She admitted to having fabricated the kidnapping account. She admitted to having provided false information to federal agents, including in the August 2020 confrontation interview when she denied the DNA match to Reyes. She admitted to having applied to the California Victim Compensation Board under false pretenses, representing herself as a kidnapping victim, and to having received funds from the Board on the basis of those false representations.
Her statement to the court on the day of her plea was brief. She said she was “deeply ashamed.”
The statement was two words beyond the required minimum. She did not elaborate on her reasons, her mental state, her intended explanation, or her sense of what she had done to the community she had terrified. The formal record of the plea hearing contains her admission and her expression of shame. Everything else — the questions about motivation, the questions about what she had been thinking, the questions about how she had maintained the lie through years of investigation and through a confrontation interview in which she was shown DNA evidence — remains unanswered in the legal record.
Her defense attorney, William Portanova, addressed some of those questions at sentencing four months later, citing her history of mental health difficulties and a challenging childhood as mitigating factors. Those arguments were placed in the record for the judge’s consideration. They were not sufficient to change the fundamental nature of what had been done.
—
## The Sentencing: September 19, 2022
The sentencing hearing took place on September 19, 2022, before United States District Judge William B. Shubb in Sacramento. Judge Shubb had been appointed to the Eastern District of California and had a reputation for careful, deliberate sentencing practice. The prosecutors who presented the government’s case at sentencing were Assistant U.S. Attorneys Veronica M.A. Alegría and Shelley D. Weger.