A workplace rivalry took a sinister turn when a woman decided to sabotage her colleague by spiking her coffee with drugs in an attempt to get her fired.

An Italian woman was recently sentenced to four years in jail after she admitted to spiking a work colleague’s drink with sedatives, so she would underperform.

According to Oddity Central, this disturbing story of work rivalry taken to the extreme dates back to October 6th of 2017, when Mariangela Cerrato brought a round of coffees for her colleagues at an office in Bra, a town in Italy’s Piedmont region. She brought the coffees and cappuccinos from a nearby bar, as she usually did, so no one suspected anything shady.

However, after downing her cappuccino in one gulp, one of Cerrato’s colleagues, Alice Bordon, started feeling dizzy and lost her balance walking to her desk. She was taken to the hospital where doctors checked for a potential stroke, not knowing that something more insidious was at play…

“Usually I would just sip it, but on that day I drank it all in one gulp,” Alice Bordon recalled about her first time experiencing the debilitating symptoms. “Everything was black, I felt like I was floating.”

Things got even worse after that, though. She kept experiencing this unusual dizziness and at one point even crashed her car into a wall. But it wasn’t until Christmas of 2017 that she became suspicious of her colleague and the drinks she brought in every morning.

“She had taken a few days off and during that time I was fine,” Alice told Italian newspaper La Stampa. “I thought there might be a link between the coffee and the crises. A neurologist advised me not to drink it for a month, and that’s what I did.”

Months went by and Alice Bordon never once experienced those mysterious, debilitating symptoms, but what she did experience was the wrath of her colleague who began to spite her for not drinking the coffee she brought for everyone else. Alice didn’t say anything, but she was now convinced that Mariangela was somehow responsible for the health issues she had experienced.

After a while, Alice asked her colleague to brink her a cappuccino, only instead of drinking all of it, she only drank half and saved the rest for lab tests, which ended up confirming her suspicion.

“I put the other half in a test tube and tests revealed that it contained 10 times the amount of tranquillizer that is usually advised,” Bordon said. “With the police involved, we managed to stop her as she was putting the medicine into my cup.”

Caught red-handed Mariangela Cerrato later confessed that she spiked her colleague’s coffee with tranquillizer because she wanted to get her fired. She anticipated job cuts at the company they were working for, and this was her way of making sure that someone else got the boot, not her.

Mariangela Cerrato was sued and, after a long trial, she was sentenced to four years in prison last week.