Woman Faked Her Own Abduction By Hiding In Ex’s House And Self-Harming A La ‘Gone Girl’

A California woman has been arrested and charged after she allegedly faked her own abduction. Sherri Papini, 39, “went missing” in 2016 and the case made national news. However, as it turns out, she’d simply been hiding in her ex-boyfriend’s house the whole time while the manhunt continued. It was a hare-brained idea straight out of the pages of Gone Girl, and now Papini is paying the price.

  1. Papini was charged with multiple crimes. According to a 55-page criminal complaint filed in the Eastern District of California on Thursday, Papini was charged with making false statements to federal agents and mail fraud. It’s rather shocking that the list isn’t even longer than that.
  2. What she allegedly did really was twisted. According to the court complaint, Papini appeared to have been “kidnapped” while out for a run on November 2, 2016. In actuality, her ex picked her up and drove her to his house in SoCal, about 600 miles away. Not only that, but she reportedly self-harmed so that she looked bruised and beaten when she eventually went home to her husband 22 days later.
  3. Papini came up with a nuts story to tell her husband. She told Keith Papini that two Hispanic women had kidnapped her before beating, starving, branding, and torturing her in a basement where she was kept chained. Unfortunately, she couldn’t describe what they looked like as she’d been kept with a hood over her eyes. She refused to speak to law enforcement about her alleged ordeal and instead insisted her husband speak for her.
  4. She finally spoke to the FBI in 2017. During her interview, she stuck to her story about being kidnapped by the Hispanic women and said they eventually left her by the side of the road on Thanksgiving 2016. She repeated that story again in a further interview in August 2020. However, by this point, the FBI had spoken to her ex-boyfriend and discovered that Papini had been with him the entire time.
  5. Authorities confronted her with the truth and she didn’t take it well. After showing Papini phone records and DNA evidence of her contact with her ex-boyfriend during the time of the alleged kidnapping, they pointed out that lying to federal agents is a crime. However, since her husband was in the room, she kept denying the allegations against her. Once he left the room, she did admit that she and her ex “did talk a little bit before” and claimed that she “made a mistake” by talking to other men when she went out of town for work. She then claimed she “couldn’t remember” if Hispanic women had kidnapped her. However, she never outright admitted that she’d lied.
  6. The entire community was terrified that there was a violent criminal on the loose. As U.S. Attorney Phillip Talbert said in a statement: “When a young mother went missing in broad daylight, a community was filled with fear and concern. Ultimately, the investigation revealed that there was no kidnapping and that time and resources that could have been used to investigate actual crime, protect the community, and provide resources to victims were wasted.”
  7. Papini’s husband has stood by her throughout the ordeal. In fact, he claims that anyone who’s against her is “disgusting” and celebrated her return to their home. Their family spokesperson, Chris Thomas, said in a statement: “Sherri and Keith have cooperated with law enforcement’s requests despite repeated attempts to unnecessarily pit them against each other, empty threats to publicly embarrass them, and other conduct that was less than professional.” Given that nearly $50,000 was raised as part of a GoFundMe campaign when she went missing and she was also given $30,000 from the California Victim’s Compensation Board, it’s not hard to see why perhaps he’s not all that angry.

Jennifer Still is a writer and editor with more than 10 years of experience. The managing editor of Bolde, she has bylines in Vanity Fair, Business Insider, The New York Times, Glamour, Bon Appetit, and many more. You can follow her on Twitter @jenniferlstill
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