LAS VEGAS (Court TV) — A woman who falsely claimed she was a nurse while running a clinic for children with diabetes continued to refer to herself as a nurse at her sentencing.
Crystal Scott appears at her sentencing on Aug. 12, 2026. (Zoom)
“I became a nurse and diabetes educator and I spent much of my life caring for people during the most vulnerable moments in their lives,” Crystal Scott said at her sentencing on Wednesday. Scott was never licensed as a nurse in Nevada or any other state and never passed any licensing exams to become one, her attorney confirmed when the judge asked.
Scott pleaded guilty to felony charges of nursing without a license and forgery. The charges, filed in 2025, stemmed from a nurse in the Clark County School District who noticed discrepancies in medical orders for some children with diabetes.
“This was not a one-time incident,” prosecutor Dena Rinetti said Wednesday. “This was an ongoing fraud that endangered the lives of many, many children. She held herself out as a nurse and practiced without a license and took in our most vulnerable children.”
Scott’s attorney, Jack Buchanan, said the crime began when the defendant left the doctor’s office where she had been working. “When she left the office, she lost her way,” he said. Scott contacted children she had counseled for diabetes at the doctor’s office, telling them she was starting her own clinic and inviting them to transfer care to her new office.
“What we thought was finally finding a medical professional who cared was actually finding a woman who was exploiting our desperate need to keep our chronically ill child alive,” Tia Stanfield, a parent of one of the victims, said in court on Wednesday. “This plea feels like a miscarriage of justice. This case is not about fraud. It is about the calculated exploitation of chronically ill children and terrified parents. It’s about violating the sacred trust families place in medical providers. It is about risking children’s lives for personal gain.”
Investigators said there were 12 children, ages 5 to 14, identified as victims in the case. “The level of fraud in this case is outstanding,” Rinetti said, explaining that Scott assumed the identity of a real nurse with the same name in Las Vegas.
“I want to begin by saying that I’m deeply sorry to be standing before the court today. I understand the seriousness of the charges before me and I understand that my actions and decisions have consequences,” Scott said in a statement to the court. “I have thought about this every minute of every single day since this happened.”
But prosecutors said that wasn’t true — noting that days after her arraignment, Scott flew to Albania with her family and posted photos on social media using hashtags “#movingabroad” and “#expatlife.”
“I had people through the State Department ready to snatch her up if she failed to appear for her next court date,” Rinetti said.
Buchanan urged Judge Danielle Pieper to sentence Scott to probation, noting there “was no evidence that a child was misdiagnosed, that a child was misprescribed, that the child was overdosed on insulin.”
“It’s not only she didn’t hurt people, but it sounds like what she was doing was potentially helping these children, helping them go to school,” Buchanan added.
That rationale didn’t sit well with Allison Anderson, the mother of a victim. “She could have killed children. To say that no kids were harmed in this is vastly untrue. As somebody very knowledgeable in Type 1 [diabetes], if you have sustained blood sugars, it eats your body, and these kids are likely to have trouble having babies, strokes, amputations. To say that these kids aren’t harmed — we will find out later in their lives what harm has been done.”
Pieper sided with prosecutors and sentenced Scott to serve concurrent sentences of 19 to 48 months.
“Put your hands behind your back, you’re going to prison,” Pieper said before adjourning the hearing.
