SACRAMENTO, Calif. — One day after federal prosecutors asked for an eight-month prison sentence for Sherri Papini for her 2016 kidnap hoax, her attorney asked a judge to give the 40-year-old Redding-area woman a one-month sentence in custody with seven more in home detention.
Sacramento attorney William Portanova filed the recommendation Wednesday in federal court in Sacramento in advance of a hearing Monday at which Senior U.S. District Judge William B. Shubb is scheduled to sentence Papini for orchestrating an elaborate fake kidnapping.
Portanova asked Shubb to follow an earlier recommendation by the U.S. Probation Office that would allow Papini to spend one month in custody and seven additional months in “an intensely supervised period of home detention.”
Portanova argued that Papini had a difficult upbringing, writing that “Ms. Papini’s painful early years twisted and froze her in myriad ways,” and that the lies she told after returning from the phony kidnapping built upon themselves.
“Unschooled and unskilled in honest communication, Ms. Papini lost her way early on,” he wrote. "Home life and school were each a separate challenge, as were her attempts at appropriate social interactions.
“Outwardly sweet and loving, yet capable of intense deceit, whether for purposes of situational control or emotional self-protection, Ms. Papini’s chameleonic personalities drove her to simultaneously crave family security and the freedom of youth.”
He wrote that Papini’s life “was painful until she married and began a family of her own.”
“Yet after several years, she persuaded herself to flee the security of her family in pursuit of a nonsensical fantasy ultimately resulting in this awful case,” Portanova wrote in a brief, two-page recommendation. “Returning to her husband and family after three weeks, in her mind, each lie demanded another lie.
“Her unsettled masochism was in full public display when she returned from her fake kidnapping bearing the scars and wounds of her self-inflicted penance. Ms. Papini maintained the lie for years thereafter, terrified that she had actually destroyed the one thing in her life that brought her true love and happiness, her family, desperately praying that the day of discovery would never come.
“Once discovered, she lied again until there was nowhere else to go but to admit the truth of the matter. That day of reckoning has arrived, and anyone who cares to read about it knows the darkest depths of her sickest mind.”
Papini claimed she was taken Nov. 2, 2016, at gunpoint by two Hispanic women while out for a run near her Redding-area home.
She turned up 22 days later on Thanksgiving morning walking on a road in Yolo County, and law enforcement later said she had never been taken, but had convinced an ex-boyfriend to whisk her away to his Costa Mesa apartment for three weeks.
She since has admitted in court that she never was kidnapped, but Assistant U.S. Attorneys Veronica Alegria and Shelley Weger wrote in a seven-page sentencing memo filed late Monday that she has continued to tell some people she was kidnapped and that she must be punished for her actions.
“There needs to be just punishment for her conduct,” they wrote.
Portanova countered that Papini knows the great pain she caused others, including her family. Her husband, Keith, who faithfully maintained that he believed her story, filed for divorce after she was arrested last March and pleaded guilty in April to a count of mail fraud and to lying to the FBI.
“Sherri’s years of denial are now undeniably over,” Portanova wrote. “Her name is now synonymous with this awful hoax. There is no escaping it.
“There is only the hard work of moving forward, however slowly, towards a balanced, open, and honest life. There seems to be little or no chance for Sherri to go backwards now. The lies are out, the guilt admitted, the shame universally seen.
“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.”
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