Metro

Beauty’s bloody brawl started over a purse

A Latvian lovely — famously photographed by The Post in her bloodstained, midriff-baring top and high heels just after she’d knifed her boyfriend — weepily testified in Manhattan court Tuesday that the fateful night’s events began with a fight over her purse.

Pretty party girl Yekaterina Pusepa, 23, said she was drinking with boyfriend Alec Katsnelson at their usual downtown Manhattan watering hole, Ryan Maguire’s, on May 22, 2012, when she got up to go to the bathroom.

“[I] asked him to look over my clutch, which had my phone, my keys and all my belongings,’’ Pusepa told jurors. “When I came out, I found my clutch was unattended in the middle of the bar.

“I went to go look for him, and he was outside,’’ she said. “ At that point, I told him I wanted to go home because it frustrated me. I asked him to take care of something, and he was being irresponsible.

“I said I wanted to take my things and go to my girlfriend’s house.’’

The troubled pair did go back to their Gold Street pad — but things took a horrible turn.

Prosecutors and Katsnelson, 23, say Pusepa went berserk after her boyfriend received a phone message from another girl — stabbing him in the chest with a 9-inch steak knife, piercing his lungs and nicking his heart.

“You didn’t try to take a slice out of the arm, did you?’’ asked Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Leila Kermani.

“No,’’ Pusepa, 23, said.

Pusepa on the night of the alleged attack.Seth Gottfried

“Instead, you put it directly in his chest,’’ Kermani stated, displaying for jurors on an overhead screen the Post front-page photo of Pusepa crying, still dressed in her club clothes with a bloody palm print and other blood spatter clearly visible on her white top, after the attack.

On the stand, Pusepa further claimed that she knifed Katsnelson in a frenzy trying to protect herself from yet another vicious beating after months of violence.

“He was kicking me and started punching me, then hit me upside the head, and that’s when I grabbed the knife,’’ she said.

“He kept hitting me, asking, ‘Is this the s–t I like? Is this the s–t I like?’

“He went to go swing at me again. That’s when I stabbed him.”

The defendant bowed her head, crying — but the prosecutor scoffed.

Kermani noted that Pusepa told one responding cop that a black man had stabbed her lover and another officer that the victim was suicidal and grabbed her own hand to stab himself with the knife she was holding.

“I was just scared and in shock. I was just not in the right state of mind,” she said.

Her lawyer, Kevin O’Connell, told jurors his client was simply trying to “back him off’’ when she knifed her abusive boyfriend.

But Kermani insisted, “She was already boiling at that point, and he pushed her over the edge, and in that instant, she formed an intent to kill.’’