There’s nothing scarier than Meryl Streep and Cher walking down the streets of New York City. These women can fight, okay?!

Meryl recently shared a story about when she and Cher saved a woman from a mugger. “I just went completely nuts and went after this man,” she said at the Committee to Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Awards. “Ask Cher — she was there. And the thug ran away, it was a miracle.”

“I do know something about real terror,” she added, speaking of a separate incident where she was the victim. “I played dead and waited until the blows stopped — watching, like people say you do — from about 50 feet above from where I was beaten.”

The two times in my life when I was threatened and dealt with real physical violence, I learned something about life that I wouldn’t have known otherwise and I was lucky because my instincts served me well,” she said. “But I was changed by these events on a cellular level because women do know something particular about coming to the danger place. We come to it disadvantaged through the many millennia preceding our present moment and because of our vulnerability, we anticipate danger — we expect it. We’re hyper alert to it. This comes in very handy in investigative journalism, but also in acting.”

She added: “Thank you, you intrepid, underpaid, over-extended, trolled, and un-extolled, young and old, battered and bold, bought and sold, hyper-alert crack-caffeine fiends. You’re ambitious, contrarian, fiery, dogged and determined bulls–t detectives. You’re persevering, cool, objective, indefatigable, chronically fatigued, pharmaceutically soothed, chocolate-comforted Twitter clickers. You are the enemy of the people…Just the bad people…And I, on behalf of a grateful nation, thank you.”