A PROSTITUTE told a court she thought she was ‘fighting for her life’ as she struggled to break free from a man who was raping her.

The woman, who can not be named for legal reasons, said the man was a client but had ‘turned nasty’ when she asked him to stop.

In a recorded police interview played to a jury at Preston Crown Court the woman said she had been attacked many times in the course of her work as a street prostitute but had reported this attack “for the sake of the other girls”.

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She said: “He really, really frightened me.”

Lee Nield, 23, of no fixed address, denies raping the woman in bushes off Dixon Street in Blackburn last April.

He accepts he paid the prostitute £30 and had consensual sex with her but claims she started demanding money for services he had not asked for.

But during her interview, the woman gave a different account, saying Nield had pulled her hair, punched her in the face and head and raped her when she told him to stop.

She said: “When he started pulling my hair I kind of knew it was going to be a struggle to get away from this man.”

The woman said she had agreed to have sex with the man after he approached her looking for business at around 6pm on April 20.

But she said when he started being rough and she asked him to stop he replied: “I’ve paid £30 for this.

“We’ll do this a different way, shall we?” and pushed her to the ground.

“He punched me in the face and punched me in the head. I told him I’d scream and he put his hand over my mouth and over my nose so I couldn’t breathe.

“I just got all the strength I could because I was that frightened. You feel like you are fighting for your life.

“He said he was going to kill me. I thought he was going to pull a knife out. I thought it was going to get really ugly.

“He hit me and he gave me a good few cracks but he can’t have been that strong because he hasn’t marked me.

“When he got up I said ‘I’m going to get you done for this. I’m going to ring the police’ and he was all ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ He turned into a little mouse and ran off into the road.”

As Nield ran into the road, with his trousers still pulled down, the woman grabbed his jacket, pulling the hood off.

She walked to a nearby ambulance station to report the attack but when she spoke to police later in the evening she said she did not want to go to the police station as she needed to get back to work, and returned the following day to give a recorded interview.

The interviewing officer asked her: “How do you feel about what happened?”

To which the woman said: “It has happened to me a lot. You become a bit, like, you learn how to block it out. I kind of just feel nothing really. It has happened to me that many times.”

Proceeding.