Charged with allegedly raping a woman in 2016, former prosecutor and one time ‘most eligible bachelor’ Gary Zerola faced his accuser in court Tuesday as she took the stand still shaking from what she said happened to her seven years ago.

Testifying just before lunch, the victim was describing how the apartment of Zerola’s friend, “Johnathan,” who she testified she had never met, looked on the night of Nov. 9, 2016.

That night, she and her close friend went out for drinks following work as estheticians at a spot on Newbury Street. They were going to meet up with Zerola, who was in, as the victim described it, a “sexual relationship” with her friend.

After having several drinks out, she testified, they all took and Uber rideshare over to Johnathan’s apartment.

What allegedly happened after she fell asleep on the short section of the L-shaped couch was detailed in prosecutor Tom Brant’s opening arguments earlier.

“On the morning of Nov. 10, 2016, at a little before 7 a.m. [the victim], 23 years old, was asleep in a place she had never been before, an apartment she had never been before, on a couch she had never been on before. She didn’t wake up from an alarm, she didn’t wake up from a noise, what she awoke to was the defendant, Gary Zerola,” Brant said, before describing an act of sexual assault this newspaper won’t detail.

“She looked at him as she awoke and said, ‘What are you doing?,’” Brant continued. “The defendant doesn’t say anything to her,” but instead escalates the act. Zerola continues the assault, Brant said, even as the victim repeated, “‘What are you doing? What the (expletive) are you doing?!’”

Lies, said Zerola’s defense in a scathing rebuttal.

“Plain and simple, she’s a liar,” said attorney Rosemary Scapicchio, sporting her trademark spiked platinum hair and pacing before the jury. “The story you just heard from the commonwealth doesn’t tell half of what happened.”

Instead, Scapicchio said in her opening that the victim had been kissing on Zerola at the bar.

Scapicchio also attacked the victim’s credibility, detailing how the alleged victim has been changing her story since that time every time she gets caught telling an untruth by evidence uncovered by the defense.

She then went on to say that in the times since the alleged assault, the alleged victim has behaved in ways that don’t comport with expected displays from the victim of a rape, including posting social media content with Zerola in a friendly manner.

Zerola was a criminal defense attorney ahead of these charges. He also spent a year as a prosecutor in the Essex DA’s office and two months as a prosecutor in the Suffolk DA’s office, according to the Suffolk DA’s office.

Once dubbed Boston’s most eligible bachelor by People magazine in 2001 and named a finalist for ABC’s first season of “The Bachelor,”  Zerola also has a pending charge accusing him of rape from 2021. He was indicted by a Suffolk County grand jury on that charge in February of that year.

Prosecutors in that case said Zerola and a then 21-year-old woman met through a friend, and the three of them went to a private party with several dozen other people at a Boston bar, after which he drove her home. Then, as the woman was drunk and asleep in her own bed, she awoke to Zerola raping her, prosecutors said.

The high-profile attorney was also accused in 2006 of raping two women in his North End apartment but was acquitted. While on probation for those charges in 2007, he was accused of raping a woman in a Miami Beach hotel, but those charges were dismissed.

This is a developing story.