Sherri Papini Breaks Silence 9 Years After Kidnapping Hoax
Papini, who pleaded guilty to fabricating her abduction and served jail time, has opened up on the bizarre case in a new docuseries.
Hector Amezcua/TNS via ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
Sherri Papini, the California woman who pleaded guilty to fabricating her 2016 abduction, insists in a new docuseries that she really had been kidnapped.
In a trailer released Thursday for Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie, Papini tried to walk back her confession, while admitting she had kept “some secrets.”
“Haven’t you ever lied? And then, has the lie been blown up?” she says. “I went missing in 2016, was gone for 22 days. I was tortured. I was branded. I was chained to a wall. All that is true. I did keep some secrets from you, though.”
Papini claimed that two armed, masked Hispanic women had abducted her while she was out jogging in November 2016. They tortured and branded her, she alleged, and kept her chained in a bedroom. She was found three weeks later, emaciated and with a chain around her waist.
Papini’s then-husband, Keith, stood by her, as did much of her Redding, California community.
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Yet authorities would later find out that Papini had actually been hiding out with an ex-boyfriend in Southern California under the guise that Keith was “abusive,” and that her wounds were self-inflicted. The ex-boyfriend, they said, helped her create some of her injuries.
“Ex-Boyfriend said he helped her create some of the injuries, although he never laid his hands directly on her; for example, she told him, ‘bank a puck off my leg,’ so [he] shot a puck off her leg, lightly,” according to a federal complaint obtained by People.
In Sept. 2022, Papini was sentenced to 18 months in prison on felony charges of lying to federal agents and mail fraud related to her hoax. She served a lesser sentence, and was released from federal prison in August the following year.
Papini was also ordered to pay more than $300,000 in restitution to law enforcement.
The new docuseries will also detail Papini’s efforts to get custody of her two children. Keith, their father, filed for divorce in April 2022, a few days after Sherri’s guilty plea.
The four-part series will air on ID starting Monday, May 26.
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