“I tried so hard to ‘gotcha’ her,” Nicole Rittenmeyer says. The veteran true-crime filmmaker went into her latest project, an ID docuseries called Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie, expecting to learn what really happened when Sherri Papini disappeared in 2016. Initially, it seemed that Papini had been kidnapped; later, investigators said the whole thing was a hoax cooked up by Papini, with support from her ex-boyfriend James Reyes.
The case has already been the subject of another docuseries: the 2024 Hulu production Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini, featuring interviews with Papini’s then husband, Keith. Papini herself did not participate in Perfect Wife—though Michael Beach Nichols, director of Perfect Wife, tells Vanity Fair that he and his team made repeated efforts to include her in their show. “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 commitment to this new series, which features extensive interviews with Papini. ID president Jason Sarlanis says that Caught in the Lie was in the works long before the network was aware 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 worked with members of the Perfect Wife team in the past. As Sarlanis puts it, “The Hulu project came out before us—but in so many ways, I believe this project is the yin to its yang.”
It might sound counterintuitive, but the Hulu show’s earlier premiere gives Caught in the Lie an opportunity to duck a lot of standard true-crime tropes. Papini’s alleged 2016 kidnapping—after reappearing, she initially said she had been taken by two Hispanic women—was national news, as were her 2022 plea deal and prison sentence for the alleged hoax. (She pleaded guilty to charges of mail fraud and making false statements.) Yet a large swath of the public was still unfamiliar with the case until Perfect Wife, which took a chronological approach to the story’s twists and turns.
As such, Caught in the Lie gets to skip a lot 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 until now to set the record straight?
It might be a spoiler to announce here that none of those questions get fully answered by the new show, though Rittenmeyer truly tried her best. Often, when Papini appears on camera, we can hear Rittenmeyer off-screen, pushing back on responses or pointing out 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 fully diverge from the story she’s been telling for years now, insisting that she was in fact 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 camera.
According to Papini, she initially reconnected with Reyes after he experienced a death in his family, but she says they continued to communicate—with Papini eventually using a secret second phone—as Keith became emotionally abusive and controlling and she sought someone who made her feel heard. (Through his attorney, Keith denies all of his ex-wife’s claims of abuse.) Papini claims she has gaps in her memory around her alleged kidnapping, including the exact details around her alleged abduction in the Northern California town of Redding.
According to Papini, she initially blamed two Hispanic women because naming Reyes as her abductor would have meant publicly revealing that she’d had an emotional affair with him. In the series, Papini claims that if Keith had learned of her text conversations with Reyes, he would have likely divorced her. She says she and Keith had a postnuptial agreement that would have awarded Keith all property in the event of a divorce; she was also concerned that infidelity of any sort would cost her custody of their son and daughter. So instead she replaced Reyes with a fictional pair of female abductors—but the fact that she was abducted remains true, she says.
In the FBI and police footage that appears in both Perfect Wife and Caught in the Lie, says Rittenmeyer, “it seems so abundantly clear that she’s lying. And yet in our show, what we learn is what the stakes were for her—which are incredibly, incredibly high, right?” Admitting to an emotional affair could have meant losing her children, as well as her home. Perhaps, Caught in the Lie proposes, that footage actually shows a woman who fell from the frying pan into the fire.
If Papini was in fact abducted, she’s been the victim of a monstrous miscarriage of justice—and in Caught in the Lie, subjects including Papini’s therapist, Stephen Diggs, say they believe that the account she’s now presenting is the truth. Reyes, who has not been charged in connection with the case, denies all claims Papini makes in the series, wearily telling an investigator working with the production, “Whatever it is, it’s bull, dude,” before saying he’ll be contacting his attorney.
Yet there is something about Papini’s conviction that’s hard to shake. I found myself scrubbing back and forth during her interviews, looking for micro-expressions that might lead to the truth of what happened to her. But ultimately, the series ends on a note of uncertainty. Did we just spend nearly four hours with an incredibly accomplished liar who chose to double down on a falsehood, as most law enforcement officials interviewed in the series claim? Is Papini a deeply troubled person who might struggle to separate truth from fiction? Or is she a legitimate kidnapping survivor, someone who cried wolf in the name of self-preservation—and now will never be believed again? Caught in the Lie takes an ambitious and thoughtful look at trauma and shame. My guess is that whatever a given viewer ends up believing says as much about them as it does about what Papini tells the camera.
“You want to open people’s minds, and you want to show them more truth,” Rittenmeyer says. “When you show two people of different mindsets the same thing, and they both walk away with different outcomes, I feel like, Okay, nailed it.”
“Do you think that this film is going to do more harm than good for me?” Papini asks in the final moments of the series. That’s a great question, one that leads back to another question we see Papini ask Rittenmeyer—and everyone watching: “How truthful are you? Have you ever lied?” In a world in which some liars go unpunished—or are celebrated, even—Papini’s fury at not being believed might not be forgivable. But it is, at least, a little understandable.
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