Meryl Streep’s nephew is seen shirtless and carefree outside of his trendy Manhattan apartment

Meryl Streep’s nephew, Charles Harrison Streep, has been pictured for the first time since he was charged with strangling an 18-year-old college student and leaving him for dead in a road rage incident in the Hamptons last month.

In pictures obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com, the 31-year-old financier appeared without a care in the world as he spent time cleaning his apartment in New York’s trendy Soho before shooting some hoops nearby.

Streep stripped down to the waist to enjoy the last sunshine of the summer as he cleaned the windows and balcony of his New York apartment.

He was pictured just hours after his alleged victim, David Peralta, gave his first and full horrifying account of the alleged attack on August 24 in an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com.

Streep has been charged with second degree strangulation and second-degree assault and Peralta has filed a civil suit against him.

Approached by DailyMail.com as he wiled away his afternoon shooting hoops, Streep declined to comment and said, ‘Speak to my lawyer’ before packing up his kit and returning home.

According to Peralta, Streep ‘blew through a stop sign,’ near the family’s East Hampton home and nearly collided with Peralta who was driving to get breakfast with his girlfriend.

Angry words were exchanged but, in a scene straight from a horror movie, rather than leave it at that, Peralta has alleged, Streep did an illegal U-turn and followed him into the parking lot where the alleged attack occurred.

In a matter of minutes everything changed as Streep confronted Peralta allegedly hurling racist insults before strangling him and throwing him to the ground. He fled the scene having dismissed his alleged victim as ‘just Spanish.’

Peralta sustained a head injury that resulted in a potentially fatal brain bleed that saw him airlifted to Stony Brook Hospital, Southampton where surgeons performed a lifesaving craniotomy.

According to Peralta, ‘I didn’t deserve this. He said a bunch of racist things to me, just because I’m Hispanic. I don’t know what that has to do with anything.

‘He said he would throw me to the ground, threatened me and said I was ”just Spanish.”’

Peralta’s parents, Edgar, 47, and Jeny, 44, are from Ecuador though he himself was born in America, where he has lived all of his life.

He said, ‘I thought this only happens in movies. I never thought anything like this would ever happen to me. I’m not a bad guy. I’m not a bad person. I just work, come home, see my girlfriend and my family.

‘I don’t know why I deserve this, why this has happened.’

Peralta’s family has brought a civil suit describing this as a, ‘completely unprovoked, violent and malicious attack,’ and demanding damages.

The 18-year-old college student had been due to start his sophomore year at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Instead he has been left homebound and fearful, struggling to pick up the pieces of a life shattered in a matter of minutes, by a chance encounter one summer morning.

His summer, to that point, had been pretty much like any other. Each day he rose at 6am to head to his first job at the tennis courts at SPORTIME, East Hampton, then took a break before heading to his evening shift at popular village restaurant, Dopo La Spiaggia where he worked as a food runner.

By July, and after years of holding down two jobs every summer, he had saved up enough to buy his first car – a brand new, bright red Mustang. It was his pride and joy, and the car in which he and his girlfriend, Christina, were riding through East Hampton on the morning of August 24.

Peralta recalled, ‘We were just going to get breakfast and she needed to get cash at the Chase.’

Peralta said, ‘I just kept driving to the bank and then I see he followed me, and he gets out of his car and starts yelling at me multiple times about being Hispanic.’

According to Peralta, Streep also mocked his youthful appearance asking, ‘What are you? 14 or something?’

Some of what happened next is lost to Peralta due to the severity of his injuries which saw him unconscious and with a brain bleed.

But he remembers Streep got out of his car and angrily approached Peralta’s. 

Medics had discovered a bleed on Peralta’s brain. He needed emergency surgery that was beyond the small hospital’s capability.

Barely a couple of hours after that innocent drive Peralta was being airlifted to Stony Brook Hospital in Southampton – the nearest facility with Level 1 Trauma capability. And every second that passed was a second closer to irreparable brain damage or death. 

Today a crescent scar arcs across Peralta’s skull where surgeons went in to remove his skull cap and ease the pressure on his brain. The staples were only removed two days before he spoke with DailyMail.com and he moved his hand tentatively over it. 

This is not the first time he has had a brush with the law, though it appears to be by far the most serious.

Court records obtained by DailyMail.com show that Streep was found guilty of disorderly conduct/physical offense (engaging in fighting or violent conduct, using obscene language or gestures) in an incident linked to a traffic stop in Pennsylvania in 2012.

For Peralta’s part, he said, he hopes for justice and to recover.

He said, ‘If you’re famous or have money it doesn’t mean you can treat other people just however you want.

‘It’s not how this world is supposed to be. It’s not how we’re supposed to treat each other.

‘I want justice. More than that I want him to pay for what he did to me.

‘And I know it’s going to be hard, and it’s going to be long, but I just want to recover from this.’