A look into the phenomenon of Gaslighting and its detrimental effects it has on people and society.

A woman has been caught trying to frame her husband as a paedophile by downloading child abuse material and falsely telling police he raped a 13-year-old girl.

Cherie Renee Bolton was arrested in January 2018 after police launched an investigation into claims she made the previous year that she’d caught her husband raping a teenager.

When she first made the police report, Bolton also supplied police with three child exploitation images she claimed to have taken from his phone.

Police later found Bolton had lied about the sexual assault and downloaded the images herself.

Bolton, 34, was sentenced to six years on probation on Monday after striking a plea deal that avoided a maximum 10-year jail term. She was sentenced in the Benton County Circuit Court.

Bolton, from Siloam Springs in Arkansas, US, initially told police she was motivated to frame her husband because he had been restricting her from seeing their children. She later told police she couldn’t properly remember what made her download the images and provide them to police because of her drug use.

She will be on probation for no less than six years but initially faced a maximum 10 years behind bars for child pornography charges. She brokered a plea deal with prosecutors, according to The Arkansas Gazette. Bolton had no prior charges, according to reports out of the US.

Bolton initially made contact with police on May 24, 2017, saying she’d caught her husband sexually assaulting a girl, 13.

She said when she caught the pair, her husband attacked her. She showed police what she claimed was a bruise on her ribs that police weren’t able to positively identify. According to KFSM, Bolton told police she’d hesitated in making her report out of fear.

She also handed police three photos depicting child exploitation.

Police investigators soon found out Bolton had been thrown out of her home by her husband on May 22, 2017 and, when searching her phone, found she’d downloaded the child exploitation material the following day.

Her husband and the teenager both denied the assault claims.

During questioning, Bolton said she downloaded the images after becoming upset at not being able to see her children, as her relationship with her husband soured.

She also reportedly blamed her actions on a manic episode, saying she was having a mental health crisis and high on methamphetamines when she downloaded the images from the internet, according to Siloam Springs Police’s probable cause report, obtained by KFSM.

After her husband threw her out, she met a man on Craigslist, according to an affidavit. The two did drugs together in a hotel, but Bolton can’t remember if she downloaded the images with the man or while alone.

The officers in charge of the case were praised by Siloam Springs Captain, Derek Spicer, who described the case as “unusual”.

“The detectives did a great job with the forensics of the phone,” Cpt Spicer said.

Bolton pleaded guilty to planting child abuse material on her husband’s phone and making a false report to police. She was sentenced to six years on probation and will have to register as a sex offender.

She will also have to pay a $2846 fine.