A Manhattan lawyer who liked to dress as an airport security screener during S&M sessions with his girlfriend wound up choking and threatening her with a knife, prosecutors said Monday.
Christina Leos, a former preschool teacher, described for jurors how her pudgy, bespectacled former boyfriend, Ryan Hemphill, allegedly choked her during one of their rough-sex sessions.
“It hurt, it scared me, but there was no pain afterwards,” the petite bottle blonde, 32, said in Manhattan Supreme Court.
Hemphill, 33, the son of a pediatric neurologist, is on trial for allegedly assaulting Leos, with whom he enjoyed S&M sex games at his Murray Hill pad.
During pretrial hearings, prosecutors said the couple made a sex tape where he pretended to be a “TSA agent, searching her body cavities,” papers state.
Hemphill also had 20 homemade porn videos featuring him choking, water-boarding and torturing women, mostly prostitutes, prosecutors added.
“One of the objects we recovered is a baton, looks like a police baton, and inside, if you undo it, is a sword,” prosecutor Sara Weiss said. “He is in multiple videos holding that sword to the neck of blindfolded women, women he, on some occasions, urinates on, while he makes them recite prayers.”
But those details weren’t allowed at trial, after defense lawyer Jason Steinberger objected.
Instead, Monday’s testimony centered on Leos, who met Hemphill on eHarmony. She tearfully testified about how she had shown up at his apartment on Feb. 28, 2013, to break up with him — and explained that things quickly turned sour.
“He was so angry that he grabbed me really fast and held my throat really tight,” she said.
He let go, then retrieved a Bowie knife, she said.
“He put it up to my neck and said, ‘I’m going to f–king slit your throat! Get the f–k out!’ ” she testified.
The couple reconciled the next day, but had another blowout the next month.
“He grabbed me and started strangling me,” Leos said, weeping. “He had one hand on my neck and one covering my mouth and pushing down on my nose. That’s when I realized I can’t breathe.”
Leos said she thought she was going to die. Then, Leos said, he let her go, and she fled. She called cops the next day.
Hemphill denies the charges.