An ex-prostitute broke into tears as she testified against her former pimp at his trial for kidnapping and torturing her after he allegedly caught her withholding her earnings.
“He told me he saw something in a movie and always wanted to try it,” the distraught victim, 24, told jurors of the twisted defendant Sherman Gamble, 55.
“He’s on top of me and he’s shoving the magazine down my throat, just shoving it, shoving the magazine down my throat. He told me I didn’t know him. That’s all he kept saying. I don’t know him and that he’s called the black Hitler.”
“I thought I was going to die that night,” she continued, breaking into sobs, as she testified before Justice Jill Konviser in Manhattan Supreme Court.
The victim, who met Gamble when she was only 21, said he tortured her for three days in March of 2014 yanking out chunks of her hair, choking her until she lost consciousness, beating her and forcing her to turn tricks.
“He was talking about different scenarios of me dying about how he could hang me upside down and skin me alive,” she said. ”He told me he was going to stick his hand down my throat and pull my heart out.”
Meanwhile Gamble’s 9-year-old grandson, who lived in the apartment, witnessed the horrifying abuse.
She finally escaped her sick captor by telling him she had to meet a john. Instead she ran straight to the 13th Precinct.
The victim met Gamble on a “date” in June of 2012 and immediately moved in with him.
She helped him run a small-time prostitution ring out of his apartment at 333 East 23rd street advertising on backpage.com.
For over a year she handed over every penny to Gamble but started keeping some of her earnings for herself. When he caught her, he became irate, she said.
Defense lawyer Liam Malanaphy told jurors in his opening statement, “You will hear some outrageous, frightening Stephen King-worthy allegations” but they are a “vicious lie.”
Gamble is charged with rape, kidnap, assault, sex trafficking, promoting prostitution, child endangerment and other raps. He faces up to 25 years on the top count alone.
But he turned down a plea deal of two years in prison, which would have sprung him from jail immediately, insisting on his innocence.
The victim has since married and become a full-time homemaker, she said. She’s expected back on the stand Wednesday.