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\u201cI tried so hard to \u2018gotcha\u2019 her,\u201d Nicole Rittenmeyer<\/strong> says. The veteran true-crime filmmaker went into her latest project<\/a>, an ID docuseries called Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie,<\/em> expecting to learn what really happened when Sherri Papini<\/strong> disappeared in 2016. Initially, it seemed that Papini had been kidnapped; later, investigators said<\/a> the whole thing was a hoax cooked up by Papini, with support from her ex-boyfriend James Reyes.<\/strong><\/p>\n The case has already been the subject of another docuseries: the 2024 Hulu production<\/a> Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini,<\/em> featuring interviews with Papini\u2019s then husband, Keith.<\/strong> Papini herself did not participate in Perfect Wife<\/em>\u2014though Michael Beach Nichols,<\/strong> director of Perfect Wife,<\/em> tells Vanity Fair<\/em> that he and his team made repeated efforts to include her in their show. \u201cShe never responded to us,\u201d he says<\/a>. \u201cWe would have loved to have spoken to her, and you always want to speak to everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps her reticence was motivated by her commitment to this new series, which features extensive interviews with Papini. ID president Jason Sarlanis<\/strong> says that Caught in the Lie<\/em> was in the works long before the network was aware of Hulu\u2019s competing property. \u201cIn fairness to them, they told a one-sided story because that\u2019s all they had,\u201d says Rittenmeyer, who has worked with members of the Perfect Wife<\/em> team in the past. As Sarlanis puts it, \u201cThe Hulu project came out before us\u2014but in so many ways, I believe this project is the yin to its yang.\u201d<\/p>\n It might sound counterintuitive, but the Hulu show\u2019s earlier premiere gives Caught in the Lie<\/em> an opportunity to duck a lot of standard true-crime tropes. Papini\u2019s alleged 2016 kidnapping\u2014after reappearing, she initially said she had been taken by two Hispanic women\u2014was national news, as were her 2022 plea deal and prison sentence<\/a> 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,<\/em> which took a chronological approach to the story\u2019s twists and turns.<\/p>\n As such, Caught in the Lie<\/em> 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?<\/p>\n 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\u2019s claims. \u201cI have 1,500 pages of interview transcripts,\u201d Rittenmeyer says, \u201cand every time you go through it, it\u2019s just us kind of hammering her.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet Papini refuses to fully diverge from the story she\u2019s been telling for years now, insisting that she was in fact kidnapped in November of 2016. \u201cI was abducted by my ex-boyfriend, who held me captive for 22 days. There was no consent, and he still did it,\u201d she says, staring straight into the camera.<\/p>\n According to Papini, she initially reconnected with Reyes after he experienced a death in his family, but she says they continued to communicate\u2014with Papini eventually using a secret second phone\u2014as 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n According to Papini, she initially blamed two Hispanic women because naming Reyes as her abductor would have meant publicly revealing that she\u2019d 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\u2014but the fact that she was abducted remains true, she says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n