California 'chameleon' Sherri Papini awaits 2016 kidnapping hoax sentence

Sherri Papini pleaded guilty last spring. Photo / AP

A Northern California mother-of-two faces up to eight months in jail for meticulously faking her own kidnapping so she could go back to a former boyfriend, prompting an intensive three-week, multi-state search before she resurfaced on Thanksgiving Day in 2016.

Sherri Papini, 40, pleaded guilty last spring under a plea bargain that includes paying more than US$300,000 in restitution. Her lawyer says she's troubled and disgraced and should serve most of the sentence at home while prosecutors say it's imperative she spend her full term in prison.

"Papini's kidnapping hoax was deliberate, well-planned, and sophisticated," prosecutors wrote in their court filing. And she was still falsely telling people she was kidnapped, prosecutors said, months after she pleaded guilty in April to staging the abduction and lying to the FBI about it.

"The nation is watching the outcome of Papini's sentencing hearing," Assistant US Attorneys Veronica Alegria and Shelley Weger wrote. "The public needs to know that there will be more than a slap on the wrist for committing financial fraud and making false statements to law enforcement, particularly when those false statements result in the expenditure of substantial resources and implicate innocent people."

Probation officers and Papini's attorney say she should serve one month in custody and seven months in supervised home detention. Senior US District Judge William Shubb is to sentence her after a final hearing in Sacramento federal court.

"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," defence attorney William Portanova wrote in his responding court filing.

So "in pursuit of a nonsensical fantasy," Portanova said the married mother fled to a former boyfriend in Southern California, nearly 960km south of her home in Redding. He dropped her off along Interstate 5 about 240km from her home after she said she wanted to go home.

Passersby found her with bindings on her body, a swollen nose, a blurred "brand" on her right shoulder, bruises and rashes across her body, ligature marks on her wrists and ankles, and burns on her left forearm. All the injuries were self-inflicted, and all designed to support her story that she had been abducted at gunpoint by two Hispanic women while she was out for a run.

The wounds were a manifestation of her "unsettled masochism" and "self-inflicted penance," Portanova wrote. And once she began, "each lie demanded another lie."

Prosecutors said Papini's ruse harmed more than just herself and her family. "An entire community believed the hoax and lived in fear that Hispanic women were roving the streets to abduct and sell women," they wrote.

Prosecutors agreed to seek a sentence on the low end of the sentencing range in exchange for Papini's guilty plea. That was projected to be between eight and 14 months in custody, down from the maximum 25 years for the two charges.

She has offered no rationale for her actions, which stumped even independent mental health experts who said her actions don't conform with any typical diagnosis.

"Papini's painful early years twisted and froze her in myriad ways," Portantino said in arguing for home confinement. With her deception finally revealed, he said, "It is hard to imagine a more brutal public revelation of a person's broken inner self. At this point, the punishment is already intense and feels like a life sentence."

But prosecutors said her "past trauma and mental health issues alone cannot account for all of her actions."

"Papini's planning of her hoax kidnapping was meticulous and began months in advance – it was not merely the reaction to a traumatic childhood," they wrote.

After her arrest in March, Papini received more than US$30,000 worth of psychiatric care for anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. She billed the state's victim compensation fund for the treatment, and now must pay it back as part of her restitution.

As part of the plea agreement, she has agreed to reimburse law enforcement agencies more than US$150,000 for the costs of the search for her and her nonexistent kidnappers, and repay the US$128,000 she received in disability payments since her return.