Katharina Blum - young, attractive, bright, sensitive - falls in love at a carnival party with a young radical lawbreaker in flight from the police. Her brief association with a hunted man brings her under police surveillance and makes her the cruelly exploited subject of cheap newspaper sensationalism. Paraded across the front pages of a big-city newspaper, portrayed as a whore, an atheist, a Communist sympathizer, she becomes the target of anonymous phone calls and letters, sexual advances and threats. Out of an anger so remorseless and a violation of integrity so profound that it overcomes even her will to survive, she shoots the offending journalist and the rings the front door of the chief criminal investigator to request her own arrest.