NEW YORK – The woman who penned an “autobiography” under the pseudonym JT LeRoy testified Wednesday that the tale of life as a truck-stop prostitute wasn’t real – but it wasn’t a hoax.

San Francisco writer Laura Albert, the defendant in a federal lawsuit filed by a producer who bought the film rights to her book, “Sarah,” testified that the boy in her book was as real to her as her own son.

The writer took the stand one day after Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, president of Antidote International Films, testified he sued Albert because she defrauded him by selling screen rights to an autobiography that was fiction.

Levy-Hinte said he did not learn that JT LeRoy was imaginary until he read articles about the case in early 2006 – six years after the book was published. He seeks $110,000 along with attorney costs and other unspecified damages.

Albert testified Wednesday that she objected to people calling JT LeRoy a hoax. She acknowledged doing telephone interviews under that name because she believed “LeRoy” was inside her.

“It was my respirator,” she told a jury in U.S. District Court. “If you take JT, you take my other and I die.”

When a lawyer played a tape of an interview in which she answered to the name JT LeRoy, Albert explained it saying: “It was JT LeRoy speaking and I was there.”

She told the court that she began assuming male identities after a childhood in which she was sexually abused since age 3. Albert, 41, began crying within minutes of testifying as she recounted a childhood marked by sexual attacks.

As she got older, Albert occasionally used male voices when she calling abuse hot lines, she said. In 1989, she moved to San Francisco, taking jobs in housecleaning, baby-sitting and doing phone sex – sometimes in a male voice. She said she was sometimes suicidal and moved in and out of mental institutions, spending as much as a month in one San Francisco facility.

She said JT LeRoy developed inside her shortly after the birth of her son and as a result of a character she created in one of her books.