A former local government and parliamentary candidate has been warned she could end up in prison if she does not stop harassing her neighbours.

Mary Jelena O’Neill, 62, was sentenced in the Napier District Court on Thursday for a single charge of intentional damage.

The offending happened in Napier, but O’Neill appeared via an audio-visual link from Dunedin, where she now lives.

The charge, which was proven against her at a judge-alone trial this year, was laid after O’Neill hired a contractor to cut back trees on the property of her neighbours on Napier’s Bluff Hill.

However, Judge Russell Collins said the heart of the matter was not the physical damage caused but a “cynical act of harassment” towards the neighbours.

O’Neill has a previous history of harassing the same neighbours – including four breaches of a protection order in 2021 – and other people, dating back to a charge of threatening behaviour in 2015.

Court documents from 2021 say she made “false and damaging” accusations of sexual misconduct about one of her neighbours, to the authorities and on social media.

She also once threw a rock at an AA serviceman who had been called out to fix a neighbour’s car, then drove towards him, stopping about 60cm away.

Judge Collins stopped short of imposing a custodial sentence on O’Neill, saying she had “complex needs” and her claims about the neighbouring family were “delusional”.

Instead, he imposed a maximum term of two years of intensive supervision by a probation officer.

The supervision includes conditions that O’Neill lives at the Dunedin address and does not go near her former house or neighbour’s house on Napier Hill.

She will also need to do any counselling thought necessary.

She is not allowed to contact her victims or post anything about them on social media.

O’Neill was ordered to pay $500 in reparation to her victims.

Judge Collins warned O’Neill that if she breached her intensive supervision, or reoffended, “I doubt that you would avoid a term of imprisonment”, or at least an electronically monitored sentence such as home detention.

O’Neill stood unsuccessfully as a candidate in the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council elections in 2019 under the name Jelena Jordan.

She was previously an Alliance Party candidate for Parliament in 2011 and 2014.