She was an 18-year-old living in foster care, waiting on Fulton Avenue in West Baltimore for a Lyft one day in 2023 when a man pulled up in a Tesla.

He wasn’t her ride. He was twice her age. But they hit it off, exchanged numbers and began going on dates and staying together.

A year later, she testified Tuesday, she kicked him out of her Cedonia apartment after an argument and he returned, strangling and raping her until she lost consciousness.

Michael Maurice Johnson, 42, is on trial for attempted murder, rape and related charges in Baltimore County Circuit Court for the alleged attack. What jurors won’t hear is that he was once convicted, and eventually cleared, of killing a teenage girl in 2010, in a circumstantial case that nonetheless mirrors the current accusations.

Baltimore prosecutors theorized at the time that Johnson had become obsessed with 16-year-old Phylicia Barnes, the younger half-sister of his then-girlfriend, strangled her and disposed of the body, which was found floating in the Susquehanna River. Johnson was convicted by a jury, which was overturned prior to sentencing and later tossed out by a judge in 2018.

Now, Johnson is back in court on similar accusations, with a victim who says she survived the 2023 attack and is willing to talk about it.

Johnson’s defense attorneys conceded at the outset that he assaulted the victim, whom the Banner is not identifying because she is an alleged victim of sexual assault. But her injuries are consistent with hitting, punching or slapping, and not the vicious attack described by the victim, said assistant public defender Amy Stone.

“I am submitting to you that the evidence will not support those most serious charges,” Stone told jurors in her opening statement.

The alleged victim, who was 19 at the time of the alleged attack and is now 21, was the first witness to take the stand. Small in stature and speaking from behind large glasses, she described being raised by her mother and entering the foster care system at age 14, from which she frequently ran away.

Johnson was living in York, Pa., where he owned a home. He was unemployed at the time of his arrest but had previously worked as a mechanic.

She said the first time they met, she got into Johnson’s vehicle thinking it was a ride she had requested.

“Do you know how old he was?” Assistant State’s Attorney John Magee asked.

“I don’t know how old he is now,” she replied.

She said she “liked his vibe.” Dates at the Crafty Crab and a hookah lounge followed, and he would take her on trips to Miami, the Bahamas and Puerto Rico, she testified. She said she fell in love with him.

Arguments became frequent, and one night in June 2024, she said Johnson was drinking and she was smoking marijuana and they got into a fight. She kicked him out, but said he returned and attacked her.

Afterward, “he said, did you think I was going to kill you?” she testified. “He said he wasn’t [going to], after I said yes.”

When she woke up the next morning, she ran out of the home and summoned help at a business across the street. In a text message to her social worker, she said the attack had gone on “for like 6 hours.”

Responding officers noted that her eyes were bright red. Her tongue was so swollen she was unable to speak, so she instead wrote out her answers to their questions, according to body camera footage played for jurors.

Stone, Johnson’s defense attorney, said the victim did not have head or neck injuries consistent with the attack described, nor did a forensic exam show injuries from forced sex. But prosecutors plan to call an expert witness who will testify that the burst blood vessels in her eyes and other symptoms could be caused by strangulation.

Johnson had a knot on his head and scratches on his forearms at the time of his arrest, and told police that the victim had attacked him because he was talking to other women on his phone.

Stone noted the pair had sex often, and the presence of Johnson’s DNA was not indicative of an assault. On the witness stand, the victim said the sexual encounter was brief and that she had allowed it to happen to get it over with.

During cross-examination, the victim said she was frustrated with the questions she was being asked and stormed off the witness stand and out of the courtroom. After about 10 minutes, she returned crying and answered the rest of the attorneys’ questions.

Barnes, an honors student in North Carolina, was visiting family in Northwest Baltimore in 2010 when she went missing. Her body was later found in the Susquehanna River. Johnson was the last known person to see her alive and would be charged with killing her.

The key evidence was a neighbor’s observation of Johnson struggling to move a large plastic storage bin the day she disappeared. Though prosecutors believed the girl’s body was inside of it, they couldn’t prove it.

But the circumstantial evidence, along with a fellow inmate who claimed Johnson told him of the crime, led a jury to convict. Questions about the informant’s credibility led to the conviction being thrown out. At a second trial in 2015 a judge threw the case out, only for prosecutors to reindict. A different judge dismissed that case.

This story has been updated.