KS woman sentenced for lying about astronaut wife’s bank access from space
A 51-year-old Sedgwick County woman received a three-month federal prison sentence on Thursday for lying about her NASA astronaut wife illegally accessing her bank account from space.
Summer Heather Worden was also ordered to pay $210,000 in restitution to a group of real estate investors whom she never paid after selling a piece of property in Spicewood, Texas, court records from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas show. She will be subject to two years of supervised release immediately after her prison sentence is complete, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas.
Worden pleaded guilty in November to making false, fictitious and fraudulent statements and representations to law enforcement related to the accusations against her wife, the news release says. The charges related to the real estate scheme were dismissed in exchange for her plea, court records show.
Worden accused her astronaut wife of logging into her bank account without permission from the International Space Station while they were going through a divorce. She continued to lie about it even after an internal investigation exonerated her wife, including talking to news outlets and hiring a media consultant “to amplify the claim,” according to the news release.
She also released to the public personal information about her estranged wife, the release says.
Worden claimed in 2019 that her wife logged into the account without her permission after guessing her password. But an investigation showed that Worden had given her wife access to her bank records, including the login credentials, as early as 2015 — and that both women accessed the bank account until Worden changed the account credentials in January 2019.
According to her plea agreement, Worden lied to special agents of the NASA Office of the Inspector General in Houston about the date she opened a new USAA Federal Savings Bank checking account, about the date she changed her online banking profile credentials and that her wife didn’t have permission to access it.
Worden was living in Travis County, Texas, at the time. She moved to Kansas, in the Wichita area, around June 2019, her plea agreement says, and currently has an address north of Valley Center and Park City.
“Worden was permitted to remain on bond and voluntarily surrender to a Federal Bureau of Prisons facility to be determined in the near future,” the news release says.
