CONCORD — A federal judge sentenced a former office manager of The Dartmouth student newspaper to the maximum possible sentence of 15 months in prison and three years of supervised release on Monday after the woman pleaded guilty to embezzling over $223,000 from the paper.

Nicole Chambers, 41, formerly of Springfield, Vt., worked at The Dartmouth, also known as The D, from 2012 until the end of September 2021, and stole money from the paper between at least April 2017 and September 2021, according to court documents. U.S. District Court Chief Judge Landya McCafferty delivered Chambers’ sentence.

Chambers pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in late April. In her plea agreement, 15 months in prison was set as the maximum possible sentence.

Chambers also is required to pay the total amount embezzled back to The Dartmouth.

Sentencing documents submitted by Jane Young, U.S. Attorney for the District of New Hampshire, state that while stealing as much money as Chambers did is a “serious crime,” “that wrongfulness is compounded by the fact that the defendant stole from a nonprofit student newspaper.”

The D is published by The Dartmouth inc., a nonprofit whose funding comes from advertising sales, investment income and donations.

Olivia Gomez was the student publisher of The D from March 2021 through March 2022. Gomez uncovered Chambers’ theft in 2021 and gave a victim impact statement at Chambers’ sentencing Monday in Concord on behalf of The Dartmouth inc, along with former editor, Kyle Khan-Mullins.

“I’m very happy to see that three years after I discovered Nicole’s theft, justice has been served…” Gomez said in a Tuesday phone interview. “We are especially grateful that the sentencing includes restitution for the money she embezzled.”

Chambers had access to the paper’s PayPal and Venmo accounts and a debit card, all of which she used to transfer money to herself and to make purchases. She used the funds for personal purchases such as plane tickets and hotels across the United States and the Caribbean, luxury items and to pay her husband’s legal fees.

In her victim impact statement, Gomez emphasized the power Chambers held in her position.

“In an environment where student leadership changed annually, Nicole was the constant,” Gomez said. “She held a critical position of huge trust, teaching incoming publishers all they needed to know about the paper’s finances and how things were done.”

Gomez said she and the other student publishers came in wanting to run it well.

“Nicole took advantage of our inexperience,” Gomez said. “She used her position of trust to manipulate and deceive students, allowing her to st eal with abandon.”

Chambers was one of only two paid employees at the paper, with the rest being student volunteers, and in addition to having access to the paper’s financial resources, she handled the paper’s accounting and had “minimal supervision.”

Gomez argued that Chambers made understanding the paper’s finances “very, very difficult,” including by intentionally isolating publishers from their predecessors and using her position of power as an older long-term employee of the paper to make herself indispensable to them.

“Nicole was smart in the way she hid her crimes; her actions were premeditated and deliberate,” Gomez said.

Khan-Mullins, who traveled from Seattle for the sentencing hearing, emphasized the wide-reaching impact of The D in the Dartmouth community.

“The D is utterly essential to campus life, to informing the Dartmouth and Hanover communities and to holding one of the wealthiest and most powerful institutions in the state, Dartmouth College, to account,” he said. “Nicole’s fraud, which weakened The Dartmouth, thus made victims of the community the newspaper serves.”

Khan-Mullins noted that volunteers run the paper and the Dartmouth’s operating budget comes from selling ads and subscriptions and from donations.

With this funding, Khan-Mullins said The D has operated at a deficit for many years, covering the loss with endowment funds.

“The sheer amount of money Nicole stole could have covered that gap for over a decade,” Khan-Mullins said. “Put another way, Nicole shortened the potential life of The Dartmouth by over a decade.”

Several friends and family member’s of Chambers’ wrote letters on her behalf to speak to her character and request a reduced sentence. Many of these letters cite Chambers’ untreated bipolar disorder and/or history of mental illness as the cause of her actions.

Her husband, Brian Chambers made this argument, writing, “I’ve known Nicole for 25 years and can tell you that she is a different, better person after receiving treatment for her disorder,” and added that the “manic episodes that have led her to strange, irrational behavior in the past,” have stopped.

Young argued that Chambers deserved an increased sentence because she had not repaid any of the money stolen between her resignation in 2021 and her sentencing three years later, that she did not deserve a lower sentence for a first offense, and that she could not blame her crimes on her mental health.

“The vast majority of people who suffer mental health problems do not commit large-scale embezzlement,” Young wrote, adding that Chambers was on medication for her mental health when she was embezzling from the college, contrary to what character witnesses suggested.

Finally, Young noted that manic episodes are short periods and cannot account for the amount of time Chambers was stealing from The D and the steps she took to hide her actions.

The defense also attempted to compare Chambers’ crimes to a similar case, U.S. vs. Renee Crawford, in which the defendant received two years probation.

However, the prosecution argued that these cases were not comparable because Crawford stole just $60,000 from Saint Anselm College in Manchester, and Chambers stole nearly four times this amount.

Young described Chambers’ crime as “motivated by the defendant’s greed, plain and simple.”

Chambers’ sentencing was originally scheduled for Aug. 12, but the hearing was postponed due to scheduling conflicts for her attorney, Jaye Rancourt, with the New Hampshire District of the Federal Public Defenders Office in Concord, and Chambers’ need to care for her grandmother at that time.

Messages left for Rancourt and Chambers on Tuesday were not returned by deadline.

Clare Shanahan can be reached at cshanahan@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.