Why Did Sherri Papini Fake Her Kidnapping: Affair and Fabrication

No single clean answer explains why Sherri Papini faked her kidnapping in November 2016. The explanations that emerged over the years — from Papini herself, from prosecutors, and from people who knew her — point in several directions at once: an affair she wanted to hide from her husband, a lifelong pattern of running away and fabricating stories, and a deliberate, sophisticated deception she sustained for years while collecting more than $150,000 in fraudulent payments. The federal judge who sentenced her suggested she would have kept the lie going indefinitely if investigators had not caught her.¹

The Affair She Wanted to Hide

The explanation Papini herself has offered centers on an affair. In the months before her disappearance, she had been in contact with several men and was engaged in what she later described as an “emotional affair.”² Phone records corroborated the contacts, and former sheriff’s officials said they were aware of “infidelity issues in her background” throughout the investigation.

In her own telling, years later, the entire hoax was an attempt to avoid the consequences of her husband Keith finding out. “I’d prefer prison over telling Keith Papini that I was having an emotional affair,” she said in a 2025 interview.³ She also stated she was in an “emotionally abusive and controlling marriage” and that “prison was far safer than the consequences that I would suffer if my ex-husband found out.”⁴ Keith has denied being abusive.⁵

A Lifelong Pattern of Running and Fabrication

People who knew Papini described a pattern that stretched back to childhood. Friends told the Shasta County Sheriff’s Department that as a child and teenager, she would run away whenever life became difficult. One friend, Asia Coleman, told investigators: “That is how she used to deal with things as a child. When things got hard, she would just run away.”² At 16, she ran away to Southern California to stay with friends.⁶

The FBI affidavit filed in her case documented behavior that went beyond fleeing. Multiple ex-boyfriends and acquaintances described her as “attention-hungry” and said she routinely fabricated stories about being abused by family members or partners. A man she dated around 2000 told investigators she invented abuse allegations after their breakup. Her first husband heard from mutual friends that she had a history of lying. The director of a youth program she attended called her the only student they feared having in the program because she was “good at creating different realities for people so that they would see what she wanted them to see, which got her really good attention.”⁶

Her therapist, psychologist Stephen Diggs, later said he believes Papini exhibits traits of Self-Defeating Personality Disorder and has a history of creating “a second secret life” when unfulfilled in relationships. Diggs said he personally believes she was abducted, a view that conflicts with the federal record.⁷

What Prosecutors Emphasized: Deliberate and Sophisticated

Federal prosecutors never offered a detailed psychological theory of motive, but they were emphatic on one point: the hoax was not impulsive. At sentencing, they called it “deliberate, well-planned and sophisticated.”⁸

Papini used a burner phone to coordinate with her ex-boyfriend James Reyes, who picked her up in Redding and hid her in his Costa Mesa apartment for the full three weeks. She had him brand her shoulder and hold a hockey stick for her to run into so the injuries would corroborate a kidnapping story.³ Reyes dropped her along Interstate 5 near Sacramento so she could stage her rescue on Thanksgiving morning.⁹

After her return, Papini collected more than $30,000 from the California Victim Compensation Board and over $127,000 in Social Security disability payments based on claims of PTSD and anxiety from the fabricated kidnapping.¹⁰ A GoFundMe campaign raised nearly $50,000 during her disappearance; federal prosecutors said more than $30,000 of it was withdrawn by a family member, $11,000 went to pay off personal credit cards, and the rest went to personal expenses.¹¹ Whether the money was a motive or a byproduct, Judge William Shubb said at sentencing that Papini likely would have continued the hoax if she had not been caught.¹

The Racial Framing of Her Story

Papini’s choice to blame two Hispanic women was not incidental to the deception. In her 55-page account to investigators, she described the alleged abductors in terms that leaned on stereotypes associated with the cholo and chola subculture: big hoop earrings, thin drawn-on eyebrows, bandanas, Spanish-language conversation, and Mariachi music. Thomas Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said Papini “fell into stereotypes about the Latino community that are far too prevalent” and was “counting on law enforcement relying upon stereotypes.”¹²

Investigators examined a 2007 blog post signed with Papini’s maiden name, “Sherri Graeff,” which described getting into fights with Latina girls and declared the author to be “drug-free, white and proud of my blood and heritage.” Papini denied writing it, calling the content “awful,” and federal investigators said they were unable to conclusively confirm authorship.¹³

Possible Borrowing From Other Cases

Keith Papini has said he later concluded his wife assembled elements of her story from real and fictional abductions she had followed: the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping, the unsolved 1998 disappearance of Redding teenager Tera Smith, and the book and film Gone Girl. The 2024 Hulu docuseries Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini explored this theory.¹⁴ This is one person’s inference rather than an established finding, but it fits the affidavit’s picture of someone practiced at building convincing false narratives.

How Investigators Established It Was a Hoax

The reason we can speak of motive at all is that the underlying facts are settled. When Papini was found in November 2016, investigators collected male DNA from her sweatpants and underwear. It did not match Keith, and it could not belong to the two fictional female abductors she described.¹⁵

In 2019, a familial DNA search identified a potential male relative of the unknown donor and led investigators to James Reyes. In June 2020, they pulled an Honest Honey Green Tea bottle from the trash outside Reyes’s Costa Mesa apartment; the DNA on the mouthpiece matched the unknown sample.¹⁵ Confronted in August 2020, Reyes admitted the whole arrangement, cooperated fully, and passed a polygraph. He was never charged.⁸

Papini was arrested on March 3, 2022, and charged in the Eastern District of California with making false statements to a federal law enforcement officer under 18 U.S.C. § 1001(a)(2) and mail fraud under 18 U.S.C. § 1341. She pleaded guilty to both counts on April 18, 2022, and was sentenced on September 19, 2022, to 18 months in federal prison, three years of supervised release, and $309,686.33 in restitution.⁶

Papini’s Current, Contradictory Explanation

The motive question is complicated by the fact that Papini has since walked back her guilty plea in the court of public opinion. In June 2025, she self-published a book titled Sherri Papini Doesn’t Exist and gave interviews claiming she had been telling the truth about being held captive all along — just not about who did it. She now accuses Reyes of being her actual kidnapper and abuser, says the injuries were inflicted by him, and claims she lied about his identity because she feared both Reyes and Keith.¹⁶

These claims contradict the investigative record. The Shasta County Sheriff’s Office reaffirmed that Reyes was “fully cooperative and forthright” during extensive FBI and sheriff’s office interviews and passed a polygraph verifying his statements. Prosecutors have continued to describe the 2016 disappearance as a deliberate hoax.⁸ Even during the original 2020 interrogation, after being confronted with the DNA evidence and Reyes’s account, Papini refused to abandon her story about the two Hispanic women.¹⁷

What that leaves is the picture prosecutors and the affidavit assembled: a woman with a documented history of running from difficulty and inventing abuse stories, who staged a disappearance to escape the fallout of an affair, who managed the deception with unusual planning, and who continued profiting from and defending the lie long after most people would have stopped. Whether any one of those threads was the reason, or whether they all were, is a question Papini has never answered consistently.

1
ABC News. California Woman Faces Sentencing in Hoax Kidnapping Case
2
ABC News. How Sherri Papini Fooled Investigators and Family With Phony Kidnapping
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NBC News. Sherri Papini, Convicted of Faking Kidnapping, Claims She Was Kidnapped
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ABC 7. Sherri Papini Doesn’t Exist: New Book Claims Ex-Boyfriend Abducted Her
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People. Where Is Keith Papini Now
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U.S. Department of Justice. United States v. Sherri Papini, Criminal Complaint Affidavit
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People. What Sherri Papini’s Therapist Thinks Happened
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ABC News. Sherri Papini Claims Boyfriend Abducted Her in 2016 Hoax Kidnapping
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People. From Harrowing Abduction to Infamous Hoax: Timeline of Sherri Papini Case
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BuzzFeed News. Sherri Papini Plea Agreement in Hoax Kidnapping
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CNN. Sherri Papini Detention Hearing
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CNN. Sherri Papini’s False Claims and Latino Bias
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Los Angeles Times. Sherri Papini’s Alleged Kidnapping Hoax Stoked Racial Division and Fear
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E! Online. How Sherri Papini’s Kidnapping Hoax Was Exposed and What Happened Next
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The Independent. Sherri Papini Case: DNA on Sweatpants
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KRCR. Sherri Papini Claims New Book Reveals Harrowing Truth of 2016 Disappearance
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ABC News. Sherri Papini’s Husband Reflects on Living a Hoax