Woman Presses Case Against Aide to NY Gov. Paterson

(July 22) -- The woman whose accusations of domestic abuse scandalized New York Gov. David Paterson is speaking out for the first time, saying she wants prosecutors to charge her former boyfriend -- one of the governor's former aides -- with assault.

"I will be refiling my charges as soon as possible," Sherr-una Booker told WNBC-TV.

Months ago, Booker, 41, dropped a domestic violence claim against key Paterson aide David Johnson after a conversation with the governor. But now, after months of silence, Booker says she wants the man who allegedly ripped her clothes off, shoved her up against the wall of her Bronx home and choked her last Halloween to pay for his crime.

"It's the right thing to do," she told the New York Daily News. "I don't want any woman to go through what I went through." She said the abuse was hard to come to terms with, calling it "surprising. Shocking. Hurtful. Hurtful down to your soul."

For the first time, Booker is talking publicly about the scandal that forced the resignation of five state officials and ended the governor's hopes for a second term.

Paterson came under fire when multiple reports in The New York Times suggested the governor may have pressured Booker to drop the abuse charges. The governor says he has done nothing wrong in the case. Johnson, the longtime aide, was suspended without pay when the scandal broke, but has denied any wrongdoing. His lawyer, Oscar Michelen, said Johnson has been cast unfairly in the press, and noted that no charges have been filed against him. "This is not a case where a victim of domestic violence fails to make a report for fear of retribution from her aggressor and then, at some later date, summons the courage to report the crime," he said in a letter to Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson obtained by AOL News. "[Johnson] has been the subject of a torrent of harsh newspaper articles without ever having been formally accused of anything," the lawyer. wrote.

Last year, Booker was in the process of filing charges against Johnson, her boyfriend of four years, when she said she came under pressure from state police to drop the case. "State troopers kept calling me and harassing me to drop the charges, and I wouldn't," she said in family court, according to a report in the Times. But on Feb. 8, one day after a phone call from Paterson, Booker failed to show up in family court, and the case was dismissed.

The governor and state police are under investigation in the case, specifically whether they orchestrated a cover-up to protect Johnson. Booker still refuses to talk about the conversation she had with Paterson. "We are not going to say anything that's going to possibly compromise their investigation," her lawyer, Ken Thompson, told the Daily News. Paterson did not return a call for comment.

But Booker said talking to other women about their own stories of abuse made her feel it was important to speak publicly about her ordeal. "And it kind of gave me the courage to come forth and speak for other women that maybe didn't feel that they would be heard or weren't important enough to speak up," she told WNBC.