An inconsolable Nadine Menendez said ex-Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez strung her “like a puppet” into an international bribery conspiracy and a bad marriage before a Manhattan judge hit her with a 41/2 year prison term Thursday.

In distraught remarks, the 58-year-old wife of the imprisoned former lawmaker said she believed he was her knight in shining armor when they met in 2018, the “light at the end of the tunnel” following a string of physically abusive relationships.

“He was my god. I felt safe, following him through life. He was one of the most powerful men in the most powerful country on Earth and there was no way he’d lead me astray or lead me to do anything illegal, or so I thought,” Nadine said in Manhattan federal court.

The marital blame game cut both ways. During Menendez’s trial last year, his lawyers threw his wife under the bus while she was recovering from a double mastectomy in treatment for breast cancer, claiming she hid financial troubles from him and kept him in the dark about promises she made to his bribers.

Nadine Menendez told Manhattan Federal Judge Sidney Stein her husband’s legal team had told her behind the scenes that if they could get him cleared of charges alleging he traded his powerful political influence for stacks of cash and gold bullion bars, her case “would vanish.”

“I put my life in his hands, and he strung me like a puppet,” she said. “Now I’m standing here taking full accountability for all my actions, actions I made blindly in love with my husband … I now know, he’s not my savior. He’s not the man I thought he was.”

Nadine’s lawyer, Sarah Krissoff, in extensive arguments requested Nadine serve no more than a year and told Stein her client wasn’t the rapacious wife Menendez’s lawyers had made her out to be, but “a woman who literally has no power, no juice, zero,” and a doting homemaker who overcame extreme hardship growing up in war-torn Lebanon, happiest cleaning up her husband’s cigar ashes and playing backgammon at their Garden State home.

The lawyer said Nadine still needed a series of surgeries to repair the right side of her body — some that would take upward of 10 hours, plus six to eight months of recovery — and that she worried about her well-being long term under the care of the Bureau of Prisons.

Stein, who said he would recommend Nadine serve time at a facility where she would get the care she needs, said he didn’t believe Nadine was the “manipulative, hungry for money” force behind the conspiracies that lawyers for her husband and co-defendants portrayed her to be — nor was she the passive witness she’d painted herself as.

“You are not the person they tried to depict,” the judge said. “By the same token, at your trial, your attorneys depicted you as an innocent observer to what was happening around you, the non-actor thoroughly dependent on the men in your life.”

“That is not you either. You knew what you were doing,” Stein added, saying Nadine was “always purposeful,” a central participant in a wide-ranging conspiracy involving the corruption of one of the highest-ranking U.S. senators.

“You set up meetings,” he said. “You initiated actions. You involved others. You knew what you were doing throughout.”

Known as Nadine Arslanian before she wed the New Jersey lawmaker in 2020, Nadine was indicted alongside her husband in September 2023 on charges alleging they participated in a series of backdoor deals with a trio of New Jersey businessmen, many to the benefit of the Egyptian government.

The couple had been set to fight their cases before a jury together, but Stein postponed Nadine’s in light of her health developments. She was found guilty in April after a five-week trial of 15 counts, including multiple bribery, foreign agent, and obstruction of justice offenses.

The 71-year-old Bob Menendez began serving his 11-year prison term in June. The former head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was convicted in July 2024 of acting as a foreign agent, bribery and other offenses, with trial evidence establishing he pocketed nearly half a million dollars in cash, $150,000 worth of gold bars, designer watches and Formula 1 race tickets in exchange for taking official actions to benefit his bribers.

Convicted along with the Menendezes in the scheme were Wael Hana, 41, an affluent businessman who operated a halal certification business, among other ventures; Fred Daibes, 67, a hugely successful real estate developer; and Jose Uribe, a New Jersey businessman, who cooperated with the feds.

Much of the bribery proceeds were discovered by the feds at the couple’s Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, home in June 2022 raid, including a pile of gold bars and closets full of $480,000 in cash and jackets emblazoned with Menendez’s name.

Evidence at both of the Menendezes trials showed that in exchange for the lavish gifts, the senator directed millions in aid and weapons to Egypt, meddled in a pending federal prosecution case involving one of his bribers in New Jersey, pressured federal officials to let another of his bribers maintain an exclusive monopoly over U.S. exports of halal products to Egypt, and coerced the highest levels of state law enforcement in New Jersey to scrap a criminal investigation into a third conspirator and his associate.

Prosecutors argued that Nadine played a key role in the scheme from 2018 through 2023, acting as a central go-between. She wrecked a luxury convertible she received in 2018 after striking and killing a pedestrian in a northern New Jersey suburb.

Before imposing the term Thursday, Stein received letters of support for Nadine Menendez, including from her imprisoned husband, who lamented his defense strategy at trial of claiming his wife had kept him in the dark.

“Nadine is not the person who Prosecutors, or for that fact, what the Defense Attorneys made her out to be,” the ex-lawmaker wrote.“I regret that I didn’t fully preview what my Defense Attorney said about Nadine during my trial and in his summation. To suggest that Nadine was money hungry or in financial need, and therefore would solicit others for help, is simply wrong.”

But prosecutors, who had sought a term of seven years, said Nadine’s participation wasn’t fleeting or hesitant, and that she was the second most culpable person out of five charged in the scheme after her husband.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Lara Pomerantz said Nadine Menendez had consciously chosen to participate in brazen public corruption for years, implicating national security, foreign relations, and the integrity of state and federal law enforcement.

“The defendant was not a bit player in the scheme,” Pomerantz said. “She played a critical role in selling the power of a U.S. senator for personal gain.”

Stein ordered Nadine Menendez to report to prison on July 10, 2026, to accommodate medical treatment in the meantime, and imposed a term of three years of supervised release.

Despite putting the onus on Menendez in her tearful plea for leniency, the senator’s wife struck a different tone in comments to The New York Daily News outside the courthouse.

“I do not plan on divorcing him,” she said.

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