An Arkansas woman must register as a sex offender after she tried to frame her own husband for possessing child pornography.
Cherie Renee Bolton, 34, pleaded guilty to distributing, possessing, or viewing child porn and filing a false police report in a Benton County Circuit Court last week.
Judge Brad Karren also ordered Bolton to pay $2,000 in fines and court fees. As part of her plea deal, Bolton agreed to serve six years probation.
Reports state Bolton met with Siloam Springs police in May 2017 and alleged that a few weeks earlier, she caught her husband sexually assaulting their teenage daughter. The arrest affidavit states she “was afraid of S. Bolton, who assaulted her the day after she saw him having sex with S.B.”
Bolton presented police with pornographic images on her phone that showed “females obviously under the age of fourteen years depicted in sexual acts.” Furthermore, the “sexually suggestive clothing focuses on their breasts,” the affidavit states.
Police later discovered through forensic investigation that Bolton had downloaded the images onto the device herself.
However, reports state that she denied having downloaded them onto her phone because she was “high on meth, in the middle of a manic episode and was upset that her husband was trying to keep her from seeing their kids.”
Bolton also claimed her husband had physically assaulted her and left bruises on her ribcage. However, detectives found no evidence of the alleged assault on Bolton’s body.
Police discovered that Bolton had been kicked out of her home days before she alerted the police, adding that she “went to a motel in West Siloam Springs, Okla., where she did meth with a man she met off Craigslist. She said the man kicked her out of the room after an argument,” the reports state.
Bolton was arrested in January 2018 after an investigation by the Siloam Springs police found she was trying to frame her husband for possessing child pornography and rape.