QAnon Momfluencer Convicted Of Falsely Claiming Craft Enthusiasts Tried To Kidnap Her Kids

She's looking at up to six-months in prison.

A California woman with QAnon-leanings has been convicted of filing a false police report nearly two years after she falsely accused a Latinx couple minding their own business in a Michael's store of trying to sex traffick her children.

Katie Sorenson was a mother and an an aspiring influencer — a mom fluencer, if you will — in Petaluma, California. She shilled MRA essential oils, talked about her kids and whatever the hell "clean beauty" is on Instagram. Coffee foam art, cozy sweaters and reminders to "Live, Laugh, Love" were probably incorporated to some degree as well, we have to assume. There is a lot of competition in that industry, naturally, but she was finally able to break through one day in December of 2020 when she recorded a video from her car about how her kids were nearly stolen from her by very scary child traffickers while she was shopping with them at a Michael's craft store.

Sorenson had reported the incident to police, but it hadn't gone anywhere on account of the fact that the couple she said was trying to kidnap her kids didn't actually try to kidnap her kids, and she was frustrated. She got into her SUV and filmed a video talking about the incident, warning other parents about human traffickers trolling the Mod Podge aisle. You know, just to create "awareness." There's nothing Instagram momfluencers love like "awareness." Pretty soon she was going viral and even ended up on the local news with Polly Klaas' father (Klaas was also kidnapped in Petalma) — which showed surveillance video of the couple she claimed was trying to kidnap her children and, we can assume, sell them to a Satanic child trafficking/eating cult.

That, of course, was not what was happening. Sadie and Eddie Martinez were a normal couple with normal jobs — a UPS guy and a balloon arch maker — who had no interest in Sorenson's damn children. They didn't even find out about any of this until their daughter saw them on the local news and told them about it. Since then, Sadie has been active in trying to get Sorenson held accountable for her actions.

This all took place during the height of the COVID pandemic, at a time when legions of women like Sorenson were getting wrapped up in Qanon-style conspiracies about human trafficking — like the thing where they thought Wayfair was selling cabinetswith child sex slaves included or the thing where they thought the pandemic was actually a cover so that the US military could rescue all of the "mole children" who had been living underground their whole lives for trafficking-related reasons. They shared posts with freakishly incorrect statistics about child trafficking with #savethechildren hashtags, they shared conspiracies and most of all, they spreadawareness . There was certainly an idea that it didn't actually matter if anything they were saying was actually true, so long as it raised awareness .

We still really don't know what Sorenson's actual motivations were with this — whether she was just a weird racist who saw a Latinx couple and thought that they were going to try to steal her kids, or if she just wanted to gain attention for her Instagram, or if she really just wanted to raise "awareness" of the existence of child sex trafficking during a child sex trafficking moral panic. Either way, she's an asshole.

She hasn't been sentenced yet, but she has been remanded into custody and her bail is set at $100,000. The crime she's charged with is a misdemeanor, which means she faces up to six months in prison.

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