Nadine Menendez gets 4.5 years in bribery case

What happened

Nadine Menendez, the wife of disgraced former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), was sentenced to 4.5 years in prison on Thursday for her role in a bribery scheme that ended her husband’s long political career. The 71-year-old former senator was sentenced in January to 11 years in prison.

Who said what

“I was wrong about my husband,” Menendez, 58, told the court before her sentencing. “I put my life in his hands and he strung me like a puppet.” Menendez’s attorney had argued that her “childhood in wartime Lebanon and a series of abusive relationships” made her “easy prey for manipulative men,” The New York Times said.

Bob Menendez’s “legal strategy” of “throwing her under the bus” to save both of them failed badly, Politico said, and he recanted in a presentencing letter that threw “his defense team under the bus” for blaming the yearslong scheme on his wife. Nadine Menendez was not the “true force behind the conspiracies,” but she also wasn’t an “innocent observer of what was happening,” U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein said at yesterday’s hearing. “People have to understand there are consequences.”

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

What next?

Stein gave Menendez 10 months to report to prison so she could complete and recover from medical procedures tied to her trial-delaying treatment for breast cancer. As Menendez left court yesterday, “she was asked if she wants a divorce,” The Associated Press said. “She said no.”