Christianne Meneses Jacobs was born in Managua, Nicaragua. Meneses' family included her brother Enrique, mother Thelma, who was a legal secretary, and father, Enrique Meneses, who was a lawyer and vice president of the National Liberal Party, who had been jailed more than once in Nicaragua for political reasons. Her grandfather was Dr. Ildefonso Palma Martinez, who was a lawyer, law professor, and a justice of the Nicaraguan Supreme Court. Due to the Sandinista National Liberation Front and their coup d'état, the main opposition was the Contras. The hectic situation tied a lot of foreign countries into the mix to choose sides, including the United States among many others. The fighting and the food shortages were massive problems at this time. She recalled that "The Sandinista revolution occurred when I was eight years old. I remember the civil war and the attacks on small towns." The Meneses family fled Nicaragua via Los Angeles in 1988 when Meneses was only 17. The reason they had to flee was because her father was an attorney. She said "My Father was on the defense team for an American pilot whose plane was shot down by the Sandinista artillery at the border of Nicaragua and Costa Rica in December of 1987. The American pilot was accused of being a CIA agent." Three months later, she would leave the country on March 19, 1988. Her parents and brother would arrive a week later.