Is Kidnap Hoaxer Sherri Papini a Liar — or a Victim? Director of Explosive New Doc Says Both

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. 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 multi-state 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.

She still maintains that she was the victim of a violent kidnapping. Only now Sherri claims it was at the hands of Reyes, whose DNA — found on the clothes she was wearing when she was recovered — was traced to him in August 2020. When questioned by FBI agents, he confessed that Sherri had planned “everything.” Even the decision to use a woodburning tool to brand her shoulder was her idea, Reyes — who later passed a polygraph test — 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 hid Reyes’ identity from investigators and concocted her story about the two masked women because she feared what Keith would do if he found out about her relationship with him. “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].”

Whether anybody will believe Sherri’s new version of what she claims happened in 2016 remains to be seen. “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.”

Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie will premiere across two nights on Monday, May 26, and Tuesday, May 27, from 9 to 11 p.m. ET/PT on ID. Episodes will be available to stream on Max.