A member of the U.S. Marshals Service stands outside the Manhattan Federal Court constructing.
Bryan R. Smith | AFP | Getty Images
A Recent York woman was sentenced to time already served in jail for cyberstalking in a case where she was accused of “catfishing” a mystery high-profile CEO of a publicly traded corporation.
The lady, Sakoya Blackwood, 35, was charged in a Manhattan federal court indictment with attempting to extort the unidentified millionaire out of as much as $300,000 to maintain her quiet about his sexual escapades, and a few false claim she threatened to make about him having sex with a minor.
Prosecutors have said in a court filing that along with that CEO, Blackwood “targeted quite a few other potential victims — all wealthy and high-profile men — using fictitious identities, while camouflaging her ownership of the accounts deployed in her catfishing scheme.” She was not charged in reference to those other men.
At her sentencing Wednesday, Blackwood was also ordered to serve three years of supervised release for the attempted shakedown, which spanned six months in 2022. Judge Jesse Furman agreed with recommendations by her lawyers and probation officials.
But because she got here to the USA from Jamaica as a baby without legal immigration status, Blackwood now faces the danger of being deported and separated from her 12-year-old daughter, her lawyer said in a court filing.
The Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office had asked Furman to punish the Bronx resident with a “significant term of imprisonment,” which could be between 24 and 30 months given federal sentencing guidelines. An office spokesman didn’t immediately reply to CNBC’s request for comment.
Blackwood, since her arrest last August, had been held in a Brooklyn jail, after a judge deemed her to be a flight risk.
She pleaded guilty on March 28 to cyberstalking as a part of a plea deal that led to the dismissal of the opposite two criminal counts she faced: extortion and use of interstate communication with intent to extort.
Prosecutors in a court filing said Blackwood tried to extort the victim by threatening to “falsely tell the world” that the person “has sex with a minor.”
That claim was “a blatant lie which she invented out of whole cloth,” the filing noted.
But what was true were sexually explicit photos and messages the CEO shared with Blackwood as she posed in electronic communications as a former romantic partner of the victim.
Blackwood then pretended to be a vengeful ex-boyfriend and employees of media outlets — amongst them a Vanity Fair reporter — purportedly occupied with reporting his conduct.
Such online deception is often called catfishing.
Blackwood also ramped up pressure on the victim in late April 2022 by “using Twitter to tweet veiled threats on the Victim,” prosecutors wrote.
“She tweeted a few scandal brewing across the Victim and rhetorically asked what would occur to the share price and shareholders of the Victim’s company when the compromising information is released,” the filing said.
The person’s identity has never been made public. But court filings describe him as a Harvard-educated CEO of a publicly traded company who’s in his late 60s.
“The defendant’s behavior was heartless,” prosecutors wrote.
“For a lot of months, the defendant kept the Victim affected by the constant fear that his life could be ruined. She taunted him with the prospect of releasing embarrassing materials and, even worse, false accusations that he had sex with someone who was underage,” the filing said.
Prosecutors said Blackwood “employed sophisticated and devious means” for her scheme, which included the creation of “multiple online personas” and using a Voice over Web Protocol phone number.
She also obtained the cellphone numbers of the victim, his son and 6 members of his company’s board of directors, “threatening to destroy the Victim’s life by disclosing to those near him her false claims,” prosecutors wrote.
Blackwood’s lawyer, Michael Tremonte, in his sentencing submission July 5, said that after emigrating from Jamaica and earning top grades in highschool, Blackwood at age 18 married an older man “who subjected her to extreme physical and mental abuse.”
Tremonte wrote that “Blackwood never fully healed from the trauma,” and that “she continued to experience the consequences of PTSD and, like many survivors of domestic violence, continued to have interaction in unhealthy relationships and rely financially and emotionally on abusive men.”
“It was from this position of fear, vulnerability, and resentment toward her abusers that Ms. Blackwood made the terrible decision to send harassing messages to a millionaire CEO,” wrote the lawyer, who didn’t immediately reply to CNBC’s request for comment Thursday.
Tremonte wrote that after 10 months in jail and the “dramatic wake-up call” from her arrest, “Ms. Blackwood has absorbed the large consequences of her poor decisions and will not be more ashamed.”
The defense lawyer wrote that Blackwood struggled emotionally in the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, and after unsuccessfully attempting to earn money from day trading, began “compulsively reading on the Web about powerful men who engage in abusive conduct.”
“She became particularly upset about narratives involving men who sexually took advantage of young
women or abused positions of political, social, or corporate power, after which got away with it,” Tremonte wrote.
Blackwood then began contacting men who were rumored to have been involved in domestic violence, sexual harassment or sexual assault of minors and others, in response to her lawyer.
