WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES.
THE vicious slashing of a young woman in Chelsea last week conjured nightmarish flashbacks for Marla Hanson, a stunning model whose disfiguring by two razor-wielding thugs horrified the city three decades ago.
“I just feel sick hearing something like that,” Hanson said of Wednesday’s assault on Amanda Morris, whose face was sliced by a deranged man as she walked to her job at Whole Foods.
Her alleged attacker, Kari Bazemore, 40, a career criminal with a history of mental illness, was being held at Bellevue Hospital on Saturday night and awaiting arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court.
“This was random,” Hanson told The Post. “It’s so friggin’ scary. Just walking down the street. It’s everybody’s worst nightmare.”
Hanson’s own horror occurred in Midtown on June 5, 1986, when she was just 24 years old.
Her landlord at the time, Steve Roth, had hired two hoodlums to attack her after she rebuffed his advances.
After announcing a “stick-up,” the assailants sliced her face with a razor blade outside a Midtown bar.
It took 150 stitches to close the wounds crisscrossing her face, and Hanson was left with an S-shaped scar from her right cheek to the corner of her mouth.
Gotham rallied behind the plucky Missouri native whose fresh Midwestern looks had already landed her spots in commercials.
Hanson’s continued courage and grace — even as defence attorneys tried to sully her character — dominated the headlines for years.
In 1987, Roth and his two hoods for hire, Steven Bowman and Darren Norman, were convicted. Each was sentenced to between five to 15 years in prison for the attack.
With her modelling career over, Hanson found herself locked in a jail of depression and even considered suicide.
“The whole thing was such an awful experience,” she said from her Hudson Valley home. “I couldn’t figure out who I was most angry at — the cops or the courts or the press.”
Now 54, she said she focuses on her screenwriting and her 18-year-old daughter, who attends NYU, like she once did.
“It’s all good ... I love New York. I’m not in the city anymore, but there’s so much creativity. It’s such a happy, vibrant place,” Hanson said.
A longtime victims advocate, Hanson campaigned for an anti-stalking law in New York, pushed for a law against gender bias and helped extend the rape-shield law so victims could protect their anonymity.
Hanson said she would reach out to Morris to offer support.
“She’ll go through shock and disbelief before the healing,” she said.
This article was originally published on The New York Post and is republished here with permission.
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