Topeka ? Traumatized after being sexually attacked in her Topeka home, a 47-year-old woman said a relative and the relative’s husband – well-known politico Al LeDoux – took her to their home.

The next morning, LeDoux had something to tell her, the woman testified Monday in Shawnee County District Court.

When she was alone with LeDoux, the woman said, he confessed to her he was one of two men in her house the night she was attacked.

“He said, ‘I know this is going to destroy my family and put me in the slammer,'” the woman testified.

“I love you and have loved you for years,” the woman said LeDoux told her.

LeDoux, 55, faces charges of aggravated kidnapping, aggravated rape, aggravated criminal sodomy and aggravated burglary. He has pleaded innocent to the charges, and a trial has been scheduled for 9 a.m. Feb. 18.

During a daylong preliminary hearing, the woman testified for about two hours before Shawnee County District Judge Eric Rosen about what happened May 22-23 in her Topeka home and later at LeDoux’s home outside Holton.

She said a man wearing a ski mask broke into her house, tied her up and blindfolded her. She said the man cut off her nightshirt, dragged her into the bathroom and put a knife to her throat. The man forced her to perform oral sex, she said. Prosecutors said DNA evidence linked LeDoux to the investigation.

Later that morning, after talking with police and being examined at the hospital, the woman went with her relative to LeDoux’s house outside Holton. She spent the night and was leaving for Topeka in the morning for another interview with police when, she said, LeDoux said he wanted to speak with her.

She said he appeared to have been crying.

After LeDoux confessed, she became frightened and hurried from the house to speak with her relative, who was at her place of employment. When she told her relative, she said the woman fell to her knees in shock.

LeDoux was arrested in September and placed on administrative leave without pay from his position as director of the Kansas Water Office. He has served in high-ranking positions with two governors – Mike Hayden and Bill Graves – and is well-known in Republican Party circles.

On Monday, Judge Rosen said there was enough evidence to hold LeDoux for trial on the four charges.

He dismissed one sodomy charge and a proposed new charge of conspiracy. During the attack, the man spoke as if there was another man in the house, too. The woman said that when LeDoux confessed to her, he referred to himself as “one of the men in your house the other night.”

But Rosen said there was no evidence there was a second perpetrator.

LeDoux acknowledged he understood the charges against him, but he said nothing else during the hearing. His attorneys, Pedro Irigonegaray of Topeka and Robert Eye of Lawrence, did not ask the woman any questions.

After the woman left the courtroom, Rosen called for a break. During the break, LeDoux briefly sobbed.