AN IRANIAN immigrant sentenced to eight years’ jail for raping a teenage girl said in his home country western women were “portrayed as whores”, a court heard yesterday.

Amir Mohebbifar, 27, ­pleaded guilty to the aggravated sexual assault of the 19-year-old woman in an brutal early morning attack on Sydney’s Anzac Bridge on January 16 last year.

Mohebbifar admitted he had pushed the young woman into bushes on a pathway leading up to the bridge in Pyrmont and then proceeded to rape her.

In sentencing him yesterday, Judge Donna Woodburne said Mohebbifar had preyed on a vulnerable young woman who was simply trying to get home.

media_camera Police at the scene where the woman was sexually assaulted in January 2014. Picture: Bill Hearne

Mohebbifar was sentenced to serve eight years in jail with a minimum non-parole period of six years.

Ms Woodburne said the sexual assault, in which Moh-ebbifar violently shoved two fingers into the victim’s vagina and “pushed hard”, would have been “sheer terror” for the woman.

She kicked, screamed and even bit him to make him stop.

The university-educated Mohebbifar, who came from a middle-class Iranian family, told a psychologist that Western women were “portrayed as whores” in Iran.

In explaining the reasoning behind his horrific attack he also said that he had been ­depressed because he had been unable to make friends since arriving in Australia.

Mohebbifar sobbed in the court as his sentence was read out. He sat next to a Persian ­interpreter and told the court through a letter he was “truly sorry and deeply regretted” what he had done.

Mohebbifar was living in ­Australia on an expired bridging visa after arriving by boat in March 2013.