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Woman Sentenced for Faking Cancer to Duck Prison for Fraud Conviction

Ashleigh Chavez made the bogus claim that a doctor had discovered “cancerous cells” in her uterus on the eve of her sentencing.

A woman who admitted to repeatedly forging medical notes about a bogus uterine cancer diagnosis to ask for leniency in a prison sentence for fraud has been ordered to spend two years behind bars. Ashleigh Chavez, 38, pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in April, in a charge stemming from a separate case from 2019, in which she was set to be sentenced after acknowledging that she had embezzled more than $160,000 from an employer. But two days before her fraud sentencing, KPBS reported, Chavez gave the court a fake doctor’s note claiming that “cancerous cells” had been discovered in her uterus. Although her sentence—more than a dozen years in prison–was handed down last year, Chavez was allowed to remain free for several months, purportedly to receive medical treatment. Several more falsified letters were to follow, begging for home confinement on the basis that her cancer had progressed to stage II and that she could not “be exposed to COVID-19,” according to the Justice Department. Her doctors, when contacted by officials, denied writing the letters. Chavez’s two-year sentence will be served consecutively with her other term.