Infamous NYC serial sex offender Carl Phanor who sowed terror on West Side is sentenced
An infamous serial sex offender who terrorized Manhattan’s West Side was slammed at his sentencing Monday — after his victims described how he wrecked their lives, even destroying one’s 20-year marriage.
Carl Phanor, 31 — who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting his victims along the West Side’s waterfront in separate attacks between March and November 2022 — was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Lauren Breen read each of the victims’ impact statements in court, detailing how Phanor — a career criminal with two previous rape busts — terrorized the women and neighborhood while the NYPD had launched a manhunt for the deranged sicko.
“The woman who existed before November 3rd is gone,” said Phanor’s third victim, who was out for a morning run when she wanted a “few extra steps” and turned down Pier 45 before being raped Nov. 3, 2022.
“This attack has stolen my sense of safety, my marriage and the close bond shared amongst my children,” she wrote in her statement read aloud in court, adding that her 20-year marriage “crumbled” after the attack and led to a divorce.
The fiend’s second victim — a 48-year-old woman who was assaulted on a morning stroll a month before — said she’s turned into a “hermit” who suffers from PTSD and depression and can’t celebrate her birthday anymore without being “reminded every year of this attack that took place five days before my 49th birthday.”
Prosecutors said Phanor’s crime spree began when he attacked a 39-year-old jogger on the Hudson River Greenway, tackling and choking her before sexually assaulting her.
She recalled how she thought she was going to be “strangled to death” on what was the “worst day of [her] life.
“I thought about how I wouldn’t see my son or daughter again or how I wouldn’t see them grow up,” the woman said.
Phanor, wearing a beige jumpsuit and a mask in court, said he was “sorry about the instances” before he was cuffed and walked out of the courtroom.
He told Probation that he was high on K-2 and didn’t remember any of the attacks, said Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Laura Ward — which put his plea deal in jeopardy during the proceeding until his lawyer, Adam Friedman, quickly interjected that Phanor took responsibility for his actions.
Locals told The Post at the time of the attacks that the wanted man was a “fixture in [the] neighborhood]” and hiding in plain sight during the police manhunt — causing some people to avoid the waterfront at all costs.
Cops said at the time that they believed Phanor fled the city after his first attack, before he was eventually arrested as he was about to board a bus at the Port Authority Terminal in Times Square.
Phanor pleaded guilty in April to predatory sexual assault, rape, attempted murder in the second degree and other charges.
“Phanor’s violent attacks did much more than cause physical harm, as many of the survivors continue to suffer deep emotional and psychological scars, and I stand with them as they continue to heal and address their trauma,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement.
