CHILLING CRUELTY
He hits gal, parades her nude in street
A SELF-PITYING misogynist was arrested for choking his girlfriend, parading her naked around the frigid streets of Harlem and then posting video of the public humiliation online, police said Thursday.
Jason Melo, 24, beat and choked his 22-year-old girlfriend in their W. 142nd St. apartment in front of her 2-month-old daughter before forcing the woman out into the cold for the medieval-style degradation, cop sources said.
The brute punched the victim in the face and crotch and threatened to kill her if she didn’t disrobe, put on a towel and leave the apartment, sources told the Daily News.
Video of the Sunday morning incident, as the temperature hovered in the 30s, shows the woman wrapped in the towel being filmed by a man speaking Spanish who derides her as a “b---h” and “a thot” (a slang Spanish term for whore).
The man says he’d caught her talking to “seven other men.”
He then pulls the towel away as she stands near garbage cans outside an apartment building.
“You’re going to pay the price like a whore, right there by the trash,” he told her. “Pose with your trash.”
The woman, wearing only boots, takes cover between two cars and wraps herself with a motorcycle tarp.
“What wouldn’t he be capable of doing to me at that moment?” the woman told “Primer Impacto,” a news program on Univision. “What woman would like to go out on the street naked and he’s recording her, insulting her?”
The gutless coward brags in the video that he will post the footage online.
The video was so disturbing it prompted a response from the mayor’s wife, Chirlane McCray.
“Earlier this week, a video emerged that depicted intimate partner violence on a sidewalk in our city,” she said. “The video displayed verbal abuse, forced humiliation, and harassment by the alleged offender ... Posting that video online perpetuated the abuse, which New York City does not tolerate.”
Melo turned himself in Wednesday. He was arraigned Thursday night on charges of choking, endangering the welfare of a child, coercion and assault. The emotionless monster, wearing a red winter jacket, a plaid shirt and washedout jeans, was held on $10,000 bond over $7,500 cash and is due back in court Feb. 10.
The victim was treated for facial injuries.
Though the disturbing video does not appear to still be on any of Melo’s social media accounts, his Instagram page — which has 36,000 followers — features him defending the shocking deed.
Videos show him yukking it up with his friends and singing karaoke to a song about a man betrayed by a woman. At another point, he suggested the victim and one of her supposed paramours conspired against him and made the video of her public.
Melo, who worked as a caterer at the United Nations, even posted a video satirizing the public punishment.
“Something worse could have happened,” he rationalizes.
But in the final series, Melo, filming himself, says he realized the error of his ways.
“Jason Melo here. I want to ask all women for forgiveness. I want them to know, that really, I didn’t want this to ... I didn’t think this would get to this point,” he says.
“Maybe, I made a mistake, to do what I did, from the beginning to take her out naked. I really regret this. If I could turn back time, I wouldn’t do it. Because in my mind, so much has happened to me.
“I came from a woman, I have a daughter, and I have two sisters. But look what you pushed me to do. I am sorry for everything. This is the last video I will make,” he says.
The last video of his social media meltdown shows him wiping tears from his eyes as he listens to a song about how no man is perfect.
“What he did was messed up,” said a friend of Melo’s who would not give his name. “He’s not usually like that.”
Thousands of comments on his Instagram account slammed him. “Tomorrow you will be in jail and in the news,” one comment read.