In what has become an international spectacle, Wyoming’s portion of the program is now officially closed. It was on Thursday of last week in Sublette County court that the 26-year-old influencer who set off a firestorm in the land down under after she snatched a baby wombat, pleaded no contest to a single hunting charge.
Appearing via video from Montana, Samantha Strable entered her plea to a charge of going into a designated wilderness area as a nonresident without a required guide. As a result, the court handed her one year of probation, a 180-day jail sentence (suspended) and a $575.40 fine. For her cooperation, prosecutors dropped the other seven misdemeanor charges she had been saddled with since November of last year.
Her attorney, Nate Jeppsen, told the court she was not “intentionally trying to violate Wyoming game laws,” but that she “should have been aware” of her duty to comply. The no-contest in this case is not an admission of guilt, it is an agreement that the state can treat the charge as proven and move on.
This investigation, which had nothing really to do with the wombat controversy in Australia, was kicked off after a Stop Poaching tip surfaced last summer. According to reports, at the time, Game and Fish was told that Strable had “continued to buy resident tags even though she hasn’t resided in Wyoming for over two years — and bragged about it on social media to over 90,000 followers.”
Investigating warden Jacob Miller was soon able to put numbers to that claim. In the Cowboy State, you need a full calendar year in-state before you can apply as a resident and if you are not present for more than 180 days in a year, that status dies. According to Miller’s affidavit, Strable had spent about a week in Wyoming in 2024 and about a month’s worth of time in 2025, all while holding an Alaska license and living in multiple locales including Australia, Alaska, Montana and North Dakota.
It was in October of last year that warden Miller was lucky enough to make contact with her at a trailhead as she was heading out on an elk hunt near Rainbow Lake. That point of contact, in addition to the tags she had drawn as a purported resident (which included elk, black bear, mountain lion and antelope), quickly became the basis for the November charges.
Now nearly ten months later, our wombat-wrestling influencer is free to go and will not spend any time in a cell unless she breaks probation. Last week’s media coverage in Sydney and Melbourne were still using the wombat as the hook, reiterating that outside of the Prime Minister's scolding, she’s got no charges or cases coming her way stemming from her antics in the outback.
In the end, she walked away from her international scandal and her attempt to game the Wyoming Fish and Game Department with a fine that cost her less than a non-resident elk tag.
