Jo’s daughter, Constance, said this week that her mother has been living on the streets and occasionally staying with friends.

Constance isn’t buying Grant’s suggestion that her mother had been stealing or smoking crack on her property. It is her belief that Grant beat her just because she was tired of looking at her.

“She beat up my mom for nothing,” Constance said  Monday. “Just because my mom was asking people for money.”

What’s the truth?

Beats me, bro.

Grant was issued a court summons for assault, not arrested. There will be no first court appearance or carefully worded police affidavit. It is likely Grant will simply go to the courthouse at some point and pay a fine and that will be that.

To find the truth of what transpired, one would have to weigh Grant’s explanation against a thousand online opinions from people who did not, in fact, witness the account. It’s a muddy proposition at best.

The truth, as is so often the case, is probably somewhere in the middle of the two extremes.

My attempts to find Mary Jo this week have thus far failed. Her daughter, in the meantime, has posted a GoFundMe page in hopes of rounding up funds to help her mother.

A week after the beating went viral, the fundraiser has raised $25.

It took a little while, but it appears that the locals have moved on.