May 25, 2025
by Carla Hay
“Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie”
Directed by Nicole Rittenmeyer
Culture Representation: The four-episode documentary series “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” features a predominantly white group of people (with a few people of color) discussing the case of Sherri Papini, who claimed to be kidnapped from her home city of Redding, California, for 22 days in November 2016, and was convicted in 2022 of faking the kidnapping.
Culture Clash: Sherri Papini, who is interviewed extensively in the documentary, has changed her story again and says that she was kidnapped and abused by her ex-boyfriend James Reyes during her 2016 disappearance.
Culture Audience: “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in true crime documentaries about fraud and people who went missing, but there is something distasteful about giving a convicted fraudster a platform to tell more questionable stories.
Whether or not you believe Sherri Papini—the California woman who’s told contradictory stories about her 22-day disappearance that happened in 2016—there’s no doubt that “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” can be perceived as an attempt to repair her tarnished reputation and to rewrite a closed case. This four-episode docuseries is more exploitative than investigative. It’s so tacky to have convicted fraudster Sherri Papini recreate her controversial disappearance for the cameras. The documentary also fails to ask some questions that need answers.
Directed by Nicole Rittenmeyer, “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” tries to give the impression that it has journalistic integrity by interviewing a variety of people: those who support Sherri Papini, those who don’t support her, and those who want to give the appearance of being neutral. This documentary also has the first extensive interviews that Papini has given since she was released from prison in 2023. The year 2023 was also the year that the divorce of Sherri Papini and her ex-husband Keith Papini became final. In addition to having original footage that was filmed specifically for the documentary, “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” has archival footage (such as TV news reports and audio/video police interviews), much of which has been seen in other documentaries and news reports about the Sherri Papini case.
Any attempt that “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” might have made to have journalistic integrity is ruined when it’s revealed that Rittenmeyer and the other people involved in making this documentary came up with idea for Sherri to recreate on camera the moment that Sherri says she was kidnapped, despite Sherri’s therapist warning that this recreation was not a good idea. Sherri says in the documentary that she doesn’t remember what happened when she was in the vehicle that took her to the house where she stayed during the disappearance. The recreation was supposedly intended to help Sherri remember what happened.
However, Sherri can only recreate jogging on the road where she was last seen before she disappeared. When the recreated “kidnapping” car drives up, she starts crying on camera and says she can’t go through with getting near the car. At one point, she can’t even look at the car. While Sherri shows obvious signs of emotional distress (whether it’s real or not), Rittenmeyer can be heard off camera callously and repeatedly telling Sherri to look at the camera. This tasteless stunt is not responsible documentary filmmaking. It’s the type of bottom-of-the-barrel trashy fakery that many reality shows do in pathetic attempts to get ratings.
Let’s be honest here: What was supposed to happen for this on-camera recreation when that vehicle drove up on the road and stopped neared Sherri? The documentarians couldn’t have someone jump out of the car and “kidnap” Sherri, because that would be a contradiction to what law enforcement and Sherri’s on-the-record criminal conviction say really happened. On the flip side, Sherri wasn’t going to recreate willingly going into the car because she repeatedly says in the documentary that she can’t remember how she got into the car that took her away. Simply put: This recreation “experiment” was an exploitative and dismal failure.
“Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” also has Sherri do a lie detector test, which gets mixed results for her. The lie detector test is a less-exploitative part of the documentary, but it still comes across as something you’d see on a low-level reality show. Sherri makes shifty excuses when it’s revealed which parts of the lie detector test found her to be deceptive.
First, some background information on the case: In 2022, Sherri Papini was arrested for faking her 2016 kidnapping. Investigators say that Sherri was the master planner for this phony kidnapping, and she lied about it to federal investigators, which is a felony. In 2022, she confessed to law enforcement that she planned the fake kidnapping, and she was the one who decided when she wanted to go home. She pled guilty to this hoax and was convicted of crimes related to this hoax. Her ex-husband Keith Papini gave his side of the story in the 2024 Hulu docuseries “Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini.”
Sherri (who was born on June 11, 1982) and Keith (who was born on March 25, 1982) got married in 2009. Their son Tyler was born in 2012. Their daughter Violet was born in 2014. The family seemed to have an idyllic middle-class life in Redding, California. Keith was born and raised in Redding, which is in Shasta County. Sherri was also born and raised in Shasta County. Several people who knew homemaker Sherri described her as a “supermom.”
On November 2, 2016, Sherri disappeared from Redding. On that day, she had planned to go jogging while her two kids were at a daycare center, and her then-husband Keith was at work. When Keith arrived home, he couldn’t find Sherri, but he used the Find My Phone app to find her cell phone, which was abandoned in an area about a mile from where the couple lived. Keith immediately reported Sherri’s disappearance to authorities. His 911 call is included in the documentary.
Sherri’s disappearance made international news. Although investigators received many tips, none of them led to finding Sherri. When Sherri was missing, some people in the general public speculated that Keith could’ve been involved in abducting, even though Keith had an alibi (he was at work), and investigators ruled him out as a possible suspect.
On November 24, 2016 (which was Thanksgiving Day), Sherri was found partially bound by chains, outdoors in Yolo County, California, about 150 miles south of Redding. She claimed that two Spanish-speaking Latina strangers kidnapped her and held her captive for the past 22 days, but the two so-called kidnapper women decided to let her go. Sherri had several bruises and burns on her body, she was branded with letters on her right shoulder, and she was emaciated.
Sherri could not describe the vehicle that was used to transport her because she claimed that she could not remember anything about the vehicle. She described the Latina kidnappers as one who was young and one who was middle-aged. Sherri said she couldn’t see their entire faces because she claimed that she only saw the two women wearing bandanas covering the lower halves of their faces, which is also the description that she gave to a police sketch artist.
Police could not find the women whom Sherri described as her kidnappers. The FBI was also involved in the investigation. Four years later, in 2020, there was a major break in the case: DNA that was found in Sherri’s underwear that she wore during her so-called kidnapping was traced back to James Reyes, her ex-fiancé who lived in Costa Mesa, California, which is about 585 miles south of Redding.
When interrogated by investigators, Reyes at first denied anything do with Sherri’s disappearance. But then, he confessed that Sherri had asked him to pick her up in his car at a designated meeting place and hide her in his house for the period of time that Sherri went missing. Reyes said that he and Sherri used pre-paid “burner” phones to secretly communicate with each other before the disappearance, which is why Keith didn’t know that Sherri had been contacting Reyes.
Sherri and Reyes have reportedly said in separate law enforcement interviews that their relationship when Sherri and Keith were married was an emotional affair, not a sexual affair. Sherri has also denied speculation and gossip that she had sexual affairs with other men when she was married to Keith. She will only admit that during her marriage to Keith, she would flirt and get emotionally involved with other men, mostly through online communication.
According to Reyes, he agreed to the plan to help Sherri go into hiding because Sherri told him that Keith was abusing her, and she wanted to get away from Keith for a while. Reyes said that Sherri asked him to use a brand on her and cause many of the injuries that were found on her body. Reyes also claimed that some of Sherri’s injuries were deliberately self-inflicted, which is an allegation that Sherri continues to deny. Reyes was not charged with any crimes in this case and so far has not given any media interviews. There has been no evidence that Keith physically abused Sherri. Keith has also not been charged with any crimes in this case.
“Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” shows footage of an unidentified private investigator (hired by the documentarians) ambushing Reyes in November 2024, at a house in Nogales, Arizona, where Reyes says he’s helping take care of his grandfather. Reyes is heard but not seen on camera. Reyes politely declines to answer any questions about Sherri and says repeatedly that he’s going to have to contact his lawyer in California.
In 2022, Sherri was arrested for lying to federal agents and committing mail fraud because she collected Social Security disability benefits as a result of reporting that she was an injured kidnapping victim. The case never went to trial because in 2022, Sherri eventually entered a plea deal. She pled guilty to one count of making false statements and one count of mail fraud. As part of the deal, she confessed to masterminding the kidnapping hoax.
Keith filed for divorce after Sherri’s guilty plea. He got full custody of their two children. Sherri was sentenced to 18 months in prison and served 10 months before getting an early release in August 2023. She was also ordered to pay more than $300,000 in restitution for the costs of the investigation and for the money that she got from disability benefits and the therapy she got that was funded by the California Victim Compensation Board.
All of this has been widely reported already. But now, Sherri wants to change the story about her 2016 disappearance again. In “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie,” she claims that Reyes really did kidnap and physically abuse her during the period of time in 2016 when she disappeared. She now vehemently denies that any of it was her idea.
Sherri also says that she was pressured by William “Bill” Portanova, her defense attorney at the time, to admit that she came up with the idea for the hoax as part of the plea deal. According to Sherri, Portanova said that if she didn’t admit to masterminding the hoax in the plea deal, then she would be facing additional charges. Portanova is interviewed in the documentary, and he denies telling Sherri to lie about masterminding the hoax. He also says that Sherri would still be facing charges of lying to federal agents, regardless if her physical injuries were self-inflicted or inflicted by Reyes.
In “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie,” Sherri’s story is that she arranged to meet with Reyes and misled him to believe she wanted to run away with him, but he took things too far and kidnapped her. Sherri says she lied about two Latina women kidnapping her because she was scared of Reyes and what he might do to her if she told authorities that he kidnapped her. She also repeats her previous accusations that Keith was emotionally abusive to her during their marriage. The documentary has disclaimers that Reyes and Keith have denied all of Sherri’s accusations.
The way Sherri acts in this documentary ranges from emotionally guarded to emotionally messy. She sometimes acts like a vulnerable victim and other times acts like an angry person who’s out for revenge. If she did this documentary to clean up her image, this attempt is a failure because she’s too contradictory in presenting who she really is.
Whenever director Rittenmeyer (who is not seen on camera but can be heard asking questions) confronts Sherri about Sherri’s proven lies, Sherri gets very defensive and snaps in response by saying that everyone is guilty of lying. Sherri’s lack of self-awareness is on full display. Yes, everyone is guilty of telling lies. But Sherri wants to ignore the fact that most people don’t fake their own kidnapping and most people don’t commit the felony crimes that landed Sherri in prison.
“Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” has four episodes called “chapters” but they all essentially repeat the same pattern: Facts of the case are presented. Sherri disputes almost all the facts and tells another version of the story. People who are interviewed offer their own opinions.
Chapter 1 is titled “Exodus” and does a summary of the case, with Sherri’s added comments about why her story has changed. Chapter 2 is titled “I Am a Liar” and has some psychoanalysis of what’s going on with Sherri. Chapter 3 is titled “Multiple Truths” and shows the documentary’s aborted recreation of Sherri’s November 2016 disappearance. Chapter 4 is titled “It’s Complicated” and features the lie detector test.
In the beginning of the documentary, Sherri is asked why she wanted to be in this documentary. She giggles nervously before she comments solemnly: “The story that the world thinks they know is that I’m a master manipulator who’s fooled everyone.”
Sherri then waves her hand like she’s waving a wand. “That’s my magic wand,” she giggles again. “Sorry. I’m going to do ridiculous things because some of this is ridiculous.” (She’s right about that.) Sherri continues, “The Sherri Papini that’s out there is not me. It’s just this version of me that has been created to fit the narrative for the media’s version of what happened.”
Denise Farmer, who was the FBI’s lead investigator of the Sherri Papini case in 2016, is the only person interviewed in this documentary who was also interviewed in “Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini.” Farmer, who is now retired from the FBI, is more candid in “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie,” when it comes to voicing her thoughts on how she was suspicious of the kidnapping claims from the beginning.
According to Farmer, one of the “red flags” was that Sherri’s abandoned phone had its headphone wires wrapped in a way that looked staged, not like someone had dropped it during a kidnapping. Farmer says that she thought Keith was very image-conscious and he wasn’t a complete ally to law enforcement. She comments that Keith often got in the way of the investigation, but she doesn’t go into specifics.
Peter French, another retired FBI agent, is also interviewed in the documentary, but he says he never worked on the Sherri Papini case and can only speak about FBI protocol. Also interviewed is assistant U.S. attorney Veronica Alegria, who was the lead prosecutor on the Sherri Papini case. Alegria doesn’t have anything new to add that isn’t already on public record.
Keith’s sister Suzanne Papini is another person in the documentary who echoes the description of Keith being image-conscious. Suzanne says that when Keith and Sherri were married, he was caught up in the idea of having a perfect wife, which was an unattainable standard. After Sherri was released on bail in 2022, Sherri and Suzanne lived together. Suzanne is one of Sherri’s supporters and says she has a sibling-like relationship with Sherri that Suzanne doesn’t have with Keith. However, the documentary doesn’t explain why Keith and Suzanne are apparently estranged.
“Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” also has interviews with Sherri’s parents Richard Graeff and Loretta Graeff, who have reconciled with Sherri after a period of estrangement. For a while, Sherri lived with her parents after she got out of prison in 2023. Loretta and Suzanne have different opinions of Sherri’s 22-day disappearance. Loretta says emphatically, “It wasn’t a kidnapping.” Suzanne says she believes Sherri’s latest version of the story that it was a date that turned into a kidnapping.
What does it say about Sherri that her own mother doesn’t believe Sherri’s kidnapping story? Sherri is never asked about her mother’s opinion in the documentary. That’s not the only thing the documentary fails to ask.
“Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” irresponsibly doesn’t ask Sherri’s parents about allegations that the parents raised Sherri and her sister Sheila Koester in an abusive household. Sherri’s childhood friend Jennifer Harrison and Koester both made these allegations in “Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini,” a documentary that is mentioned several times in “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie.” Harrison said she personally witnessed Sherri’s mother physically assault Sherri when Sherri was a child.
In “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie,” the only abuse from her childhood that Sherri and her parents mention (but don’t go into too many details about) is Sherri’s allegation that she was sexually abused by someone who was not either of her parents. Sherri and her parents do not identify who this alleged abuser is but Sherri’s father says that they know the abuse happened because the abuser was caught in the act. Sherri’s parents say that this sexual abuse was not talked about in the family because they found it difficult to discuss.
Sherri becomes infuriated when she is asked about her ex-husband Keith’s allegations in “Perfect Wife” that Sherri made their kids wear rags of soaked with alcohol and placed in Ziploc bags around the kids’ necks. Sherri’s version of the story is that the kids wore “cotton balls” soaked with “essential oils.” She also says that Child Protective Services investigated these allegations in 2022, and they found no evidence of abuse, which is why Sherri says that Keith should’ve never brought up these accusations again in the “Perfect Wife” documentary. There’s also a self-made video (apparently filmed shortly after Sherri watched the “Perfect Wife” documentary) of an angry Sherri saying that she just mailed a cease-and-desist letter to Keith to stop him from further making this accusation.
Sherri’s mental health is discussed mostly by her therapist Dr. Stephen “Steve” Diggs, a licensed psychologist. Diggs and Sherri say that she has successfully undergone eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy as treatment for her mental health issues. Diggs says that Sherri is a survivor of major trauma. He has diagnosed Sherri with having a self-defeating personality disorder. He also says that her personality is histrionic, not narcissistic.
Diggs comments on Sherri: “I absolutely believe she was abducted. She is now—most of the time—quite honest. She has now stopped telling big lies.” Diggs says he believes Sherri’s most recent version of her disappearance story that says Keith was abusive to her, and she asked Reyes for help in getting away from Keith, but Reyes ended up kidnapping her. Sherri says she believes Reyes let her go because she convinced him that she wouldn’t tell people that he was her kidnapper.
Someone else in the documentary who speaks up in support of Sherri is Mo De La Mora, who spent time in prison with Sherri and describes herself as Sherri’s friend. De La Mora (who identifies as Mexican American) says that Sherri got a lot of hostility from other prisoners—especially Latina prisoners—because of the lie Sherri told about two Latina women kidnapping Sherri. De La Mora comments with awe that Sherri was able to win over many of the prisoners, including herself, after Sherri explained her side of the story.
Van Kinney and Chase O. Kinney—a father-and-daughter attorney team who represented Sherri in her divorce from Keith—also express their support for Sherri in the documentary. Chase takes a moment to vape on camera before she does her documentary interview. Whatever was in her vape pen is not mentioned, but Chase looks very stimulated in her interview. Chase says she believes Sherri’s kidnapping story because Chase says Chase was kidnapped and raped by five male strangers in 2006 when she was partying on a boat.
Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a clinical psychologist who says in the documentary that she has never met Sherri, gives the most pointed comments about the ethics of this documentary and Sherri’s changing stories: “I’ve heard so many different versions of this story, I struggle with what to believe.” In another part of the documentary, Durvasula adds, “Can a person fake it? Sure, they can. A person can fake anything. But that’s not where a psychologist is going to start this journey with someone. Our first duty is to believe. It’s not to doubt. We are not detectives. We are mental health practitioners. We are healers. And in a trauma-informed model, we believe.”
Durvasula speaks directly to Rittenmeyer on the approach that this documentary is taking to showcase someone with mental health issues and who has admitted to telling numerous lies that are crimes: “It’s such a tough line for you to skirt between journalism and compassion, being trauma-informed and, frankly, ego in not wanting to look stupid—because that’s really what this comes down to. And I can say this to you as a psychologist: You can’t win.”
Sherri gives a glimpse of her living situation by saying she’s staying at the house of “a friend,” who let her live at the house because it had been unoccupied. She shows her home office where she says she likes to make arts and crafts. Sherri also says she used to do branding of letters in her arts and crafts, but now she no longer uses a branding tool because it reminds her of the branding that Reyes did to her. She still has the branding scar on her shoulder.
In the documentary, Sherri makes a quick apology for the harm she caused with her lies, but most of her energy in the documentary is spent trying to convince whoever’s watching that she’s telling the truth this time, and she wants to prove that she is misunderstood. She expresses sadness about having limited supervised visits with her children (she can also talk to them on the phone once a week), but she mostly talks about her kids in the context of how it hurts her that she can’t see her kids as often as she wants, and not how her kids must be hurting from the harm that she caused. The documentary has a video clip of one of these phone conversations—the kids’ voices are not heard, to respect their privacy—and when Sherri hangs up after the conversation ends, she lets out an anguished scream.
Sherri becomes furious when she rants about Keith allowing the children to be filmed in the “Perfect Wife” documentary. However, she lacks the decency and remorse to admit that whatever she did to end up in prison caused much more damage to her children than the children being shown in a documentary for a few minutes. And let’s not forget that documentaries about Sherri Papini aren’t about what a great parent she thinks she is. These documentaries are about the crimes she committed that got her sent to prison and brought shame that her children have to live with for the rest of their lives.
Brett Bartlett is the polygraph examiner who administers the polygraph test on Sherri. He asked her specific questions about her disappearance and how much of it she planned. This review won’t detail all the results of the polygraph test except to say that Sherri failed the test questions where she denied knowing in advance that she was going to meet Reyes on November 2, 2016. Barlett shares his opinion on Sherri by saying she can be both a liar and a victim.
A very telling part of the documentary happens when Rittenmeyer confronts Sherri about Sherri’s stating over the years that she used what Reyes’ mother looks like to describe one of the fabricated Latina “kidnappers.” When Rittenmeyer says that Reyes’ mother is actually of Irish (white) heritage, Sherri’s eyes turn into a cold stare, and Sherri’s attitude becomes rude and abrupt. Sherri dismissively says that she only met Reyes’ mother once or twice, and she doesn’t “give a fuck” what his mother’s real ethnicity is. It’s a moment when Sherri’s “poor innocent me” mask falls off, and she turns into an unrepentant, foul-mouthed fraudster caught in another lie.
At the end of the documentary, Sherri is playing the vulnerable victim again and asks Rittenmeyer in a worried tone: “Do you think this film will do more harm than good for me?” If Rittenmeyer gave an answer, it’s not shown in the documentary, which lets the question remain unanswered. However, based on the exploitative nature of “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” and Sherri continuing to contradict herself on many embarrassing levels, there are no real winners here.
Investigation Discovery will premiere “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” on May 26, 2025.
