Disgraced New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez’s wife Nadine threw him under the bus as she was sentenced to prison Thursday for her role in the couple’s cartoonishly corrupt scheme — painting herself as a victim of his cunning manipulations.

“I put my life in his hands and he strung me like a puppet,” Nadine Menendez, 58, said through tears as she pleaded for leniency from Manhattan federal Judge Sidney Stein.

“I was wrong about my husband,” she said. “The blindfold is off. I now know he is not my savior. He is not the man I thought he was.”

Nadine’s weepy speech came after her former Senate bigwig husband  — now serving an 11-year prison sentence for helping mastermind the bribery plot — blamed her for his brazen corruption at his own trial last year.

Nadine, whom the feds described as the “second-most culpable” member of the bribery scheme, claimed to the judge that she’d been betrayed by her once-powerful husband.

“He was my God,” she said, standing at the defense table in a dark blue suit. “I felt safe following him through life. He was one of the most powerful men in the most powerful country on Earth,  and there was no way he would lead me astray or ask me to do something illegal. Or so I thought.”

But Stein said he didn’t believe the sobbing Nadine’s claims that she was an “innocent observer” — sentencing her to four and a half years in prison.

“You knew what you were doing. You were always purposeful,” he told her.

Prosecutors had asked for a term of seven years, but the judge said he gave Nadine the lighter sentence because of her battle with breast cancer and other mitigating factors.

Despite the blistering attack on her husband of five years, Nadine insisted after the hearing that she would stick by him.

“I do not plan on divorcing him,” she told reporters outside the courthouse.

She also asked for permission to visit her jailed hubby at Pennsylvania’s Allen Federal Correctional Institution before she’s due to report to prison herself on July 10, 2026.

Jurors convicted Nadine on April 15 of separate corruption charges for serving as what the feds called the “linchpin” of a brazen plot to leverage the three-term Democratic senator’s powerful post in return for gold bars, a luxury convertible and other bribes.

Nadine acted as the “go-between,” connecting her husband with businessmen who funneled bribes to them from the Egyptian and Qatari governments, the feds charged.

In exchange, the pilloried ex-pol used his authority to do favors for the businessmen.

As head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for instance, he lobbied colleagues to unfreeze $300 million in Egyptian military aid that had been held up due to human rights concerns, jurors heard.

He also passed along, through Nadine, secret information about employees at the US Embassy that could have put them at risk, prosecutors said.

“What else can the love of my life do for you?” Nadine told one Egyptian official while sitting alongside her cigar-puffing husband at a May 2019 dinner at Morton’s Steakhouse, evidence revealed.

Former Garden State insurance broker Jose Uribe testified that he bribed Nadine with a new Mercedes-Benz C-300 in exchange for her husband’s help shutting down a criminal probe.

Nadine met Uribe in the parking lot of a Jersey shopping mall where she collected $15,000 in cash, Uribe testified. Nadine then used the cash to make a down payment on the luxury car.

“Congratulations mon amour de la vie, we are the proud owners of a 2019 Mercedes,” Nadine then texted her husband — using the French term for “love of my life” — alongside a picture of the new ride and a heart emoji.

Nadine’s lawyers had asked Stein to give her a light sentence of just one year and a day behind bars, citing her “lifetime of trauma,” including what they called horrific long-term abuse from men in her life before she married Bob in 2020.

“Nadine was objectified since she was a teenager, and, before her marriage to Senator Menendez, was involved in a series of romantic relationships since a young age where she was emotionally and, tragically, physically abused,” her attorneys said in a letter to the court.

The convicted bribe-taker, who is currently recovering from breast cancer surgery, fled her home country of Lebanon during a civil war in the 1970s, the attorneys added.

Among the attendees of Thursday’s sentencing was Steve Rogovic, who described himself as one of Nadine’s ex-boyfriends. Sitting in the courtroom gallery, Rogovic wore a suit jacket over a T-shirt bearing the word “Karma” on it.

“Karma found her,” Rogovic told The Post after the hearing. “Nadine thought her actions would be forgotten, that consequences were for others … In the end, what goes around, truly does come around.”

— Additional reporting by Isabel Vincent