A gentle rain was falling outside the house where Sherri Papini has been living in the days since her release from federal prison in 2023. Inside the home on the outskirts of Redding, Calif., the 42-year-old convicted felon stepped across the hardwood floors in black socks and tight jeans before plopping down in an overstuffed chair. For a woman who has faced years of public condemnation and ridicule, Papini cut a whimsical figure as she waved an imaginary magic wand in the air and made silly faces for a camera crew filming her for a new documentary series.
“The story that the world thinks they know is that I am a master manipulator who has fooled everyone,” she said to the camera, her expression now serious. “The Sherri Papini that’s out there, it’s not me. She’s not real. I’ve gone from teenage sex worker to criminal mastermind to master manipulator. I poisoned my children. [I’m a] liar, cheater, whore. . . . I’m so f---ing tired of keeping the secret and living the lie. Now I get to tell the truth.”
In the explosive new four-part docuseries Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie—premiering on Investigation Discovery on May 26 and streaming on Max— the divorced mother of two speaks publicly for the first time to tell what she now says is the real story behind the 2016 scandal surrounding her mysterious 22-day disappearance and abduction hoax. Back then Sherri made nonstop headlines after her then husband—Keith Papini, 41—reported her missing after she failed to return home from an afternoon jog near their home in Redding.
Twenty-two days later, a bruised, emaciated Sherri was spotted by a motorist near a highway on-ramp 150 miles from her hometown. Her ankles and wrists were bound with a zip tie and hose clamps. The flesh on her back was blistered from her abductors branding her, she claimed (see timeline). After telling investigators that two masked Hispanic women had abducted and tortured her—setting off a nationwide search for the kidnappers—Sherri eventually confessed that it had all been a hoax and she’d been staying at the apartment of her former boyfriend James Reyes in Costa Mesa, Calif., the entire time she was missing. In 2022 she pleaded guilty in federal court to making false statements and was sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to pay $310,000 in restitution that included the cost of the multistate police investigation.
Now, a year and a half after her early release from prison after serving 10 months, Sherri is presenting a new version of what she says is the truth. Along with commentary from the lead FBI agent on her case, polygraph experts, her parents, her former sister-in-law, her lawyers and her psychologist, the docuseries features Sherri at its center, attempting to explain why she lied and what, she insists, really happened. “Let’s face it, she’s an unreliable narrator,” says the docuseries’ director Nicole Rittenmeyer, who initially believed she would easily be able to catch Sherri telling multiple falsehoods. Instead, she came away from the project convinced that a “huge chunk” of the former convict’s story had never been told. And after spending months with Sherri— who agreed to undergo an on-camera lie detector test and to reenact her disappearance in the docuseries—Rittenmeyer is convinced that she’s both a victim and a manipulator. “Many things can be true at once,” she says. “That’s the big takeaway from the show.”
ABOVE: ABC NEWS
(REYES) ANDY JOHNSTONE; (BRANDING, INTERROGATION) SHASTA COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE(2); (SKETCHES) FBI/AP(2); (OUTSIDE COURT) PAUL KITAGAKI JR/ZUMA/SHUTTERSTOCK
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To the outside world, Sherri and Keith Papini, who first kissed in junior high and were married in 2009, appeared to have it all—an idyllic marriage and two beautiful kids. But by the afternoon in November 2016 when she disappeared, Sherri, she now says, was “dying inside” and felt trapped in an unhappy marriage to her increasingly controlling husband. For much of the previous year she had been communicating with Reyes, her former boyfriend. They used burner phones, she says, after Keith—who had previously caught her texting with another man— asked her to sign a postnuptial agreement that would leave her with “nothing” if she was unfaithful. “It wasn’t sexual,” Sherri says in the docuseries. “James was someone that was actually listening to me and hearing me, and that’s what I needed.”
Shortly after Keith’s frantic 911 call to report his wife’s disappearance, local police, along with family members and hundreds of concerned Redding residents, launched a massive search for the young mother. Police detectives and the FBI quickly learned that Sherri—who claims she endured sexual abuse during her childhood—had a habit of lying and running away when life turned rough. When she suddenly showed up 22 days later, on Thanksgiving Day, it initially felt like a miracle.
INVESTIGATION DISCOVERY(6)
As Sherri, whose hair had been chopped off, recovered from her physical wounds, she began giving detectives details from her hospital bed of her supposed abduction. Investigators were immediately suspicious. Sherri told police that, after she was seized while jogging, her female captors covered her face, chained her to a rod in a closet and nearly starved her while savagely torturing her. “It made absolutely no sense as an investigator,” says retired FBI special agent Denise Farmer, who worked on the case and could never determine a motive for an abduction. “My gut was telling me it was a hoax.”
For four years Sherri maintained that she was a victim of a violent kidnapping. But by August 2020, DNA found on the clothes she was wearing when she was recovered was traced to Reyes, who told FBI agents—and later passed a polygraph test—that Sherri had planned “everything.” Even the decision to use a wood-burning tool to brand her shoulder was Sherri’s idea, Reyes insisted, adding: “I didn’t kidnap her. She was just a friend in need asking for help. She was trying to get away from her husband.”
In Caught in the Lie, Sherri says she concocted her story about the two masked women because she feared what Keith would do if he found out about her relationship with Reyes. “The truth is,” she says, “I was concealing an affair from my husband, who [was] threatening to take everything from me if he found out that I was having any involvement [with another man].”
Sherri now alleges that her former boyfriend snatched her after she had urged him to come to Redding because—unbeknownst to Reyes—she intended to end their long-distance romance. “I was abducted,” she says. “I remember waking up briefly in the back of the vehicle and not being able to even keep my eyes open. And then the next time I woke up was when he was getting me out of the vehicle to go inside, and it was dark. He had one hand underneath my arm trying to help me walk. And I just remember thinking, ‘This is not where I’m supposed to be. I’m supposed to be picking my kids up from day care. I am not supposed to be here.’ The injuries that occurred . . . the bites on my thigh, the footprint on my back, the brand, the melting of my skin—I am telling you there was no consent.” (Reyes declined to comment about Sherri’s allegations.)
In March 2022 Sherri was arrested and was charged with mail fraud and making false statements to federal officials about her abduction. Facing decades in prison if convicted, she signed a plea deal admitting she had orchestrated the hoax and was given an 18-month sentence. In a statement released by her lawyer, Sherri said she was “deeply ashamed” by what she had done and would “work the rest of her life to make amends” for her actions.
Three years later Sherri says the fallout from her admission of guilt has brought her nothing but heartache. Months before her release from a federal facility in Victorville, Calif., her divorce was finalized, and Keith was awarded custody of their two children, Tyler, 12, and Violet, 10. After spending time in a halfway house and staying with her parents, she now lives alone in a friend’s house near Redding. Once described by Keith as a “supermom” who lived for her kids, Sherri rarely gets to see or even speak with her children, and she’s locked in a bitter custody battle with her ex-husband. She claims she long ago hit “rock bottom” but is determined to move forward with her life—and the first step, she says, is to finally explain what really happened to her during the 22 days she went missing.
But will anybody believe her now? And what about the lies she’s already told in her ever- changing version of the truth? Sherri doesn’t seem to think her past lies should permanently damage her credibility with the public. “Well, how truthful are you?” she says to the camera in the final episode of the docuseries. “I mean, I really challenge anybody watching this film: How truthful are you?”