The day after a Wall Street intern scored an $18 million court award against her amorous ex-boss, she had only one word for him — “psychopath.’’
Pretty brunette Hanna Bouveng, 25, told The Post Tuesday that married financier Benjamin Wey “used psychological abuse’’ to “control and isolate’’ her.
“He has the behavior of a psychopath,’’ she said of her ordeal.
“He told a lot of stories about how people screw each other by money and political power. He said that if you don’t have powerful friends or resources, then you’re screwed and could end up in prison,’’ she said, sitting down for an interview in the midtown office of her lawyer, David Ratner.
“At that time, you don’t really think, you just act on emotion, and that emotion is that I was scared and he intimidated me.”
The former marketing intern — who testified that the 43-year-old Wey turned into a 2-minute man during their first sexual encounter — said her boss would change his mood on a dime depending on whether she succumbed to his demands.
“He manipulated me, and he broke me down in various different ways. It could be the way he was acting in the office, depending on whether I had dinner with him or not,’’ she said.
She described how Wey, the CEO of New York Global Group, would introduce her to important people to try to show how powerful he was.
“It’s weird when you meet Nancy Pelosi or the mayor of New York [de Blasio] — all these different things start to break me down, and I didn’t feel that I was independent or I was strong enough to be the person that I am,” Bouveng said.
“He was trying to slowly peel off my own self-identity and replace it with his ego.”
Bouveng testified that Wey sexually harassed her almost as soon as she started working for him, pressuring her to wear sexy clothes and eventually to sleep with him.
She said that after she called it quits, he flipped out and fired her when he found another man in her bed. He also posted stories about her on his blog calling her a prostitute and e-mailed her dad to tell him she’d been sleeping with a “homeless black man.’’
Bouveng told The Post that she was especially upset after Wey showed up in her small Swedish hometown of Vetlanda and frightened her 19-year-old cousin by walking right up to her and calling out her name.
“She was terrified. She just went straight home,’’ she said.
“I realized he was obsessed and he was not going to go away,” she said, explaining why she finally filed her $850 million suit against Wey.
She said she plans to use at least some of her jury award to help other victims of workplace harassment.
But her own nightmare isn’t over, she said.
Bouveng refused to discuss her personal life, including where she’s living and what she’s doing back home in Sweden, because she said she was still too scared of the international businessman.
“I don’t walk by myself anywhere,’’ she said, adding that she’s scared no matter “what I’m going to do, if I’m going to go around the corner, if I see someone pass by in the type of car he had.’’
She did say she doesn’t have a boyfriend.
Meanwhile, Wey appears shamelessly unrepentant.
He noted on Twitter on Monday — hours after the Manhattan federal jury ordered him to pay her millions of dollars — that he didn’t have to give her the full $850 million she sought and hadn’t been found guilty of sex assault.
Some of his other tweets included “Fought for #american #businesses’’ and “#fight for justice.”
Wey refused to respond to any questions outside his Financial District office Tuesday — except when asked whether his long-suffering wife would be staying with him.
“Absolutely,’’ Wey said, breaking into a huge grin.
His lawyer, asked whether they would appeal the award, only said, “We are evaluating our post-verdict options.’’
Wey also missed a pretial hearing on his countersuit against Wey in Manhattan federal court Tuesday.
Bouveng’s lawyer Ratner, said Wey “has a predator’s sense of what buttons to push and how hard or soft to push them in order to get his way, especially when he’s dealing with somebody young and vulnerable.”
Bouveng added, “I feel extremely sorry for that person.”
Additional reporting by Sarah Trefethen