"Kidnap Victim" Sherri Papini: Another White Woman Throws Minorities Under the Bus
Nothing says "I'm innocent" like paying off your credit cards with people's donations.
On November 2, 2016, thirty-four-year-old mother of two Sherri Papini went for a run and disappeared. Using the “Find my Phone” application, her husband Keith Papini located her phone and ear buds by the side of the road, approximately one mile from their home in Redding, California. The ear buds had strands of Sherri’s long blonde hair wrapped around them.
The story made international headlines. Suddenly, the whole world was searching for Sherri Papini, the beautiful, blue-eyed wife of a Best Buy salesman. Her neighbors in Redding combed the area for any clues to her disappearance and circled the wagons around Keith, under scrutiny as the odds-on favorite for having done away with her— despite having passed a polygraph—as well as the couple’s young children. There was even a GoFundMe, which raised more than $49,000. Local law enforcement organized multiple search parties in an ongoing effort to find this very white woman from a very white city in an exceedingly white part of California.
Twenty-two days later, Papini reappeared about 150 miles south of Redding, stumbling along a highway around 4 a.m. She was painfully emaciated, purple with bruises, and branded on her right shoulder. She had a chain around her waist, her nose was broken, and her signature blonde hair had been brutally chopped. According to authorities, she weighed all of 87 pounds and had been subjected to weeks of horrendous physical abuse.
Papini claimed she’d been abducted at gunpoint by two Hispanic women, one in her 20s or 30s, the other between 40 and 50, who hid the lower halves of their faces behind masks and mostly spoke Spanish. The older woman, Papini reported, was “really mean,” with breath that smelled like sweetened coffee, which is a remarkable detail considering that the woman purportedly wore a mask. The two women chained Papini in a room with boarded-up windows and blasted her day and night with ear-splitting music. Was it a ransom situation? Some form of human trafficking? Papini didn’t know.
Home now, Papini received $30,000 in state assistance for kidnapping victims and another $127,000 in social security. She was shaken but grateful to be back with her husband and children. The Shasta County sheriff continued to aggressively investigate the whereabouts of “two Hispanic females armed with a handgun and driving a dark-colored SUV.” Detectives issued almost 20 search warrants, sifting through cellphone records, bank accounts, email and social media profiles. They even traveled out of state to follow up on leads. But the truth remained frustratingly elusive.
Then on March 3, 2022, Sherri Papini was arrested by the FBI at her children’s piano practice. In a 53-page indictment, she was accused of lying to federal agents and faking her own kidnapping. It turns out she hadn’t been abducted at all; she’d run away to spend time with an ex-boyfriend. Six weeks after her arrest, Papini signed a plea deal admitting that she had masterminded the hoax. What seems to have been forgotten in all the excitement is that she masterminded a racial hoax.
I have a huge problem with white women fabricating a crime and then blaming it on a person of color. When a segment of people who are treated like second-class citizens (women) turns around and perpetuates that kind of rancid behavior on other people who are also treated like second or even third-class citizens, it really puts my back up. I’m sure it puts a lot of backs up, but I’m not hearing even a peep about the Papini case.
What Sherri Papini did was no different than what happened in any number of racial hoaxes: Emmett Till, Breana Harmon’s abduction, the Central Park Five, Jason Stokes’ Black Lives Matter arson, or runaway bride Jennifer Willbanks, who claimed she’d been abducted by a Hispanic man and white women who took turns raping her in the back of a van. Willbanks served no time in jail. Neither will Papini, I suspect, since she has copped to one measly count of lying to a federal officer and another one for mail fraud. They’re going to tell her she’s been very naughty and send her home.
The Papini case was cracked using heretofore unidentified DNA found on her clothing, but even then, it wasn’t until 2019 that they were able to use the DNA forensically. The FBI requested a “familial DNA search” (hello, 23 and Me), a database that afforded them access to offender DNA.
Then in March of 2020, investigators discovered a potential male relative of the unknown male whose DNA was found on Papini’s clothing. That family member was related to an ex-boyfriend of Papini. On June 9, investigators collected a bottle of Honest Honey Green Tea from the trash outside the ex-boyfriend’s apartment, found a match, and then brought him in for questioning. Yes, he was with Papini during the months of her alleged abduction. Yes, she’d told him her husband was abusing her. Yes, she insisted he make a trip to Hobby Lobby in Huntington Beach to buy the wood-burning tool they used to “brand” her. Yes, she purposely starved herself. Yes, those bruises were self-inflicted—she’d demanded he get his hockey stick and repeatedly bank a puck into her shins. No, they hadn’t slept together in the weeks she was with him. She’d finally admitted that she missed her family and told him to drop her off along Interstate 5 with a pillowcase over her head.
In the indictment, prosecutors say her staged kidnapping had been in the works for more than a year. This wasn’t a bored young housewife looking for attention. She’d planned this. Even at her trial, Papini offered no explanation—indeed, she seemed as baffled by her behavior as anyone else.
This writer suspects she felt stymied by her husband’s lack of earning power. Best Buy wages weren’t enough to keep her in Lululemon. In a society where it doesn’t matter what you’re famous for because there’s money to be made from it, regardless, Papini saw her opportunity to burnish her image as the wholesome blonde MILF while at the same time blasting a racist dog-whistle.
“I feel very sad,” she tearfully told Senior U.S. District Judge William Shubb at her trial.
Papini is due to be sentenced on July 11, but prosecutors have already agreed to recommend a sentence “on the low end” of the range—this is for a premeditated crime that traumatized her children, bilked the system, and cast deep suspicion on her husband, not to mention the countless hours that were wasted trying to find her. I got ten bucks that says she’ll wind up with time served.
Meanwhile, Black citizen Pamela Moses was just released from jail for the crime of voting.
There are too many Sherri Papinis in this world. Too many white women, even white feminists, who think nothing of railroading their minority sisters. Every time a woman stages a large-scale lie, we all pay the price. Papini made us look like greedy, racist sluts. If we, as women, want credibility and respect in this lopsided, sexist world, we have no choice but to be twice as virtuous as anyone else.
As the great Angela Davis says, “In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist. We must be anti-racist.”
And I want to hear from you! Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section.
Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin
Another absorbing and insightful piece, Stacey. You know, her impending light sentence only galls me because as you have so accurately pointed out, a woman of color would almost certainly not be afforded such compassion. Barring something as heinous as rape or murder, or some such violent crime, I'm actually in favor of non-punitive sentencing. BUT, I'm bitterly opposed to the unequal application of justice for people of color, that's the real problem. And although in principle I'd approve of Papini's sentence in practice I can't, because a woman of color convicted of the same crime would not receive such a forgiving sentence. The ugly irony here is that racism necessitates such a deviation of my principles, that to balance the scales of justice, I am obligated to be angry about a sentence that my sense of proportional justice would otherwise support; this is a truly rancid paradox.
She won't serve one day in jail. Let a black woman do something like this, number one no one would care enough to look for her. Let them find out she committed a hoax, she would be in jail and fined.