Arkansas woman framed husband on child porn, rape charges so she could see her children after being kicked out of home
An Arkansas woman who tried to frame her husband of downloading child pornography on his phone and claiming that he raped a teenage girl has escaped jail time.
The woman, 34-year-old Cherie Renee Bolton of Siloam Springs, pleaded guilty to charges of distributing or possessing child pornography and filing a false report in the Benton County Circuit Court in the last week of June, according to KFSM-TV.
Bolton was first arrested in January 2018 following an investigation by Siloam Springs Police into the allegations she made against her husband, whose identity has not been made public.
A probable cause affidavit filed in connection to the case stated that Bolton first told authorities that her husband had attacked her when she caught him sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl on May 24, 2017.
She reportedly showed investigators a bruise on her ribs, but they weren't able to positively confirm that it had been the result of an assault. She also presented them with three images of child pornography that she said her husband had downloaded on his phone.
However, there were inconsistencies in her story.
When asked why she had waited to make a report on her husband, she said she feared retaliation from him.
Police soon uncovered that her husband had kicked her out of their house on May 22, and when they extracted the child porn images from the phone, they found that Bolton had downloaded them a day after that, on May 23.
The 34-year-old initially denied knowledge of how the images got on the phone but later admitted to downloading them while she was on drugs.
She said she went to a motel in West Siloam Springs, Oklahoma after she was kicked out of the house and did meth with a man she met off Craigslist.
She said the downloads mostly happened after she was kicked out of the room by the man after an argument and while she was in the midst of a panic episode where she became upset that her husband was "trying to keep her from seeing their kids".
She told investigators that she was outside Ozark Guidance in Siloam Springs at some point but later woke up at Springwood’s Behavioral Health in Fayetteville. The girl she claimed was sexually assaulted by her husband denied any such incident occurred as well.
Bolton was initially facing a 10-year prison sentence on the child pornography charges but managed to strike a deal with prosecutors as she had no prior criminal convictions in the state that saw her sentenced to probation instead. Benton County Circuit Court Judge Brad Karren ruled that the 34-year-old will have to serve out the full six-year sentence. He ordered her to register as a sex offender and pay out close to $2,000 in fines.