She was 17 when she accused a relative of gaining her trust and then raping her in an Algiers home.

Now 20, the young woman took the witness stand Thursday in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court to claim that her accusation was a lie.

Wearing a brown pantsuit, she explained in a flat voice that she was mad at the relative, Regan Preatto, for breaking a promise to drive her to Baton Rouge to meet a boy. She rubbed Preatto's semen on herself to implicate him through his DNA, she said.

But as a New Orleans prosecutor replayed a videotaped statement she gave to police describing the alleged February 2017 rape in detail, the woman became increasingly agitated.

She played with her hair and avoided the prosecutor's eyes.

“If y’all got this, what y’all need me for?” she finally blurted out. “After this, I’m not answering no questions.”

Soon afterward, Judge Paul Bonin called for a lunch break. During the break, the woman attempted to leave the courthouse, the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office said. Bonin ordered the woman held, and she was put in handcuffs until she returned to the stand.

The question of the woman’s presence has loomed over the prosecution of Preatto, now 41, since the trial began Monday on counts of second-degree rape and aggravated crime against nature. She vanished from prosecutors' radar for years after the 2017 accusation, but her reappearance this week will force jurors to decide whether they believe her then or now.

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Days ago, they might never have heard her recantation at all. At the start of the week, the District Attorney’s Office said it couldn’t find the woman after months of attempts, and it accused Preatto of pressuring her not to testify against him.

Prosecutors cited jailhouse phone calls, including one made hours after Preatto’s March 6, 2017, arrest, in which he urged the woman's mother to take her to the District Attorney’s Office to recant.

“You don’t have a case if nobody show up,” the woman’s mother said.

Over defense objections, Bonin ruled that Preatto had forfeited his right under the U.S. Constitution to cross-examine his accuser.

Bonin said prosecutors would be allowed to show the jury the original, 2017 videotaped accusation, but the defense team would not be allowed to introduce her subsequent retractions.

For two days, the trial proceeded in the young woman’s absence. Prosecutors called another woman who lived near Preatto in a Waco, Texas, apartment complex in 2006, who said he raped her during an armed robbery. Preatto pleaded guilty to the robbery count alone.

A DNA analyst testified that Preatto’s genetic material was found on samples taken from inside the Louisiana accuser's vagina.

Worse for Preatto, prosecutors played the woman’s statement to New Orleans Police Department Detective Claudia Bruce.

She told Bruce she had spent the night lying in a bed with Preatto, opening up to him about her sexual past. Suddenly, he tore off the covers, pinned her down and raped her, she said.

“I didn't want to do that, and I told him that,” she said in the interview with Bruce. “I just was in shock, because it happened so fast.”

But on Thursday, the young woman arrived in court to rebut that statement. The woman said she had never received a subpoena before she met with Preatto’s lawyers on Tuesday.

In 2017, the woman said, she became close with Preatto after he finished serving a decade in Texas prisons for the Waco robbery. But she became upset with Preatto after he failed to drive her to Baton Rouge to meet with the boy.

“I was obsessive with him. Really crazy about him,” the woman said of her crush.

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When Preatto didn’t follow through on his promise, the woman added, “I felt like I had to get back at him.”

That was when she began concocting a series of lies, the woman said. Preatto’s DNA wound up on her body because she found one of his used condoms and rubbed his semen on herself to corroborate her story, the woman said.

But under questioning from Assistant District Attorney Sarah Dawkins, the woman acknowledged that she didn’t mention rubbing the semen inside herself during her first recantation to a public defender, or in a subsequent statement at the District Attorney’s Office.

Assistant District Attorney Payal Patel, who handled the case before Preatto's indictment, testified that the girl seemed nervous during their April 2017 meeting.

“If you lied about that night, what really happened?” Patel said she asked the woman. “That’s when she started pulling her eyebrows out.”

The interview was cut short when the woman’s mother burst into the room, Patel said.

Dawkins questioned whether anybody in the family had pressured the woman to recant her accusation. The woman denied it.

The woman repeatedly claimed she could not remember when she had given various statements, or what she had said in them. She explained that she suffers from a learning disorder and was on medication for depression, bipolar disorder and obsessive disorder.

After the lengthy cross-examination, Preatto’s attorneys questioned the woman again. Orleans Public Defenders staff attorney Beth Sgro asked the woman if Preatto had raped her.

“He never touched me. He never did,” she said.

Closing arguments are set for Friday morning.