Yahoo News Sherri Papini's Ex-Husband Keith Says He Doesn't Think She's Able to Understand 'How Much Pain She Caused'
"I think she likes it when people feel for her and look at her as a victim," Keith Papini said
Keith Papini is continuing to speak out about his ex-wife, Sherri Papini.
In an interview with Fox News, Keith said that he doesn't think his ex-wife is able to understand "how much pain she caused" after she lied for years about being kidnapped in 2016.
"To be honest, I don’t think she’s capable of seeing what she did and the lives that it affected, the ripple effect, how much pain she caused so many people," he told the outlet.
"I always think about all the people [who tried to help] during those 22 days [she was missing]," Keith continued. "All the kids that probably weren’t allowed to ride their bikes anymore, all the women that probably didn’t go jogging anymore. … I don’t think she has any understanding of how detrimental it was."
Keith also reflected on why he thinks Sherri faked her kidnapping, telling Fox News, "I do believe the core thing would be attention. I think she likes it when people feel for her and look at her as a victim … at anyone’s cost."
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Rich Pedroncelli/AP
Sherri Papini.Sherri’s story made national headlines in 2016. In the years following, authorities and the public began to cast doubt on whether she was really kidnapped and held captive for 22 days, as she claimed.
Back in 2022, after DNA evidence showed she was with her ex-boyfriend at the time she said she was being tortured by two Hispanic women, Sherri pleaded guilty to felony charges of making false statements to federal agents and mail fraud.
For more on the how Sherri Papini's hoax kidnapping, subscribe now to PEOPLE, or pick up this week's issue, on newsstands now.
She was sentenced to 18 months in prison and served a shortened sentence. Sherri is now free and able to have supervised visits with her children Violet and Tyler once a month.
Keith and Sherri met in grade school. The former couple lost touch when Sherri and her family moved away, but they rekindled their romance later in life when she moved back in 2006. They married three years later.
Related: Where Is Sherri Papini Now? What to Know About Her Life After 2016 Kidnapping Hoax
In an exclusive conversation with PEOPLE, Keith opened up about his ex-wife's saga and how he came to grips with her history of lying.
“At the end of the day, you feel like if you can trust anyone, it’s your partner in life. But I was wrong,” the father of two said. "She definitely had a history of exaggerating. And I would say at this point, lying."
“There's a lot of things I didn't question. I grew up with a lovely mother and father. I was never around a dishonest person to that extent growing up. And when we first got together and she told me things, I believed her. I wouldn't know why I wouldn't," Keith continued. "She told me she went to college down in Orange County, she told me she was in ballet. She told me she used to sell cars at a dealership and all these different things, and I wasn't going to go calling her around to verify that those were real."
He added, "But there were definitely some things where I'm like, ‘Hey, the timeline doesn't match up. Like, you said you did this or you lived at this spot, but this doesn't make sense to me because the timeline's not right.’ And she always had a way of just skirting around it, and I just kind of went along with it."
Keith and Sherri’s story is the subject of a new three-part Hulu series, Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini, which began streaming on June 20.
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