from www.nypost.com – She thought he was charming and handsome — an international journalist, he’d told her in his French accent.
But after a fifth platonic outing together, accused date-raping fiend Hugues Akassy [pictured] suddenly strong-armed her out of her Upper East Side elevator and into a stairwell, where he forced her to perform a sex act on him, a Manhattan travel agent told a jury yesterday.
“You American women,” was the alleged taunt of the Ivory Coast native — who was not a jet-setting journalist at all but a homeless man who sneaked into health clubs for showers and spent his nights sleeping on rooftops. “You know you want it,” he allegedly told her.
The travel agent is one of five women that Akassy, 43, is charged with attacking in an alleged spree ranging from harassing e-mails up to the outright bludgeoning rape of a Russian tourist in 2009.
“In an instant, we were shoulder to shoulder,” the travel agent, whose name is being withheld due to the nature of the accusation, told jurors of their first meeting in Central Park in May 2007.
Within moments, Akassy sweet-talked her into going with him for a drink off Central Park West.
“His hands started wandering around my chest, and he started to kiss me,” she recalled under questioning by prosecutor Jessica Troy.
She repeatedly pushed him away, telling him she was married but separated from her cop husband. Akassy, she said, was persistently flirtatious.
“Why would you come and have a drink with me if you are a married woman?” she told jurors he asked her.
“It’s just an innocent drink,” she said she reminded him.
“I actually thought he was handsome, intriguing, debonair,” the woman told the jury, which has been hearing evidence in the Manhattan Supreme Court trial.
The woman told jurors she took Akassy to some five travel seminars, and let him sleep on her floor once — she had a female friend visiting, and there was no funny business.
Then came the November stairwell attack, she said. She’d invited Akassy up to see the view from the roof of her apartment complex in the East 60s.
But when she took him to the elevator and told him he’d be leaving now — pressing the button for the lobby — he instead pressed “9” for her floor, she said.
She reminded him that it was time for him to leave.
“I still thought, ‘Nothing is going to happen. I’m not letting him into my apartment,’ ” she told the jury.
What followed, she said, froze her with fear. She was speechless, she remembered, and gave no resistance as he allegedly shoved her off the elevator and into a ninth-floor stairwell.
“I shut my eyes and it was over in a flash,” she told jurors.
“I told you you’d like it. That wasn’t so bad,” he allegedly taunted afterward. “You crazy American woman!”
The travel agent told defense lawyer Glenn Hardy that she reported the incident three years later only after seeing news accounts of the alleged attacks on other women.
“It was my intention,” she told jurors, her voice tinged with bitterness, “to keep it to myself — to my grave.”
Testimony continues today in the disturbing case. The suave, ascot-wearing vagrant’s other accusers are an art-gallery director, an art historian for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a tax lawyer.