MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT — His accusers call him a rapist, a sex attacker and a stalker, but Hugues-Denver Akassy considers himself a romeo.
"You say sex, I say 'making love,'" the Ivory Coast native, 43, said Thursday during bizarre testimony in his trial for allegedly targeting five women between November 2007 and December 2010.
He described romantic dates with his alleged victims, including a Central Park picnic filled with charm, that he shared with a Italian art expert from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
"I am with the baguette and the wine and the cheese and she brought some stuff," he told the Manhattan Supreme Court jury, adding that they dined at "that part of the park that was on 'Sex and the City,'" near Central Park West and West 81st Street.
Describing the Central Park encounter, he said, "The entire thing was lovely and fun. We wound up kissing, what wound up to be a passionate kiss, and we were relaxing."
"There were other lovers there," he added
While his alleged victim earlier told the court the homeless man who spoke with a French accent started pawing at her, aggressively forcing himself on her and then reacting with fury when she rejected him, he remembered a lovefest.
"We wound up kissing, and we wound up with a passionate kiss," he said.
But he said his date grew angry at him for leaving the romance to save a duck from an attack from two raccoons.
In his testimony Thursday, he said, "We were kissing and kissing and kissing. As we're kissing that poor duck quack quack quack, jumped."
Describing how he saw the wildlife savagery and left his date to go help the duck, he said, "Central Park is like a safari sometimes," appearing amused at his comparison.
"You did this because you have a lot of compassion for animals, based on your childhood [in the Ivory Coast]?" said Akassy's attorney, Glenn Hardy.
"I'm kind of a little connection when it comes to animal," said Akassy, who told jurors he grew up in Africa and Paris and has two masters degrees.
His alleged victim testified that after Akassy jumped on top of her and forcefully kissed her, he took her home, screamed at her through her intercom and showed up at her work place at least eight times.
In another incident, the apparent con man, who police believed was homeless, said he was just being nice to a tax attorney he found attractive and who approached him on the street near an AMC theater on the Upper West Side in 2009.
"You look elegant, where are you from?" he said he asked her.
Akassy said he and the woman had a brief conversation and that he met her again randomly on West 76th Street where he said he was subletting an apartment. Prosecutors said he stalked her and would not stop emailing her and showing up outside her apartment, yelling.
He is also accused of raping a Russian tourist during a picnic in Riverside Park last year.
He faces rape, sexual assault, harassment, stalking and other charges.
