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“I do love you!” a glamorous train-wreck transsexual hollered from the witness stand to her hunky FDNY ex as the War of the Hoses waged again in a Manhattan courtroom yesterday.
Claudia Charriez, a rail-thin-with-implants pre-op transsexual, took the witness stand for her third and last day in the wacky assault trial, in which she’s accusing burly smoke-eater Taylor Murphy of punching, biting and choking her during a love quarrel in their bed at a Midtown hotel last August.
“I do love him,” she told jurors, when asked by Murphy’s lawyer about dozens of emotional, expletive-filled texts she sent Murphy.
“I will have love for him,” she told jurors, her voice filled with emotion.
Then she turned to face Murphy, a 2011 fireman-calendar “Mr. March” who sat across the courtroom at the defendant’s table, looking glumly down at his hands.
“I do love you!” she shouted.
Charriez, 31, had come to court all in black — from her 6-inch platform stilettos to her black woolen poncho, trimmed in furry black balls — and when she professed her love, she raised her arms and the poncho’s trimming bobbled like a litter of rodents.
“This is just —,” she stammered at him.
Murphy looked away, giving the table a pained look.
Charriez’s cross-examination by defense lawyer Jason Berland continued throughout the afternoon, getting harsh as the lawyer cornered her into admitting inconsistencies in her statements.
Had Murphy dragged her by her hair four blocks up Broadway, as she told the first cop? Or three blocks, as she told a second cop? Or half a block, as she claimed yesterday on the witness stand?
“Is this ‘Law & Order’?” Charriez snapped at the lawyer.
“I’m so intimidated by you,” she exclaimed helplessly at another point. “You’re just slamming the hell out of me.”
“Just chill out,” she advised the lawyer. “Like, seriously!”
Murphy — who has served at Engine 59 in Harlem and lower Manhattan’s elite Ladder Co. 1 — has been assigned to FDNY headquarters in Brooklyn since his arrest.
He insists that Charriez — who was kicked off “America’s Next Top Model” in 2006 when producers discovered she had male genitalia — concocted her claims out of jealousy. Yesterday, his lawyer confronted Charriez with a text in which she asked her hose-handling hunk, “How many girls do you have to f–k ’til I get to the point where I don’t care?”
“It’s not jealousy — it’s frustration!” Charriez answered.
If you want jealousy, look at other “girls like me,” she told jurors. “Girls hate me because of jealousy.”
Shown photos of her purported felony-level assault injuries — including a pale-pink blemish on her neck — she snapped at the defense lawyer, “I’m sorry it’s not enough for you.”
Along the way, she called Murphy a drunk, implied he’d given her a venereal disease, and insisted that her elbow-length peroxide blonde locks had fallen out in handfuls after the assault because Murphy had pulled on them — not because they are extensions. “No! No!” she shouted, flicking her hair and sounding affronted. “This is my hair!”
Testimony continues today — with the defense planning to call ex-madam-and-gubernatorial candidate Kristin Davis to describe to jurors two phone calls in which Charriez allegedly made jealous, vengeful threats against Murphy, whom Davis knew from her campaign.