A historian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art yesterday told a Manhattan jury about her brush with a crazed accused date rapist.

“I could not understand where so much hate came from,” Paola D’Agostino said of Hugues Akassy, charged with raping one date, forcibly sodomizing another, and stalking D’Agostino and two other women.

Akassy had seemed charming when he first approached her on an Upper West Side street, said D’Agostino, a native of Naples, Italy.

But when she rejected his “aggressive” kisses on their first date, picnicking in Central Park, he “freaked out,” calling her an illmannered racist, she told jurors.

When she reluctantly agreed to a second date, he groped her, threw a screaming fit when she resisted and kept showing up at her job and staring, she said.