Sherri Papini, the California woman convicted after blaming her disappearance on two unknown Hispanic women and then confessing it was all a hoax, has a new story to explain her infamous 2016 vanishing act. Her ex-boyfriend kidnapped her, Papini maintains in a new TV docuseries, just when she was going to end their affair. Papini says she invented the masked women because she was afraid of what her husband at the time, Keith Papini, might do if he found out about the affair, People reports. The truth, she now says, is that the former boyfriend, James Reyes, kidnapped her. "I was abducted," she says.
Reyes has given a different account of her three-week disappearance. He told FBI agents in 2020 that Papini planned the whole thing. "I didn't kidnap her," he said. "She was just a friend in need asking for help. She was trying to get away from her husband." Papini now says Reyes, who passed a lie detector test, took her against her will after she summoned him to Redding from his home in Costa Mesa because she planned to break off their affair. Panini says she remembers waking up naked in a room in his apartment. The two later had a conversation in which she told him her husband would find her and not stop looking for Reyes, she says.
"It all came down to my coverup, and that's [when] I agreed to ... make up that someone else did it," she says in the series, per People. Panini received an 18-month federal prison sentence in the case; she's since been released. "The truth is," she says in the show, "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]." The series begins Monday on Investigation Discovery and will stream on Max. (More Sherri Papini stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
