First she was Aroldis Chapman’s, uh, hotel guest during a Cincinnati Reds road trip to Pittsburgh on May 29. Then she was the weaver of a fictitious police report of an attempted robbery involving a plumber impersonator and a Louis Vuitton bag with $200,000 worth of Chapman’s jewelry. Now, to bring this bewildering comedy to an end, Claudia Manrique goes down as a convicted practitioner of disorderly conduct.
Manrique, a 27-year-old adult club dancer from Silver Spring, Md., pleaded guilty to the crime Wednesday in Allegheny County District Court, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. Originally, she was charged with making a false report to police. Chapman was with the team when guests of the William Penn Hotel found Manrique tied up with cloth napkins and crying in his room. She told police she’d been held up by a man impersonating a hotel maintenance worker there to fix a running toilet. That story didn’t hold up under lengthy interrogation, though. So she shifted to Story B, that a male stranger who had stolen her wallet outside a nearby CVS store forced her to let him in the hotel room — lest he hurt her girlfriend back in Maryland — and ransacked it. She failed a lie detector test. Chapman didn’t believe her either. He told police he thought she was in on the crime.
Because of the plea, the public will never know what really happened. Manrique was ordered to pay a $164 fine and was released. The case paperwork doesn’t say if the jewelry was actually stolen. Nor does it explain what Chapman was doing with $200,000 worth of jewelry on a road trip to Pittsburgh in the first place.
