Judge orders Nadine Menendez to report to prison Friday, denies bid for delay

Nadine Menendez, the wife of former U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, must begin serving her 54-month federal prison sentence by 2:00 PM Friday after a federal judge rejected her last-minute bid to delay her surrender for additional cancer treatment.

Following a teleconference on Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Sidney H. Stein denied Menendez’s request to postpone her July 10 surrender date until at least October 30, ordering her to report to the Bureau of Prisons as originally scheduled.

The ruling came a day after federal prosecutors urged Stein to deny the request, arguing that the Bureau of Prisons could adequately treat Menendez’s medical conditions and that she had not met the standard the court established at sentencing.

In September, Stein sentenced Menendez to 54 months in prison but gave her nearly ten months before reporting so she could complete medical treatment.  At the time, he warned that the surrender date “will be extended only if the Bureau of Prisons states it is unable to render the necessary care,” prosecutors reminded the court.

In their filing, prosecutors said consultations with Bureau of Prisons officials showed that the threshold had not been met.

“The Government understands that the BOP is able to render any necessary care to the defendant,” the Justice Department wrote in a letter to Stein.

They said a Bureau of Prisons regional medical director determined the agency could provide appropriate treatment and believed Menendez’s planned reconstructive surgery would “likely classify the defendant’s currently scheduled surgery as elective/cosmetic” unless it later became clinically necessary.  If it did, prosecutors said, prison officials could send her to an outside specialist.

The government also criticized the timing of Menendez’s request, noting that until little more than a week before she was scheduled to report to prison, she had repeatedly represented to both Stein and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that she would surrender on July 10 while seeking bail pending appeal. Just days earlier, she had successfully asked the court to ease release conditions so she could spend more time with family before entering prison.

Prosecutors further argued that Menendez’s filing omitted key information. They said an email from a Bureau of Prisons employee stating the agency did “not oppose the requested delay” had been based on “materially incorrect” information provided by the defense indicating that Menendez had already undergone reconstructive surgery in June, when the procedure was actually scheduled for Sept. 25.

“Ultimately, in sum, the record both fails to demonstrate that the BOP cannot provide the defendant with ‘the necessary care’ and suggests the defendant failed to act ‘expeditiously’ in scheduling any medical procedures despite the Court’s explicit directive to do so at sentencing,” prosecutors wrote.

Stein ultimately agreed, leaving Menendez’s surrender date unchanged.

Her husband was sentenced to eleven years in prison.  He resigned from the U.S. Senate in July 2024 and surrendered himself in June 2025.