She’s one woman he couldn’t sweet talk.
Date-raping “journalist” Hugues Akassy tried to butter up his female judge at sentencing today — but she slammed him anyway with a 20 year sentence.
“You may be a good journalist, I don’t know,” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Jill Konviser told Akassy, who was convicted last month in a string of harassment and sex attacks on four women he’d dated in 2009 and 2010. The homeless masher was notorious for affecting an upscale look by wearing a white ascot to court — fashioned out of a Rikers bedsheet.
“What I do know is that you are a rapist,” the judge sternly told the 43-year-old Akassy before sending him to prison for two decades — five years short of the maximum allowed for rape.
“There is no question, Mr. Akassy, that you present a danger to any community in which you walk free,” the judge added. “You are a sexual predator.”
Akassy was led off to prison unrepentant of his rape last year of a Russian tourist named Tatiana in Riverside Park. Neither did he make apologies for his harassment and stalking attacks on an Upper West Side art gallery director, a law student and an art historian at the Metropolitan Museum of art.
Using such cheesy pickup lines, as “Are you from Europe?” and “Have we met before?” Akassy had managed to charm these educated, attractive women into giving him their email addresses and even going out with him on dates and picnics.
This, despite his being a homeless man who slept on rooftops and showered by sneaking into sport clubs
Today at sentencing, he clung to the same fabricated fantasy of being a jet-setting broadcast journalist that he’d plied successfully with his victims — even flubbing a claim that he’d covered the presidential campaign of “President Obama against Senator Cain[sic].”
“I have entire respect for women,” he told the judge, in the French-accented English of his native Ivory Coast.
“But I am[sic] kind of a bachelor life. I am not proud of it. I am a kind of womanizer.”
He added, “I never raped anyone and I’d like to make that clear. However, I would like to apologize for making poor judgment when it comes to women.”
Akassy had been acquitted of charges he forced an Upper East Side travel agent to give him oral sex in her apartment stairwell back in 2009.
“He will do it again and again and again as soon as he gets out,” said the agent, the only accuser to come to court today.
“It’s twisted. It’s completely twisted,” she said of Akassy’s brain. “He’s very smooth. A lot of women will believe him.”
Defense lawyer, Glenn Hardy, had asked that his client be given a break, arguing that — at least in court — Akassy had been “a gentleman.”
But Assistant District Attorney Jessica Troy argued that Akassy had caused severe emotional damage to his victims.
The rape victim, especially, “was severely traumatized,” and became suicidal, she said. Akassy raped that victim, a tourist from Russia, on a train grate in Riverside Park after inviting her there for a “picnic.”
“You say ‘sex,’ I say ‘making love,’ ” he’d cooed to jurors when he took the stand in late October.
“The defendant refused to take no for an answer,” DA Cyrus Vance said after the sentencing. “He stalked these women obsessively, and when they refused his advances, he grew irate, harassing them over the phone, via email, and in person.”