The last place she’d seen Mbarek Lafrem was in the bathroom stall of a Hell’s Kitchen bar, where he would leave her stripped and unconscious, lying on the filthy floor in a growing pool of blood.
“The last picture I have of him is him breaking into my stall,” Lafrem’s beautiful victim told the Post in an exclusive interview.
“And I remember screaming.”
The brave young woman — a pediatric nurse with a whispery voice and long blonde hair — had sat sobbing softly in a Manhattan courtroom yesterday as she saw Lafrem for the second and final time, as he was sentenced for the random attack, which was so brutal, it fractured her forehead, jaw, cheek and nose. Some 50 stitches were needed to close the bone-crushing injury to her forehead.
Lafrem will serve 16 years prison on his plea to assault and attempted sex abuse. His sentence will likely be followed by deportation back to his native Morocco, officials said.
“I couldn’t help it,” Lafrem’s victim told The Post in an emotional, post-sentencing interview, asking her name not be used to protect her privacy.
“I started crying. Seeing him again uprooted a lot.”
On March 11, 2010, at two in the morning, the woman — then age 29 — had walked down a staircase at the Eighth Avenue bar “Social.” She’d just wanted to use the basement rest room.
She was at the bar with a girlfriend, another nurse. They’d watched a game on the bar TV, and hit the dance floor for fun. A stranger had twirled her just once as she danced, but she’d thought nothing of it.
“I was never rude to him. I didn’t really say anything to him, and he didn’t say anything to me.”
The song ended, and the stranger had taken a seat at the bar — barely a word having passed between them.
That stranger was Lafrem, a metal worker from Pennsylvania who’d been staying at a nearby hotel while working a construction job. He’d been drinking heavily. When the young nurse went down the barroom stairs, so did he.
She was found moments later.
“She was wedged between the toilet and the wall of the stall,” Assistant District Attorney Shanda Strain, of the Manhattan DA’s Sex Crimes Unit, would tell a judge back in February.
“Her pants were off and inside out, with only the leg of the pants still on her right ankle,” Strain said then.
The woman’s injuries were consistent with Lafrem having slammed her head repeatedly against the toilet, wall and floor, the prosecutor added.
“She was covered in blood,” Strain told Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Charles Solomon.
“I don’t remember anything,” Lafrem — who’d been caught on surveillance video and linked to the crime by the victim’s blood on his hotel bedding — would tell the judge in protest. “I was drunk.”
The road to physical and emotional recovery has been long and hard, the woman told a reporter.
For a long time she was terrified of suffering more violence at the hands of random strangers. In public restrooms, she’d hold the stall door closed with one hand from the inside.
Worst, she was haunted by what Lafrem could have done to her after she’d blacked out.
“I started to question what sexually had happened, and whether he’d wanted me to die and had left me for dead,” she recalled.
But since the attack, she’s been encircled by love and support, she said. She has married, and came to court today with her husband and their new baby — a pink and perfect three-and-a-half-week-old girl.
“I’m blessed,” she said, smiling.