“I tried so hard to ‘gotcha’ her,” Nicole Rittenmeyer says. The veteran true-crime filmmaker went into her newest undertaking, an ID docuseries referred to as Sherri Papini: Caught within the Lie, anticipating to study what actually occurred when Sherri Papini disappeared in 2016. Initially, it appeared that Papini had been kidnapped; later, investigators mentioned the entire thing was a hoax cooked up by Papini, with help from her ex-boyfriend James Reyes.
The case has already been the topic of one other docuseries: the 2024 Hulu manufacturing Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini, that includes interviews with Papini’s then husband, Keith. Papini herself didn’t take part in Perfect Wife—although Michael Beach Nichols, director of Perfect Wife, tells Vanity Fair that he and his crew made repeated efforts to incorporate her of their present. “She never responded to us,” he says. “We would have loved to have spoken to her, and you always want to speak to everyone.”
Perhaps her reticence was motivated by her dedication to this new sequence, which options intensive interviews with Papini. ID president Jason Sarlanis says that Caught within the Lie was within the works lengthy earlier than the community was conscious of Hulu’s competing property. “In fairness to them, they told a one-sided story because that’s all they had,” says Rittenmeyer, who has labored with members of the Perfect Wife crew prior to now. As Sarlanis places it, “The Hulu project came out before us—but in so many ways, I believe this project is the yin to its yang.”
It may sound counterintuitive, however the Hulu present’s earlier premiere offers Caught within the Lie a possibility to duck lots of commonplace true-crime tropes. Papini’s alleged 2016 kidnapping—after reappearing, she initially mentioned she had been taken by two Hispanic ladies—was nationwide information, as had been her 2022 plea deal and jail sentence for the alleged hoax. (She pleaded responsible to costs of mail fraud and making false statements.) Yet a big swath of the general public was nonetheless unfamiliar with the case till Perfect Wife, which took a chronological strategy to the story’s twists and turns.
As such, Caught within the Lie will get to skip lots of exposition and go straight to the meat. So: Why did Papini disappear for 22 days? Why did she lie about it? And why did she wait till now to set the report straight?
It is perhaps a spoiler to announce right here that none of these questions get absolutely answered by the brand new present, although Rittenmeyer actually tried her greatest. Often, when Papini seems on digital camera, we are able to hear Rittenmeyer off-screen, pushing again on responses or stating inconsistencies in Papini’s claims. “I have 1,500 pages of interview transcripts,” Rittenmeyer says, “and every time you go through it, it’s just us kind of hammering her.”
Yet Papini refuses to totally diverge from the story she’s been telling for years now, insisting that she was in reality kidnapped in November of 2016. “I was abducted by my ex-boyfriend, who held me captive for 22 days. There was no consent, and he still did it,” she says, staring straight into the digital camera.
According to Papini, she initially reconnected with Reyes after he skilled a dying in his household, however she says they continued to speak—with Papini ultimately utilizing a secret second cellphone—as Keith turned emotionally abusive and controlling and she or he sought somebody who made her really feel heard. (Through his lawyer, Keith denies all of his ex-wife’s claims of abuse.) Papini claims she has gaps in her reminiscence round her alleged kidnapping, together with the precise particulars round her alleged abduction within the Northern California city of Redding.
According to Papini, she initially blamed two Hispanic ladies as a result of naming Reyes as her abductor would have meant publicly revealing that she’d had an emotional affair with him. In the sequence, Papini claims that if Keith had discovered of her textual content conversations with Reyes, he would have probably divorced her. She says she and Keith had a postnuptial settlement that will have awarded Keith all property within the occasion of a divorce; she was additionally involved that infidelity of any type would value her custody of their son and daughter. So as a substitute she changed Reyes with a fictional pair of feminine abductors—however the truth that she was kidnapped stays true, she says.