Sherri Papini is back in court territory, this time in a custody trial with Keith Papini that puts her children’s future at the center of the case. The fight comes years after she admitted that her 2016 disappearance and claim of kidnapping were a hoax, a confession that still shapes every part of her life now.
Papini disappeared in 2016 and reappeared three weeks later, telling authorities she had been abducted and tortured. Investigators arrested her in 2022 after finding inconsistencies in her testimony, and she later pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud and one count of making false statements. In September 2022, she was sentenced to 18 months in prison, 36 months of supervised release and $309,902 in restitution.
The 2025 custody fight matters because it lands after years of legal fallout and because Papini’s public return has brought the case back into view. She spoke publicly about the saga for the first time in the Investigation Discovery docuseries Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie, where she said the abduction really happened, a claim that clashes with the guilty plea and the criminal case that followed. That tension is now part of the background to a dispute over who gets to make decisions for the children she shares with Keith Papini.
The family split has been moving through the courts for years. Keith Papini filed for divorce on April 20, 2022, and the marriage was dissolved in May 2023, with him granted full custody of their son and daughter. Sherri Papini is allowed monthly one-hour supervised visits with the children, while she remains on supervised release until an undisclosed date in 2026.
Her time after prison has not brought financial closure, either. As of June 2025, she still owed most of the restitution ordered at sentencing. Of the $148,866 she owes to the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office, records obtained by KRCR showed she had returned only $9,119.70. She served 11 months in prison before being released early in August 2023, then was placed in community confinement and released from a halfway house in Sacramento County on September 29, 2023.
The case began as a missing-person search that drew an FBI-assisted hunt for the kidnappers Papini described. It ended as a criminal case built on contradictions in her account and has now turned into something more prosaic, but no less painful: a dispute over children, money and the long shadow of a lie. Keith Papini said in court that he was asking the judge to help protect the children from the negative impact of their mother’s notoriety, and that remains the question hanging over sherri papini now.
