The Latvian stunner convicted of stabbing her boyfriend in the chest with a 9-inch steak knife insists she was the real injured party — saying she can’t believe he testified against her.
“I feel betrayed,” said the heartbroken brunette, Yekaterina Pusepa, in a jailhouse interview with The Post. “I never thought he’d do that.”
The Baltic beauty claimed that former beau Alec Katsnelson took the stand against her in Manhattan Supreme Court last month to dodge the brutal abuse rap he faced for allegedly throwing her down a flight of stairs two months before she attacked him.
Pusepa, 23, alleged that prosecutors offered to drop the domestic-violence charge against Katsnelson in exchange for his testifying against her because they wanted a high-profile attempted-murder conviction.
She was famously photographed by The Post weeping on the street in her blood-splattered, midriff-baring shirt just after the knife attack on May 22, 2011.
The Manhattan DA’s Office declined comment.
Katsnelson doesn’t have a listed phone number, but his mom, with whom he lives in Franklin Lakes, NJ, said her son didn’t want to talk.
“He’s a coward,” Pusepa said of Katsnelson. “He didn’t want to go to jail, and he was facing two years. That’s why he testified against me.”
Pusepa’s lawyer, Kevin O’Connell, said he doesn’t know why Katsnelson’s violence case was dismissed.
But “both cases were being prosecuted by the same office,” he said. “There’s no Chinese wall or something that keeps the ADA on one case from talking to one on another.”
Katsnelson testified that Pusepa flew into a rage right before she attacked him because he had received a nude text from another woman.
But Pusepa insisted to The Post she and Katsnelson weren’t possessive of each other — and even engaged in kinky threesomes.
The two would pick up women at clubs in the Meatpacking District such as 1 Oak “and take them home together,’’ she said. They did this three or four times, she said.
“We didn’t have a jealous relationship,” she insisted.
Pusepa testified that she stabbed her boyfriend in self-defense as he punched and kicked her in a coke-fueled fury after they’d argued about his leaving her purse unattended at a bar.
Pusepa said that Katsnelson never wanted her to go to prison and that they had several tender phone conversations just months after she nearly killed him.
“He told me he loved me and missed me and that he’d visit soon,” she said. But Katsnelson then asked her to stop calling, saying his lawyer told him it could hurt his case, she said.
Pusepa whined that her court-appointed lawyer didn’t do enough to stop her conviction. She faces up to 25 years behind bars on the top count of attempted murder.
Pusepa said she plans to appeal her conviction — although it’s unclear on what grounds — using a new lawyer once she is sentenced Jan. 9.
Additional reporting by Frank Rosario