A love-struck suspected Moscow mole from Brooklyn who tried to infiltrate US political and media circles has pleaded guilty to lying to the feds — after drunkenly texting an FBI agent, “Catch me, baby.”
Bleached-blonde 35-year-old Nomma Zarubina was originally busted in November 2024 on charges she fibbed about her dealings with Kremlin spies and freed on bail — till her flirty late-night messages to the G-man surfaced, and she landed behind bars in December.
“Catch me baby,” Zarubina texted the federal agent — an apparent unrequited love interest — one day at 4:17 a.m. last September in a bizarre string of missives nearly a year after her arrest.
“I am sooooo bad,” she wrote the same night — in a thread she confessed she sent while drinking heavily.
A judge repeatedly warned her to stop texting the agent, but Zarubina continued to message him — including 65 more times during a single night in November 2025, telling him “I love you” and then, after not receiving a reply, calling him a “b—h.”‘
In the texting, the Russian native also name-dropped Maria Butina, an admitted Russian agent who served 15 months in prison for infiltrating conservative networks to influence US Republican politics.
“I guess Butina got more attention,” she huffed to the agent.
Zarubina, who had been living in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, before being sent to jail, also texted the FBI agent “mmmmm” alongside a photo of herself guzzling a glass of red wine while wearing a cowboy hat, court records show.
The alleged Moscow mole confessed during summer 2024 meetings with the FBI that she’d been working for the Kremlin since December 2020 under the code name “Alyssa,” according to a federal complaint unsealed in Manhattan federal court.
Russian agents had asked her to network at Washington, DC, think-tanks, with the US military community and journalists, court papers said.
Her handlers allegedly asked her how to contact some of her connections — who they planned to invite to Russia to “convert” to the “Russian way of thinking.”
She ended up convincing several Capitol Hill power brokers to pose with her for photos, said to the head of a DC-based nonprofit advocating for a free and democratic Russia to The Post.
Dmitry Valuev, president of Russian America for Democracy in Russia, said his organization had flagged Zarubina as suspicious for years before her arrest and tracked her work for a “shady Russian nonprofit” as their representative to the UN.
The FBI first met with Zarubina in October 2020 regarding a probe into her close friend Elena Branson, who was indicted in 2022 for allegedly spreading Russian foreign influence through an organization called the Russian Center New York. Branson fled to Moscow during the probe and is still at large.
Zarubina told the feds that she worked for Branson but denied having any contact with Russian spy agents during interviews in 2021, 2022, and 2023, court papers said.
But the reputed Russian snoop finally came clean during meetings in June and July 2024 — which she now says she only sat for because she’d caught “feelings” for the FBI agent.
“He influenced me. I don’t know how — how to explain that. But my life became so different after I met him,” she told a judge at one point. “And it’s not something bad, it’s not something negative, but it’s obviously that he just, like, controlled me emotionally.”
But Zarubina told the court that she “understood communicating with the FBI” because “they actually work the same as Russians work.
“They frame people, they build cases, you know,” she said.
She insisted that she was not a “spy,” despite her admitted contact with Russian espionage agents.
“My life now seems like a tragedy because I get almost every day threats from many people from many countries who think that I was a spy but they don’t know the whole story,” she told the court.
After hearing Zarubina out, Judge Laura Swain ruled that she’d breached the conditions of her release on $20,000 bond by continuing to drink booze and “harassing” the agent despite repeated warnings to stop.
“I hear the pain that you’re in, and I hear the trouble and the conflict that’s led us here
today, but you’re not helping yourself. You’re not stopping this conduct,” the judge said.
Federal prosecutors separately accused Zarubina in April 2025 of participating in a scheme to transport women to engage in prostitution at an unidentified massage parlor in East Brunswick, NJ — charges that she also mentioned during one of her drunk tirades to the FBI agent.
Zarubina pleaded guilty on Thursday to two counts of making false statements, both to the FBI about the Russian spy contacts and to immigration officials by falsely stating on a naturalization application that she’d not been involved in prostitution. She faces up to 10 years in prison at her sentencing June 11.
Her public defender lawyers, who did not return a request to comment, told the court that she’d been living in Brooklyn while the case was pending and had been the primary caretaker of her young daughter.
She’s expected to be deported as a result of the felony conviction.