MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT — A legal assistant convicted of sexually abusing his girlfriend's seven-year-old daughter was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Monday as the child, now a grown woman, gave a tearful account of the pain he caused her.
Nilton Rodriguez, 35, did not look at his victim as the now-19-year-old he sexually abused in an Inwood apartment for four years described the hell he put her through.
"I am the victim of sexual abuse. It will affect me every day, wherever I go, whoever I choose to be with," said the tearful young woman, who is now enrolled in college and is trying to put the abuse behind her.
"There was four years of consistent abuse," Assistant District Attorney Kevin Wilson told a judge, before asking for the maximum sentence.
The victim recounted how her life changed when she reached high school. When she realized what she'd endured as a child and the innocence she lost, she became withdrawn and turned to alcohol and sleeping pills to try to calm her anxiety.
Judge Gregory Carro called the case a "heinous" abuse of trust before sentencing Rodriguez to the maximum sentence.
"You have forever scarred the psyche of that individual, that child, now an adult," Carro said.
Rodriguez did not speak before he was led away.
