SANTA ANA – A Fullerton man twice discharged his semen into the water bottle of a female co-worker because he found her attractive and knew that her lips touched the bottle, an Orange County prosecutor told a jury here Tuesday.

Michael Kevin Lallana, 32, “felt that was as close as he could get” to the 29-year-old executive assistant, said Deputy District Attorney Brock Zimmon. “He did it for the purpose of sexual gratification.”

Lallana, who worked at Northwestern Mutual Financial Network, is on trial on four misdemeanor counts of assault and battery for allegedly contaminating the woman’s liter-sized water bottle.

If convicted, he could be sentenced by Superior Court Judge Walter P. Schwarm to a year in jail and ordered to register as a sex offender for life.

Defense attorney Eduardo Madrid told the jury in his opening statement that even if Zimmon can show that Lallana put his semen into the woman’s bottle and left it on her desk, his client is not guilty as charged.

Madrid insisted that the evidence will not prove that Lallana assaulted or battered the woman, who was identified in court as Tiffany G.

The woman testified that she worked at Northwestern for more than four years, but hardly ever interacted with Lallana. She said she never dated him and was not aware of any problem with him.

She told the jury that she usually kept a liter bottle of water on her desk, and she re-filled it during the day as needed.

The woman said she first became aware of something funny in her water when she took a sip on Jan. 14, 2010 while she was working in Northwestern’s Newport Beach branch. She testified she immediately noticed an odd taste, and then held the bottle away from her face and saw something in the water.

She said she threw the bottle away because “it didn’t make sense to me,” and then became more cautious with her water bottle.

Four months later, she said, the same thing happened to her in the company’s Orange branch, she said, where she had been transferred along with six others, including Lallana.

But this time, the woman took the bottle to a private lab, who determined that the foreign substance was semen.

Orange Police then launched an investigation, and started interviewing the six co-workers who were transferred to that office with Tiffany G.

Lallana at first denied having anything to do with the semen in the bottle, but then admitted discharging into her bottle on both occasions, Zimmon told the jury.

A subsequent DNA test confirmed that the semen in the bottle was Lallana’s, Zimmon added.

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Contact the writer: lwelborn@ocregister.com or 714-834-3784