The twisted temptress at the center of a kidnapping scheme that left a man burned, gagged and on the brink of death was sentenced to eight years in prison Thursday — as a Manhattan judge ripped her for the “heinous” crime.
Valerie Rosario, 23, pleaded guilty to attempted assault and kidnapping in June for luring a stranger she met on Instagram to the Bronx, where he was held captive and tortured for 24 hours by a group of sadists demanding a $100,000 ransom in February 2022.
“I have to say I have not seen a set of facts as heinous as these in a very long time,” Judge Felicia Mennin told Rosario before handing down the sentence, agreed upon as part of a sweetheart deal with prosecutors.
“What you did to the victim in this case is absolutely reprehensible and people who live in civilized society should not do that to each other,” she seethed.
Rosario, who appeared cuffed with long braided hair, earlier Thursday had stunned the courtroom when it was announced that she had fired her lawyer and wanted to walk back her plea, before she changed her mind a few hours later.
Had she decided to take a U-turn on the deal, Rosario could have faced 25 years in prison on kidnapping and assault charges at trial.
The Post exclusively reported in March 2022 that Rosario had been arrested for tricking a 24-year-old man into going to the Marble Hill Avenue apartment where he was kidnapped.
When he arrived, three men barged in and pistol-whipped him before Rosario and the accomplices allegedly stripped him naked and “poured flammable substances on him,” then burned him with a flame inside a bathtub, court documents said.
The victim’s night or horrors didn’t end there. The sadist bunch also stabbed him several times with a knife to the legs, back and body — and continued the cruelty when they moved him to Queens in a van, according to the filings.
The victim’s brother received a FaceTime call where one of the masked sickos slashed the captive man with a knife and demanded $100,000 ransom while threatening to kill him, the criminal complaint alleged.
The victim was found “barely breathing” lying in the back of the van, “unconscious, wrapped in a blanket with tape covering his mouth,” according to prosecutors.
“That’s not the way human beings should treat each other,” the judge said in Manhattan Supreme Court Thursday after reading facts from the case.
Rosario, who copped to the plea deal June 5, was finally sentenced after she initially notified the court that she’d canned defense attorney George Vomvolakis on the grounds of “ineffective assistance of counsel” — even after he negotiated the cushy agreement.
The last-minute announcement left courtroom onlookers shocked, and the judge told the attorneys to return in the afternoon with a decision about whether Rosario would really be going to trial.
For a few hours, Rosarion seemed to be willing to take her chances with a jury — despite one of her alleged co-conspirators, Michael Candelario, being convicted on kidnapping, robbery and other charges June 25.
But after an apparent pep talk with her new attorney Michael Mullen, the parties reconvened, with Rosario ready to face her fate.
Another one of her co-defendants, Javier Vargas, who was arrested in the van where the victim was found, was sentenced to 10 years in jail after taking a plea deal in May.
Rosario pleaded guilty to kidnapping in the second degree and attempted assault in the first degree.
She will also have five years of post-release supervision as part of her plea deal.
Her attorney declined to comment at the end of the hearing.
