Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie

A pathological liar, without remorse, in love with herself gets glazed by lip-ring lawyers and a "pick-me" sister in law who is obviously in love with her.

Everyone who is certain of her innocence after talking with her has never experienced a pathological liar.

Even her mother doesn't believe her.

It is insufferable watching a woman spend 90% of her camera time posing for epic and flattering camera angles to try to get a disbelieving public to please believe her.

Sorry, Sherri. Not buying it. Save your lies for the sycophants and the producers looking to make a buck off of your narcissistic lunacy. Enough already.

It's like someone at HBO went "wait what if we took the opposite stance on this" just for the sake of keeping it relevant and squeezing more money out of it. The production costs are low for documentaries, so they're able to get a lot of money out of just having some people talk about stuff ad nauseam.

But I've followed this case pretty closely. I've watched the interviews with police and FBI. This documentary leaves a lot of details out just for the sake of the narrative. Which is insane. And kind of unfair to the dude she manipulated to drive all the way up to Redding from Southern California just to pick her up and entertain her dumb ideas. They left out her internet searches for like human trafficking and branding.

Anyway, the pacing and style is really good. But this is just a money grab for HBO. Don't waste your time.

This documentary is classic case study of how to spot a liar. Sherri's own words and mannerisms during this interview make it pretty obvious when she is telling the truth and when she is not. Often she will start embellishing an answer that should be straight forward. Also everyone is to blame but herself. She plays the pity card well which sucks in a lot of people. I do not know where the psychiatrist featured in this film got his degree but he seems extremely gullible. This doc does a good job of challenging her on many aspects of the case. Every time she is challenged the answers just do not add up. Anyway, its up to each person to make their own assessment but from my perspective this documentary made her look even more guilty and even more of a liar.

I realized something from watching this crap that I didn't understand before. I knew she was a pathological liar. I did not know that she is evil. I was actually shocked by how purely evil and destructive she is. If she had just kept her mouth shut - only her ex-husband, Keith, would have known that part. Now the world knows.

I could write a book on how everything she says in this documentary is either a lie or insane. But just take this for example: Crazy Sherri takes the extreme step of secretly taping her and Keith's interaction. In part 2 she plays the most egregious one of those exchanges. All it demonstrated was that Keith, calm but firm, fully has her number and job one for him is to protect their children from HER.

And Sherri has this crazy attorney who was gang raped and talks about her need to "escape", understandably, from that event. She draws a parallel between her trauma and her need to escape from it and Sherri's trauma and Sherri's need to escape from it. The attorney ironically, and stupidly, doesn't realize that Sherri caused ALL of the trauma that she went through, and is responsible for ALL of the trauma that her family experienced, and therefore is the "rapist" in this scenario.

At the end, she asks the off-camera documentarian: "Do you think this will do more harm than good to me?" Hmm...she's starting to catch on.

I'm don't care to spend another minute on this review. But someone should go into the questionable ethics of the makers of this disaster movie using an unstable sociopath who is incapable of saying no to the project, and also incapable of doing anything but revealing, through her own words, how destructive and dangerous she is.

While the documentary is well-produced and covers the timeline thoroughly, I found myself walking away with more doubts than answers, not about the facts of the case, but about the narrative some of her supporters continue to push. The legal outcome was clear: she pleaded guilty and was sentenced to prison. However, where the documentary stumbles are in its attempt to give a platform to voices who still, for some reason, see her as a victim. Several friends, acquaintances, and even character witnesses speak on her behalf, painting a picture of a woman who was misunderstood, troubled, or perhaps manipulated by forces we don't fully see. But for the viewer, these testimonies don't carry much weight. They feel more like emotional rationalizations than evidence-based defenses. There's a notable lack of hard proof from those defending her. Much of it comes across as speculative or anecdotal "she wasn't like that" "she wouldn't do something like this". Maybe there is, but the show doesn't offer any compelling reason to believe so. It leans heavily on emotion and personality-based arguments rather than providing a meaningful counter-narrative supported by facts. Even after watching the entire documentary, I didn't walk away believing Sherri was a victim. If anything, her actions had very real consequences. It still does, with her finger pointing to her parents, ex boyfriend and ex husband. It doesn't clear her name. In the end, Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie is worth watching for anyone interested in modern true crime. Just don't expect every voice in the documentary to make sense or sway your judgment. For me, the story remains what it always seemed: a calculated deception, wrapped in confusion, and followed by a trail of people still trying to justify the unjustifiable.