He’s the charming Romeo from hell.
A pretty young lawyer told a Manhattan jury today about her chilling brush with accused violent masher Hughes Akassy — a suave, self-professed “French journalist” charged in an out-of-control rampage ranging from email harassment to outright bludgeoning rape.
“I was terrified,” said tax attorney Melissa Oaks, one of five alleged victims Akassy is on trial for. “I was scared to leave my house.”
Oaks — who told jurors she immediately rebuffed Akassy’s advances when he approached her outside an Upper West Side Food Emporium — allegedly got away easy.
Akassy is charged with merely terrifying Oaks through creepy, insulting emails, and by showing up out of nowhere to shout, “Bitch!” as she walked her Chihuahua near her Upper West Side apartment.
“You are a beautiful grave — dead inside,” Akassy wrote her in his final email message, delusionally signed “Goodbye, my whore” in French.
But Akassy’s most serious crime is his alleged date rape of a beautiful young Russian tourist at Riverside Park in July 2010.
That victim was left covered in bruises and cuts after Akassy — promising to show her “a beautiful view” as they strolled the park — attacked her along a secluded embankment, prosecutors say.
Semen collected after the incident as part of a hospital rape exam matched Akassy’s profile, Assistant District Attorney Jessica Troy told jurors in opening statements.
“He would take whatever he felt he was entitled to, no matter if he had to violate another person to get it,” Troy told jurors.
“He was a man who would not take no for an answer.”
Akassy’s other terrified women — all slated to testify — include a Metropolitan Museum of Art historian who he allegedly followed and harassed for six months after she rebuffed his sexual advances on a date, and a Central Park West art gallery director who also accuses him of harassing and stalking.
A travel agent who met Akassy in Central Park in late 2007 is set to testify that he forced her to perform a sex act on him during a violent encounter in her stairwell.
Prosecutors say Akassy, 43, an Ivory Coast native, tried to charm his attractive victims through initially gentlemanly behavior and invented claims that he was a French television journalist intent on pursuing beauty and making the world a better place.