Sherri Papini, who pleaded guilty in April to mail fraud and lying to a law enforcement official, first claimed that she had been abducted by two Hispanic Women.
Sherri Papini, the California woman who admitted to fabricating her kidnapping and lying to the FBI, was sentenced to 18 months in jail on Monday.
Last Monday, prosecutors suggested that Papini be sentenced to eight months in jail.
Papini was sentenced to jail and 36 months of supervised probation by U.S. District Judge William Shubb. Papini was given until November 8 to surrender.
“A lesser sentence, such as the one month of imprisonment recommended by probation or home detention in lieu of incarceration, is not sufficient to achieve the purposes of sentencing,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum filed September 12 in U.S. District Court for Eastern California.Â
They also suggested three years of supervised release once she served her jail sentence.
Papini, 40, pled guilty to two counts of a 35-count indictment in April, admitting mail fraud and lying to a law enforcement official.
The allegations stemmed not from fabricating her kidnapping but from the lies she proceeded to make years afterwards.
Papini, a Redding mother of two, was apprehended more than five years after she went missing in November 2016. She returned three weeks later, on Thanksgiving, some 145 miles south of where she went missing, with self-inflicted bruises and a brand on her shoulder that she blamed on her abductors.
Papini had informed police that two Hispanic women had kidnapped her. However, authorities discovered male DNA on Papini’s clothing, which led them to her ex-boyfriend, with whom she had been residing throughout the period she was supposed to be away.
Papini’s attorney, William Portanova, stated that she is tormented and shamed and should serve most of her sentence at home.
Probation authorities and Portanova agreed that she should spend one month in jail and seven months under supervised home detention.
“Outwardly sweet and loving, yet capable of intense deceit … Ms Papini’s chameleonic personalities drove her to simultaneously crave family security and the freedom of youth,” Portanova documented in his responding court filing.
So, “in pursuit of a nonsensical vision,” the married mother, according to Portanova, escaped to a previous partner in Southern California, about 600 miles south of her house. He dumped her off near Interstate 5, some 150 miles from her house, after she expressed a desire to return home.
Papini had requested him to strike her, which he refused, but he consented to wielding a hockey stick for her to run into and pelt her with hockey pucks. He also branded her when she requested it.
“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 or tortured,” prosecutors said in the sentencing documents.
“She maintained her hoax and received Social Security and California Victims’ benefits for years, demonstrating that she had no remorse for her actions even after the FBI presented her with evidence of her fraud,” the documents said.
Papini has been ordered to pay restitution to the California Victim Compensation Board, the Social Security Administration, the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office, which led the investigation, and the FBI, totalling more than $300,000.
The government said that an eight-month sentence would deter Papini from attempting such a plan again and deter others from committing fraud.
The sentence is also right, prosecutors said, because Papini’s crimes had “many societal harms such as causing the public to live in fear and possibly causing law enforcement to doubt the veracity of future victims’ claims.”
“An entire community believed the hoax and lived in fear that Hispanic women were roving the streets to abduct and sell women,” prosecutors said.
“She maintained her hoax and received Social Security and California Victims’ benefits for years, demonstrating that she had no remorse for her actions even after the FBI presented her with evidence of her fraud,” the documents said.
