I tend to agree there is no push on his part, or in the worst case it was just to push her off of him, not to cause her bodily harm.
She was clearly acting like a savage and doing the assaulting.
But the other significant piece to the puzzle is that he is on his knees while she is slapping him.
So is that an admission of guilt on his part that he did something horribly wrong?
If that's the case, then karma has a strange way of creeping up on him ... in this case, he maybe didn't deserve the beating for pushing her, but maybe he "deserved" the beating for some of his previous off the screen transgressions.
At the end of the day, only the Gods are fit to judge who deserves a beating.
Lord knows I've deserved a beating several times in my life and got off the hook easy.
So I'm out of this thread now.