Penn. Woman Who Accused Stranger of Rape and Kidnapping Sentenced to Nearly 2 Years in Prison: ‘She Targeted an Innocent Man’

A Pennsylvania woman who wrongfully accused a man of an attempted rape and kidnapping will be serving jail time.

The Bucks County District Attorney’s Office announced that Anjela Borisova Urumova, 20, was sentenced on Tuesday, April 1 to spend 23 months and 45 days in the in Bucks County Correctional Facility after filing a false police report about an attempted rape and kidnapping that occurred in Middletown Township, Pennsylvania.

The falsified police report led to a man — identified by CBS News as Daniel Pierson — “being jailed for a month,” despite not having committed any crimes, the attorney’s office said. 

“In this case, she targeted an innocent man and accused him of one of the worst crimes a person can be accused of,” Bucks County District Attorney Jennifer Schorn said in a statement.

Urumova pled guilty in January to seven misdemeanor counts, which included false alarm to an agency of public safety and tampering with or fabricating physical evidence, false reports and unsworn falsification to authorities. She initially faced up to 17 years in prison, according to the New York Post. 

In addition to her prison sentence, Urumova was also sentenced to one year of probation and ordered her to undergo a mental health evaluation. She was also ordered to pay $3,600 in restitution to the victim and was ordered not to contact the victim or his family.

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“Not only did this targeted false report impact the victim and his family in unimaginable ways, but there is also a profound ripple effect,” Schorn said. “A crime like this can shatter the community’s confidence in the system. It can jeopardize prosecutions of legitimate crimes of sexual violence.”

“The prosecution and sentence of this defendant for a malicious false report demonstrates that this will not be tolerated,” she added. 

Following the man’s arrest, detectives continued to investigate the case, which led to “the discovery of the false accusation” by Urumova, the district attorney’s office said. According to an earlier press release from Bucks County officials, police reviewed surveillance video from several shops in the area and found “multiple inconsistencies and contradictory information” from Urumova’s story.

Detectives then confronted the woman about the discrepancies and she “admitted she lied about the entire incident and that no assault occurred,” per the release. She told police that she “gave a description of his truck and identified him because she had seen him and the truck in the past.”

Pierson, along with his mother and wife, were present at the woman’s hearing. He declined to comment on the case to the attorney’s office.

“I’m incredibly grateful for the work that law enforcement did in this case to get down to what happened, but it can’t change the fact that a man spent 31 days sleeping in a cell for a crime he didn’t commit,” said Chief Deputy District Attorney Kristin M. McElroy in a statement.