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Sherri Papini’s new memoir — Sherri Papini Doesn’t Exist: The Lie That Defined Me, The Media That Destroyed Me, and the Truth That No One Heard — opens, as most memoirs do, with a disclaimer. It says in part that the book, which came out on June 26, “reflects my personal memories, experiences, perceptions, and emotions surrounding real events in my life. While I have made every effort to be truthful to the essence of what I experienced, memory is imperfect, especially under trauma.”
If it were anyone else, you wouldn’t think much of it. But this is not anyone else; it’s the woman famously dubbed the real-life Gone Girl, and her memory — and claims about her memory have not always been reliable or true.
In 2016, Papini disappeared during a jog in Redding, California, where she lived with her husband, Keith, and kids Tyler and Violet, then 4 and 2. She reappeared 22 days later — bound, bruised and branded — with a story about being abducted and brutalized by “two Hispanic women.” By 2022, that story had unraveled, and Papini was arrested and charged with lying to the FBI and mail fraud. She pleaded guilty and admitted that it was her ex-boyfriend James Reyes — with whom she’d been having an emotional affair — who had taken her.
He said he took her at her instruction, telling the FBI and Shasta County police in 2016, “She’s a good friend of mine and I didn’t kidnap her… A friend in need asked me for help.” (Us was unable to reach Reyes for comment.) Papini maintained, in her mind and subsequent interviews, including in the June Investigation Discovery docuseries Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie, that their time together was not consensual. But the damage was done: she’d worried an entire nation and endangered an already marginalized community. Her credibility was shot. She went from America’s missing sweetheart to the most-hated woman in the country.
When I talk to Papini, 43, via Zoom on June 26, I tell her that we asked readers what questions they had for her, and many said some version of, “None. Don’t platform this woman.”
“That’s the whole cancel culture that we live in nowadays,” she says. “I think these people that say, like, ‘Don’t give her a platform and don’t listen to her,’ they’ve been deeply affected by someone who’s lied to them in their life; deeply affected by someone who’s emotionally cheated on them or even potentially cheated on them in their life. My story is very relatable to so many.”
This kind of elliptical talking is, in part, what leads many to dismiss her story as fiction. In interviews, including this one, she seems incapable of answering a question in a straightforward way.
Her therapist, licensed clinical psychologist Stephen Diggs, who specializes in personality disorders — the result of early childhood trauma, he says — offers a possible explanation for that. “Lying was one of her defense mechanisms,” he tells Us. Papini “got rid of… telling outright lies pretty quickly” in treatment, he says, but she would still “evade telling people the truth and get into some conflict because she’d evaded something.”
The Monstrous Lie In conversation, Papini is warm and likable. She is clearly intelligent. She’s forthcoming about the fact that she lied about who took her — she pleaded guilty to it, after all, and was sentenced to 18 months at Victorville federal correctional facility and ordered to pay more than $300,000 in restitution to the California Victim Compensation Board, Social Security Administration, Shasta County Sheriff’s Office and the FBI. But she maintains that she’s lied about nothing else; that although she signed a legal document that was tantamount to an admission of participation in her kidnapping, she never meant it.
“I did sign the plea agreement that was built by the federal government. It was their words that I agreed to, given that there were no other options,” she tells Us. “But even in my speech in court, I say I lie — I do not say I made up a kidnapping and I hoaxed a kidnapping. So there’s no new story. It’s the same testimony that I’ve given, other than I was too afraid, which is quite normal for victims of domestic abuse and quite normal of victims that have gone through severe trauma like I did.” (Keith Papini has repeatedly denied his ex-wife’s claims of emotional abuse. Us was unable to reach him for comment.)
Either way, the lie she admits to telling was huge and horrific. By pointing the finger at two Latina women, she — unwittingly or otherwise — exploited racial stereotypes and put a target on the back of an entire community.
I ask if she is sorry. “I deeply regret that,” she says. “I wish that it wasn’t used in a way to empower law enforcement to mistreat anyone Hispanic; that wasn’t my intention.”
I ask whether there is anything she has done or would like to do to make amends. “Absolutely, and I do feel like I started doing that in my incarceration,” she says. Victorville “was like 90-something percent Hispanic women. And, yeah, I definitely feel like working with the women in there and hearing their stories and wanting to get into advocacy programs and wanting to work with programs like ARC [the Anti-Recidivism Coalition], for example, and things like that, like, absolutely, yes. I’ve always wanted to be very involved in the repair in that.”
I ask if she’s done any work with ARC yet. “It’s difficult right now because I’m on probation, so I have a lot of rules of engagement,” she says. “I can’t really do anything in the Bureau of Prisons or anything like that until I’m off of probation. So it’s a process. But I’m super enthusiastic about it, and I would really like to be getting involved.”
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On the one hand, it seems unfair that Papini needs to be a perfect victim who never told a lie in order for us to believe her when she claims that her husband was emotionally abusive and her ex tortured her. Then again, it’s her perfection (by mainstream American standards at least) and privilege (she is white, thin, blond, pretty) — that got her so much attention in the first place; attention that missing Black, Brown and Indigenous women routinely do not receive.
I ask whether she’s reached out to offer a specific apology or acknowledgment to the Latinx community of Shasta County. She says that soon she’ll be “going on to my local news station here, so I’d imagine that would… that’ll help as well.” I’m not entirely sure what this means, but we move on.
Later, she emails me a clarification: “Perhaps I’m overthinking things a bit, but I wanted to see if it was alright that I make sure I spoke clearly. I haven’t begun working with ARC yet, but it’s somewhere I’d love to become a part of in some way. I’ve been doing a lot of research into where I can give back moving forward. When I’m off probation if there is a way to further give back to women incarcerated, I would love to do that. Our prison system is broken.”
Missing Pieces A major point of contention for critics of Papini’s is her sometimes inconsistent memory. In Caught in the Lie, she tries to participate in a re-creation of her alleged abduction as a way to shake loose forgotten details. But it doesn’t work. Compare that to her memoir, which includes incredibly detailed accounts, including verbatim dialogue, of other traumatic moments, like when she nearly died in labor with Violet. I ask if she can explain that apparent discrepancy.
“I wish I knew. I’ve tried hypnotism, I’ve tried EMDR [Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing], I’ve tried guided meditation, I’ve tried everything to reach that memory,” she tells Us. “It’s infuriating for me… not having that answer.”
I try again: Can she explain why, if trauma causes memory lapse, she’s able to recount with so much detail other traumatic moments in her life? “I’m able to recall all the details about everything…. And for me [that’s] an indicator that I was drugged,” she says, meaning drugged by Reyes when he took her in his car. “So if I’m losing that gap in time, and I’m losing that space and memory and then waking up in the car and feeling the way that I felt for me, yes, it’s infuriating, and yes, I wish that I could reach that, but it’s kind of like what you would go through with anesthesia. You just can’t touch that memory.” The fact that she can remember so many other details is validating, she says, and proof of the trauma she suffered at the hands of Reyes. (Reyes has previously denied Papini’s claims.)
Perhaps this is where the book’s disclaimer comes in. Perhaps that’s too generous. We’ll never know. Papini either couldn’t or wouldn’t give me a clear answer. That doesn’t mean she’s lying. And it doesn’t mean she’s not.
New Revelations In her book, Papini shares never-before-heard details and expands on old ones. She intimates that her sister, Sheila Koester, with whom she has a fraught relationship, and her ex-husband are inappropriately involved. When I ask if she means romantically, she says, “I think Keith and Sheila are trauma bonded, frankly, and I think that the lines are being very blurred… She’s spending holidays with his family and takes these long vacations with his family and is constantly spending the night.” (Us was unable to reach Koester for comment.)
She alleges in the book that when she returned from Reyes’ house, Shasta County Sheriff Sergeant Kyle Wallace “coached Keith on how to interrogate me, wiring him up, turning him into an informant.” But then she tells me, “I didn’t see it, so I don’t know specifically if he was [wired], but he had a recording device,” adding that audio she received through a Freedom of Information Act request backs that up.
She adds that “Keith and Wallace play softball together.” I ask whether they did at the time of her return in 2016. “‘I’m not sure,” she says, “but I do know they play softball at Big League Dreams together.”
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In addition, Papini says she’s requested access to her SART [Sexual Assault Response Team] exam and medical documentation from law enforcement and has not been able to get it.
I tell her that a part of the book I found surprising was a chapter about her close friendships with women. “I was like, ‘Where did these women come from?’” I tell her. “We’ve never heard of these women.” When you think of Sherri Papini, you think of men.
“Confirmation bias!” she says with a laugh, then, “Thank you for saying that … When I left Keith and I stayed at [his sister] Suzanne’s house prior to my incarceration, I got to go out when I wanted. I got to call my girlfriends whenever I wanted … I have so much support now, and I have so many friends, so many family members that I have access to now that I didn’t have.”
During their marriage, Keith was, she says, “dead set on being able to control his image. That’s what mattered the most to him, and that meant the friendships that I had and the family that I had had to go through this vetting process. So if you were not a certain status, or you were a certain type of person, I wasn’t allowed to converse with you or hang out with you or invite you to things. If you were of low class, I was not allowed to hang out with you. If you were overweight, I was not allowed to hang out with you. If you held a certain sexual orientation, I was not allowed to hang out with you.”
She does not mention in the book a 2003 post on a white supremacist blog that resurfaced in 2016, attributed to a user called Sherri Graeff (Papini’s maiden name). The author of that post boasted about being drug-free and proud of her white heritage and recounted past fights with Latina classmates. Papini says she did not author the post.
“Do you want the whole story?” she asks. “I was living with a roommate, and she had a fiancé at the time, and she was secretly seeing another guy. I was giving her rides to the guy she was cheating on her fiancé with.” The rest of the story goes how you might expect: Papini started seeing the guy, the roommate found out and to get revenge on Papini, who was at the time, she says, working with a youth coalition (including on drug-abuse education), the roommate created the post in her name.
When I ask who the roommate was, Papini says Kim-something but that she can’t remember her last name. This strikes me as odd. As an exercise, I try to remember the last names of all my former roommates. I can’t.
Her Life Today Papini’s focus now, she says, is making restitution and getting her kids back. She was not paid for the doc, and she self-published the book, so if she makes a profit on that, it won’t be for some time. (It should go without saying but I’ll say it anyway: Papini was not compensated for this interview.) She works various gigs for money: freelance writing assignments, geriatric caregiving for family members… When she applies for more traditional work, “they find out who I am, and then they conclude the interview,” she says, “so it is incredibly difficult for me to find a job.”
She makes an interesting point about that: “The restitution is all on me. And James Reyes participated.” That’s true regardless of how you think Reyes and Papini ended up in that house together. He knew she was there for three weeks while authorities were searching for her, and he didn’t come forward. At a minimum, Papini thinks he should have been charged with conspiracy. (That statute of limitations has now run out.)
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She has recently been back in court for two cases not related to her child-custody agreement. In January, Shawn Hibdon, a man she dated after she got out of prison, sought to evict her from a Shingletown, California, home owned by 33 TEN Properties LLC, of which Hibdon is a managing member and agent. She was in court in June to fight the eviction but tells Us at the time of our speaking that the two are coming to a settlement. In fact, she says, she’s talking to me from that home. Elizabeth Elizondo, attorney for Hibdon, tells Us that Papini is illegally occupying the property and that the case is ongoing.
Her other June court date involved a restraining order she’d sought against Katherine Parrick, the ex of a friend, whom she accused of stalking and online harassment. (Parrick and her attorney, Jacob Levin, deny these claims to Us.) Papini agreed to withdraw the request, and Superior Court Commissioner John Berglund dismissed it, chastising both women in the process: “Both of you live in a small town,” he said. “It is important for both of you to remember how your actions affect others.”
In terms of figuring out her own life, Papini’s main goal, she says, is concluding her child-custody trial, currently set for August, with the hope of getting 50-50 custody of her kids, now 10 and 12. Right now, she gets supervised visitation once a month. She says her relationship with her daughter, Violet, is strong but that her son is having a hard time. “Tyler really started pulling away with the Hulu documentary [The Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini],” she says, which was told from Keith’s perspective and premiered in 2024. “I haven’t had access to him since then.” Papini says of the entire ordeal, it “broke me. I’m just trying to pick up the pieces now. And I’m trying to figure out how I can rebuild my life in a way that it’s something that I can be proud of.”
That could include a second memoir. In Sherri Papini Doesn’t Exist, she writes about watching clips of her then-yet-to-air ID docuseries: “The real story beneath their polished surface remains unknown to me, a raw wound waiting for book two.”
As you read this, you might be thinking the same thing — that the real story remains unknown. It may stay that way, forever. But one thing is certain: think too hard about the Sherri Papini story and you will drive yourself mad. All people invested in this case have to ask themselves a question: Would you rather doubt a potential victim — even if she told a horrific, dangerous lie — or risk believing a potential liar?
With reporting by Yana Grebenyuk, Andrea Simpson, Erin Strecker & Amanda Williams
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