The aspiring actress who was repeatedly raped by a vicious sex fiend in Hudson River Park last year said the gruesome memories were still too fresh to face her attacker at his sentencing Monday in Manhattan.
But she was there in spirit when prosecutors read her anguished statement as rapist Jonathan Stewart, 26, stared blankly ahead, showing no remorse for the heinous crime.
“No one deserves to be put through what I was put through,” she wrote in the heart-wrenching letter read in Manhattan Supreme Court. “It’s hard to grasp how someone can be so selfish and disgusting. Jonathan, you know what you did and to the extent you did it. You deserve much more than what you are being put away for.”
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Renee White sentenced Stewart to 35 years, plus 20 years of post-release supervision, for the brutal assault.
Stewart chatted up the 21-year-old beauty as she sat in Hudson River Park near Harrison Street to watch the sunrise on Sept. 22, 2012. He then yanked her off a bench and dragged her in a choke hold to a cluster of nearby bushes where he strangled and punched her before raping her twice.
After the woman bravely fought him off, she fled naked toward two Parks Department cops and screamed, “I’ve just been raped! I’ve just been raped!” sources said.
In her court statement, she also thanked the officers who helped her on that horrific morning. “Because of you, I feel peace at night knowing he is not roaming around the streets assaulting more women or coming after me,” she wrote.
As the letter was read, the victim’s mother sobbed in the gallery. “And although today is a good day for me, it is very very hard,” said the 21-year-old who is still haunted by the terrifying ordeal. “I couldn’t come today. It is too fresh.”
Stewart was already a top-level sex offender before the savage assault and spent seven years in state prison on sex abuse and robbery convictions.