A cleaning lady who police say was brutally beaten by New York’s linen king because he thought she had stolen from him insisted yesterday that she hadn’t taken any money and had no idea why he allegedly ambushed her.
“He tried to kill me and I don’t know why,” Reina Nuñez said of George Bardwil, CEO of the country’s biggest linen company, Bardwil Home.
“I knocked on his door. He opened it. He grabbed me, pulled me towards the window and he hit me. And then I woke up in the hospital,” she told The Post in a bedside interview at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. “I don’t understand why someone would do this.”
Bardwil, 57 — whose company manufactures tablecloths, napkins and towels under the brands Lenox and Bardwil — was charged with second-degree assault in Monday’s attack that left the 53-year-old Nuñez unconscious in a pool of blood.
It was only the second time Nuñez had ever been to Bardwil’s $4,500-a-month, East 68th Street apartment, and the first time she had seen his face.
Bardwil wasn’t home when she first cleaned the place last Friday but when she returned Monday morning, he opened the door and allegedly began pummeling her.
After repeatedly striking her on the head and face, Bardwil dragged her across the floor to the living room where she blacked out, officials said.
Bardwil initially told police he found Nuñez on the floor when he came out of the shower and called for help.
“She was like that when I got out of the shower. I called the doorman,” he said, according to the criminal complaint.
But cops said he later admitted that he struck her because he believed she had stolen money from him.
“She saw where I kept an envelope with $5,500 in it. I know she took it. When she wouldn’t admit it, I hit her three times in the head with my closed fist,” he allegedly said.
Nuñez’s daughter-in-law, Mariana Catano, 25, said Nuñez would never have stolen any money.
“She’s a hardworking woman. She’s very respectful. She doesn’t need his money. She has a house. She has been working all her life,” Catano said.
An attorney for Bardwil, who was released on $2,500 bail, declined comment.
Sources said Bardwil is on antidepressant medication and is estranged from his first wife and three college-age children.
He was recently living with a 21-year-old woman, sources said, but she moved out two weeks ago and returned to her family in Canada.
Additional reporting by Brigitte Williams-James