The sobbing woman told a jury she was forced to be David Pepe's sex slave for three days in December 1997.
She said she was raped at knifepoint, handcuffed, tied with a telephone cord and kept in a small plywood box in the basement of his Kensington house for up to 12 hours - until he wanted more sex.
Before the lid was closed, she was forced to swallow cough medicine, she said. He told her it would make her relax.
Pepe fed her hot dogs and water, she said.
The woman testified that Pepe, 34, also known as David Wilson, placed a pillow and blanket in the box, then piled clothing on top, leaving only a tiny opening for air.
"I lay there and cried," said the woman. "I didn't want to go to sleep. I thought I was going to suffocate in my sleep. I was just praying he wouldn't kill me."
Pepe's lawyer, Richard Johnson, said his client, a security guard, wasn't even at his home on the days in question.
Assistant District Attorney Christopher Mallios said Pepe repeatedly threatened to kill the woman, then 19, who escaped from the box at 6:30 a.m. on Dec. 8, 1997, and broke a window to flee the house on Hilton Street near D.
Mallios said the woman had gone out on a date with Pepe, and after first refusing sex with him, agreed after he paid her $150.
But when she tried to leave, a knife was held at her back at the front door and she was then handcuffed, taken back to the bedroom and raped, Mallios said.
"I didn't want to provoke myself into getting killed," the woman told the jury and Judge Renee Cardwell Hughes. "He told me that when I cried it made him nervous and made him want to kill me and get it over with."
