According to a statement from the Department of Justice, Sherri Papini, a mother from California who faked her own kidnapping in 2016 with the aid of DNA technology, was given a year and a half in prison on Monday.
Papini, 40, admitted to the hoax and pleaded guilty to mail fraud and making false statements in April. Judge William B. Shubb decided that she should serve 18 months in jail followed by 36 months of supervised release. In addition, restitution totaling close to $310,000 was mandated for her.
Compared to what the lawyers had asked for, the sentence was very long. While the defense requested one month of custody and seven months of home detention, the prosecution asked the judge to sentence her to eight months in prison.
Papini read a statement to the judge, saying, in part: “I am so sorry to the many people who have suffered because of me. The people who sacrificed for the broken woman I was. The people who gave willingly to help me in a time that I so desperately needed help. I thank you all.”
She told the judge she was guilty of lying and dishonor, and was ready “to repent and to concede.”
The allegations stem from Papini’s disappearance in November 2016 after she went for a jog close to her Shasta County residence in Northern California. She was discovered alone and hurt on a highway about 140 miles away three weeks later. She reported to police that two masked, Spanish-speaking women had kidnapped and tortured her, keeping her chained in a closet, holding her at gunpoint, and branding her with a heated tool.
Authorities conducted a thorough search for the alleged Hispanic captors as a result of the accusations, but they were unsuccessful for a number of years. She also received more than $30,000 in victim compensation money from the state.
However, her story was disproved in 2020 when detectives linked DNA from her clothing to an ex-boyfriend, who later acknowledged that the alleged kidnapping was a fabrication.
Federal prosecutors claimed that the hoax wasted resources and led police to investigate innocent targets in their memo regarding sentencing.
“Papini planned and executed a sophisticated kidnapping hoax, and then continued to perpetuate her false statements for years after her return without regard for the harm she caused others,” prosecutors said in the filing. “As a result, state and federal investigators devoted limited resources to Papini’s case for nearly four years before they independently learned the truth: that she was not kidnapped and tortured.”
“Papini caused innocent individuals to become targets of a criminal investigation,” prosecutors added. “She left the public in fear of her alleged Hispanic capturers who purportedly remained at large.”
Papini’s lawyer mentioned that she had admitted to the hoax in the defense’s sentencing memo and claimed that the damage to her reputation was already too great.
“Sherri’s years of denial are now undeniably over. Her name is now synonymous with this awful hoax. There is no escaping it,” attorney William Portanova wrote in the filing.
“It is hard to imagine a more brutal public revelation of a person’s broken inner self. At this point, the punishment is already intense and feels like a life sentence,” he added.
Portanova made an effort to separate the present-day Papini from the criminal outside of court on Monday.
“Whatever happened five years ago is a different Sherri Papini than the one you see here today,” he said.
