She’s pathetic, all right.
In a cowardly plea for special treatment, accused killer nanny Yoselyn Ortega begged a judge to bar the press from her hospital-bed arraignment yesterday — claiming through her lawyer that she’s too visibly sick, too “pathetic” to be seen.
“It is a pathetic woman who lies here,” public-assistance lawyer Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg told a Manhattan judge as Ortega lay at her side, handcuffed to her bed at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
“My client does not wish to have the press in here,” the lawyer said, in asking unsuccessfully for Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Lewis Bart Stone to bar a reporter from watching as Ortega pleaded not guilty to the bathtub-slashing murders of two young Upper West Side children in her care.
Lucia and Leo Krim perished in the brutal, Oct. 25 attack. The girl was 6 years old, and the boy was 2.
They were found bleeding to death in the bathtub of their West 75th Street apartment by their mother, Marina Krim, upon her return home with her third child, Nessie, 3. Ortega was still in the apartment, and had slashed herself in the throat, authorities said.
In allowing the proceeding to be covered by the media, the judge said he recognized that sometimes, “there are things that become uncomfortable with respect to the press. That is the cost that we must bear in connection with the civil liberties.”
The judge ordered Ortega to undergo a psychiatric exam to determine if she is mentally fit to proceed, and kept her on suicide watch.
Ortega appeared alert, but did not speak at the 10-minute proceeding, during which she lay under a white blanket, her hair in a blue hair net. Her lawyer entered a not-guilty plea on her behalf.
The purpose of the hearing was to formally inform Ortega that she has been hit with the top homicide charge on the books — murder in the first degree, reserved for slayings of judges and cops, serial killings, killings deemed cruel and wanton or, as in Ortega’s case, in which there were multiple victims.
The nanny had been suffering mental and financial difficulties, and told cops she resented the Krim family for asking her to do an extra five hours a week of housework.
The judge set Jan. 16 as her next court date.