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Woman jailed for reporting bogus text threats

A woman in Orange County, Calif., claims hundreds of threatening texts were sent by her ex-boyfriend and his sister-in-law. After they are arrested, it emerges that the woman sent the texts to herself.

Chris Matyszczyk
2 min read

There are days when I really don't like myself very much. Sometimes, I even curse the very ground I tread and the being that I have willfully become.

However, if I write these feelings down, I try to make sure that they're in a very private corner of my laptop or, at the very least, hidden in one of the self-help books in my bookcase.

It seems, though, that Jeanne Mundango Manunga, a 25-year-old woman from Santa Ana, Calif., took a slightly different philosophical approach.

According to the Orange County Register, Manunga wanted to make people believe that it was others who disliked her. That, indeed someone was out to get her. Actually two someones-- her ex-boyfriend and his sister-in-law.

She informed her local police department--actually, three of her local police departments--that she was receiving nasty, nasty texts from these two people.

"Oh, hell. I bet it's another threatening text from me." CC Kiwanja/Flickr

It seems she paid various police departments at least 19 visits. This somehow persuaded the police to finally issue arrest warrants for the alleged miscreants. In fact, the sister-in-law was arrested three times and spent some time locked up while she tried to raise bail.

The ex-boyfriend and his sister-in-law were quite convinced that something was afoot. So, they went along to a cell phone store, where they happily learned that Manunga had bought a pre-paid cell phone under her sister-in-law's name.

Once the police had worked out that most of the calls had been made from places that seemed remarkably adjacent to Manunga's home or place of employment, their suspicions were deeply aroused.

This all led to a jury of her peers deciding that Manunga was guilty of three felony counts of false imprisonment by fraud or deceit and two misdemeanor counts of making a false police report. For she had, indeed, sent the threatening text messages from the pre-paid phone to her own original cell phone. Perhaps she had an unlimited texting plan.

This had been an act of some commitment. There had been hundreds of threatening text messages that must have taken some time to compose. So one can only imagine what might have motivated Manunga to embark on such a treacherous path to ignominy.

Like many who purchase pre-paid cell phones for nefarious purposes, she thought she could get away with it. Instead she will have to now spend a year in jail and quite some time, one fears, talking to herself.