A maid yesterday testified that her millionaire Long Island “master” carefully wrapped her manicured hands in plastic to protect her nails – before pummeling the “slave.”
Allegedly beaten with a rolling pin, starved to the point where she ate from garbage cans, and stripped naked then wrapped from head to toe in plastic tape, the diminutive housekeeper named Samirah recalled what she told her boss after one allegedly brutal assault.
“I said, ‘Missus, just send me home to Indonesia,’ ” Samirah said she begged her very wicked and very wealthy employer, Varsha “Cruella” Sabhnani.
Samirah, 51, detailed five years of alleged abuse, each alleged attack more bizarre and troubling than the previous, in the family’s mansion in the Gold Coast enclave of Muttontown.
She claimed that if Sabhnani caught her in any transgression – such as snacking or resting during her 21-hour workdays – she was beaten with a rolling pin, broom or by her tony torturer’s fists.
Once, she was forced to swallow 100 green chilis as punishment, the maid said.
Then, “not satisfied that I wasn’t dead yet, the missus told me to eat powdered chili with six spoonfuls of salt in water,” Samirah told the rapt federal courtroom in Central Islip, where Sabhnani and her perfume-magnate husband, Mahender, are on trial for slavery charges.
“I ate it, and I threw up,” Samirah said, weeping. “The missus told me to eat my vomit. ”
Another time, Samirah said, “the missus” ordered her to strip naked in the basement bathroom and then began wrapping her head to toe in clear packing tape that was used in the family’s business.
“I was taped from the bottom up to the whole body. My face was covered, and my eyes as well, and I couldn’t walk, and I couldn’t see,” she said.
Sobbing, the maid said that when the tape was pulled off, “I cried. It hurt because the hair on my body was pulled off.”
Sabhnani’s cruelty included forcing the woman to don a bizarre contraption – three pairs of reading glasses taped together, one on top of the other – to do housekeeping, Samirah said.
“I couldn’t see,” she added.
At times, the maid picked up courtroom exhibits such as a rolling pin and broom to demonstrate how she was allegedly bashed with them.
Holding the rolling pin, she said, “This is what she used to beat me with. My teeth fell out.”
Samirah said that when Sabhnani, 45, and a mother of four, stabbed her with a red-handled paring knife, “The blood was streaming down, and the missus said I should lick it.”
Another housekeeper, Enung, who witnessed this alleged abuse and said she, too, was tortured, is expected to testify later.
During one attack, Samirah said, Sabhnani even wrapped her hands in white plastic bags to protect her nails as she bloodied the worker’s ears.
The Sabhnanis’ lawyers have said the maids dallied in witchcraft and suggested that they mutilated themselves as part of a ritual.