Sherri Papini, the California mom who rose to fame for a kidnapping hoax in 2016, accused her ex-husband and sister of engaging in “inappropriate” behavior.
On Wednesday’s episode of The Viall Files podcast, Papini revealed that her ex-husband, Keith, and sister, Sheila, began developing a “really inappropriate relationship” during her kidnapping scandal.
“She was very involved with being on camera, just as Keith was, and then she started developing a really inappropriate relationship with Keith,” Papini claimed. “And then they got really close and they still are really close.”
“I would say it’s a highly inappropriate relationship,” she added.
Papini claimed that she was kidnapped by two masked Hispanic women while out for a jog in Redding, California, alleging that they branded her and kept her chained in a bedroom for 22 days in 2016.
Six years later, she admitted to lying about the whole ordeal, agreeing to pay the government $300,000 in restitution and receive an 18-month prison sentence for lying to federal law enforcement and mail fraud. She ultimately only served less than a year.
But in May, Papini switched up her story again, claiming in her four-part docuseries, Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie, that she was actually kidnapped, but by her ex-boyfriend James Reyes.
Now Papini is back with a new bombshell claim, alleging that she believed a “lot of inappropriate things” happened between Keith and Sheila, “a lot of things that I’ve seen.”
When asked by co-host Nick Viall if she thought there was a “romantic relationship starting” between her ex-husband and Sheila, she replied “I do.”
“I think that there’s a lot of inappropriate things that have happened between Keith and Sheila and a lot of things that I’ve seen,” she said.
The mother-of-two recalled finding a home video of Keith and Sheila that she wanted to include in her 2025 docuseries, but ultimately chose to omit from the show.
“I had this really cool home video that I had that I was hoping would end up into the film where you see Keith and Sheila engaging physically, in a way. Then you hear my dad in the background go, ‘Oh God,’” she said.
Papini admitted that “Sheila and I were never close,” saying that the two “don’t have a very good relationship.”
“We were close for a short period of time,” she recalled. “When the abduction happened, and she started getting on the news with Keith and started getting highly involved with everything, that’s when she suddenly became a part of my life.”
She said that she doesn’t talk to Sheila anymore.
Keith filed for divorce from Papini after she took her plea deal in 2022. The two met in middle school but lost touch after Papini’s family moved away. They reconnected in 2006 and got married three years later, going on to have two kids, Violet and Tyler, together.
He told TV Insider in June 2024 that his relationship with Papini was “really non-existent” at that point, the two only communicating through messages. He went on to credit Sheila for being a “huge” source of comfort for him.
“I think Sheila, her sister, was a huge, amazing source for me. We’re still close. She almost made it like, ‘You need to really cut her out because she’s going to continue this,’” he said.
“She knows that I love her. I mean, this is my wife. Obviously, I was very dedicated. I didn’t want this,” he added. “I always wanted to be her husband and have our family. I think [Sheila] saw that she would just continue to manipulate me.”
Keith went on to say that cutting Papini out of his life was like lifting “a weight off my shoulders.”
In an interview with People that same month, Keith said that “at the end of the day, you feel like if you can trust anyone, it’s your partner in life. But I was wrong.”
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