Sherri Papini's Ex-Husband Claims She Purposely Made Their Kids Sick With Rubbing Alcohol
New allegations about the staged disappearance of Sherri Papini have come to light following the rollout of a new docuseries about the infamous 2016 case.
In Hulu’s “Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini,” Keith Papini claims that his ex-wife forced their two children, Tyler and Violet, to “breathe in” rubbing alcohol in order to deliberately make them sick.
“One day, after Sherri was already in prison, as I go and lay my daughter to bed, I push off the bed and I kind of make a little grunt sound, like ‘Ah!’ You know, I was a little bit sore,” Keith Papini said in the series, according to People. “Violet, she was like, ‘Daddy, are you sick?’ and she goes, ‘Why don’t you do mommy’s trick?’”
When Keith Papini asked Violet to clarify what she meant, he said his daughter told him, “Well, you just breathe in this rubbing alcohol.”
“She goes to the bathroom, she knows right where the rubbing alcohol is,” he added. “She wads up a thing of toilet paper and just soaks it and then hands it to me to breathe.”
Watch the “Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini” trailer below.
As to how often Sherri Papini made such a demand of her children, Keith Papini said Violet claimed it happened “every single day” before her mother took her to the doctor.
“Find out, Sherri would soak rags of alcohol and put it in a Ziploc bag and tie a string around their neck onto the Ziploc bag so that ... they would continue to smell the fumes to make them not feel good,” he explained.
Sherri Papini appeared to vanish without a trace while on a morning jog near the Redding, California, home she shared with Keith in November 2016. The 34-year-old reappeared just over three weeks later on Thanksgiving Day after supposedly escaping from two women that she said kidnapped her and held her captive.
In March 2022, however, Sherri Papini was arrested by the FBI after authorities determined she’d actually been staying with a former boyfriend, James Reyes, in Costa Mesa, California, during the time she’d purportedly gone missing.
She also was found to have caused a number of self-inflicted injuries to make her story more believable, and defrauded the state out of more than $30,000 in victim assistance money after returning home.
After Sherri Papini signed a plea deal admitting to the hoax about a month after her arrest, Keith Papini filed for divorce. His ex was then sentenced to 18 months in prison.
“I think she wanted me to be her knight in shining armor and run to her, and I think she wanted to plan a fake kidnapping, but in her version, I was supposed to find her,” he told ABC News last week, after noting that his former spouse has never apologized or shown any remorse for her actions.
“Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini” is out now on Hulu.
