Last year, the mother-of-three won a new hearing into the killing of Robert Kissel, a senior executive at Merrill Lynch, after her 2005 murder conviction was quashed due to legal errors at the first trial.

The housewife was convicted of drugging her husband with a sedative-laced strawberry milkshake before beating him to death with a lead ornament. But she maintains she acted in self-defence against an abusive, drug-addicted spouse.

On Tuesday, the sobbing and frail woman described enduring a history of physical and sexual abuse, including forced anal sex.

"It was forced sex -- he made me do things I didn't want to do," the trembling 46-year-old told jurors.

"The more I struggled, the more it hurt."

Kissel also said her husband demanded she induce labour because their third child's due date conflicted with one of his business trips.

The high-powered investment banker, she added, punched the wall when she initially refused.

"I had never seen him become so enraged so fast," Kissel said, adding that she kept silent about the abuse because people thought she had a "wonderful life".

Earlier Tuesday, Nancy Kissel's lawyer Edward Fitzgerald rejected prosecutors' claims that Robert Kissel was asleep on the couple's bed in their luxury apartment before his wife repeatedly smashed his skull.

Kissel had a cocktail of drugs in his system, but the evidence did not prove that the brew knocked him out, Fitzgerald said.

Bloodstains at the scene instead suggested a violent fight broke out between the pair, probably over Robert Kissel's plan to start divorce proceedings, before the "frenzied" attack, he told jurors.

"The allegation that (the victim) was asleep on the bed doesn't fit the bloodstain evidence," Fitzgerald said.

"(The prosecution's) own evidence doesn't support their theory," he added.

The re-trial has heard that Kissel rolled up her husband's body in a carpet and covered his head with plastic, leaving it in the bedroom for days before hiring workmen to carry it to a storeroom.

Prosecutors rejected the Michigan-born Kissel's offer to plead guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter at the start of the trial last month.

She was handed a life sentence in 2005 but Hong Kong's Court of Final Appeal overturned the conviction last February and ordered a fresh hearing.

Kissel's original hearing featured a mix of adultery, violence, spying, greed and enormous wealth in the expatriate community, gripping the former British colony and inspiring books and films.

At the time, prosecutors argued that Kissel stood to gain up to $18 million from the death of her wealthy husband, saying she planned to run away with her lover, a TV repairman in the United States.

Kissel maintained that she acted in self-defence after her cocaine-and alcohol abusing husband attacked her with a baseball bat.

In her successful appeal last year, Kissel's lawyers argued that prosecutors had presented inadmissible evidence during the original trial.

In a separate disaster that befell the Kissel family in 2006, Robert Kissel's brother Andrew was found murdered in his house in Connecticut, bound and with multiple stab wounds. He was reportedly about to plead guilty to bank fraud charges.

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