After shooting Andy Warhol three times in 1968, she told the press that the reasons for her doing so could be found in her book "The S.C.U.M. Manifesto," which was a book about how men should be killed in a violent revolution.
However Andy Warhol was hardly the typical man. He was one of the most androgynous of people, and he even put her in one of his films. But she was crazed and harassing him to produce her play, and his distancing of himself from her, coupled with his posse in the Factory ignoring or taunting her, seems to have driven her over the edge. So it didn't really have anything to do with her hatred of men, it was classic nihilism -- which i believe to be basically synonymous with self-hatred -- that led her to shoot Andy Warhol. Someone who was within her reach to hurt, someone who was vulnerable. Given her S.C.U.M. manifesto's agenda, she should have killed one of her Johns, but no.
As to why feminists would later defend her or even see her as a kind of feminist martyr and read her book -- well that really shows those people to be beneath contempt, as well as being completely intellectually bankrupt.
As a side note, I think the films of Andy Warhol and the whole Factory scene which they depicted were perhaps the primary visual embodiment of what drove the conservatives of middle America crazy. You had it all there, drugs, sex, homosexuality, and the poorly shot quality of it all giving it a very seedy edge. It was a very powerful force for uniting the country into a reactionary political force. The images are still with us today, and represent for many those folk the godless liberal New Yorkers.
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