US ‘mom influencer’ guilty of falsely accusing Latino couple of trying to kidnap her children

A white California woman who styled herself on social media as a “mom influencer” has been ordered to spend three months in prison for falsely accusing a Latino couple of attempting to kidnap her children.

State jurors in Sonoma county found 30-year-old Kathleen “Katie” Sorensen guilty in April of knowingly making a false report of a crime in a case that involved her publishing a December 2020 social media post that asserted a man and a woman had tried to steal her two children from her in the parking lot of a Michaels craft store about 40 miles outside San Francisco.

Authorities said both the accused couple and store surveillance video “resoundingly contradicted” the account given to them by Sorensen. And on Thursday, Judge Laura Passaglia gave a 90-day prison sentence to Sorensen, two months of which could be served through a work release program, according to a statement from the local district attorney’s office.

Passaglia also told Sorensen to avoid any presence on social media, to agree to have her electronic devices searched and seized without a warrant, to undergo four hours of implicit bias training, and to pay various fines and fees.

The DA, Carla Rodriguez, said the verdict against and prison sentence for Sorensen held her “accountable for her crime”.

“Our hope is that this measure … will help provide some closure to the couple that was falsely accused of having attempted to kidnap two young children,” Rodriguez added.

Sorensen’s defense attorney, Charles Dresrow, could not immediately be reached for comment. He had previously told Good Morning America that his client “misperceived and misunderstood a series of random events, which were occurring around her, and a made an honest report to the police”.

“I don’t think she had any understanding of how this would spread and the impact it would cause,” Dresrow said.

Before landing in a case that illustrated the kind of unfounded criminal suspicions that racial minorities in the US can draw, Sorensen posted tips on social media about beauty and being a mother.

That existence changed when she went shopping at a Michaels store on 7 December 2020 and – after leaving – reported to police that a couple had tried to kidnap her children, who had accompanied her.

Several days later, Sorensen published a video on social media which gave a more detailed version of purported events at the store than the one she gave to investigators. The video showed Sorensen describing how the couple had trailed her into the store, commented on her children’s appearances and gave her the “heebie-jeebies” because they were not “clean-cut individuals”, as NBCNews.com reported.

Sorensen also said the couple followed her out of the store to her car and waited near her as she put her children into her car to leave, NBCNews.com added. She said the encounter left her so “paralyzed with fear” she couldn’t say anything to the couple, who only fled after she yelled for help.

“There were significant additional details that were included in her … video that had not been disclosed to … police,” the statement from Rodriguez said. “Ms Sorensen also went on a local news program repeating her account.”

The couple, Sadie and Eddie Martinez, told the Petaluma Argus-Courier newspaper that they had gone to Michaels that day simply to buy Christmas decorations. They came forward to deny Sorensen’s claims after recognizing themselves in a photo that the police released after the influencer’s report to authorities, which the couple maintains amounted to racial profiling.

“She wanted a strong following [online]; she was looking for, you know, content for her name and her income and at our expense,” Sadie Martinez said to Good Morning America in response to Sorensen’s video, which has been viewed more than 4m times at least.

Prosecutors charged Sorensen with three misdemeanor counts of making a false report of a crime after her arrest in 2021. Jurors acquitted her of two of the counts, leaving Sorensen to face a maximum of six months in connection with the charge for which she was convicted.