If you’ve seen Hulu’s new docuseries Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini, you might be wondering where Sherri is now.
We asked the documentary filmmakers behind the Hulu show and they told us what they know below.
The series takes a deep dive into the mysterious case of Sherri Papini, the wife and mother who disappeared in 2016 while out jogging in Redding, California. A frenzied search ensued, making headlines across the world. So when Sherri reappeared three weeks later saying that she’s been kidnapped and held captive, police began an intense search for her captors that lasted for six years.
But the truth of the story is something no one expected — not even her then-husband, Keith Papini, who sits for extensive first-hand interviews in this enthralling docuseries.
Below, we speak with director Michael Beach Nichols (Wrinkles the Clown, Welcome to Leith) and executive producer Erin Lee Carr (Britney vs Spears, The Ringleader: The Case of the Bling Ring) about the making of the series, and where Papini is now, and how they approached this story in the post-Me Too era.
Perfect Wife Filmmakers Tell Us Where Sherri Papini Is Now and More
MovieMaker: How much do you know about where Sherri is now?
Michael Beach Nichols: She’s living in Northern California, I think in a town a little bit outside of Redding. She has a new boyfriend. Her and Keith are involved in a custody battle right now. I think she can see them [her children] once a week. I think she wants shared custody, and Keith is pushing back against that, rightfully so. And yeah, she’s still — basically, it sounds like she’s trying to tell the same story that she’s been telling since 2016, that she was abducted.
MovieMaker: Where did your journey towards making The Perfect Wife begin?
Erin Lee Carr: I had been working with Hulu on something. And they were like, we have this crazy story. And we know this production company named Marwar has gotten access to Keith Papini. I was intimately familiar with the Sherri Papini case. It felt like as soon as it started happening, I was like, I gotta do this. And then I reached out to Sherri, basically, when it first started happening… Hulu contacted me, they’re like, this is in the works.
I was doing a project for them. So I was like, who will hit this out of the park and really understand the male psyche as it relates to this story, this family, deception? And I am lucky enough to know Mike Beach Nichols through the festival circuit. Then we got to work together. And I was like, okay, Mike has to do this.
Michael Beach Nichols: I had never actually heard of this story before, which is just kind of, I don’t really know how it slipped under my radar. But for whatever reason, it did. When Erin told me about it, I was just completely blown away. I saw all of the archival that existed, all of these police interrogations and FBI confrontations, and when I saw all of those interviews, all that archival video, I just was like, this is incredible.
This is such an amazing opportunity. We can approach this story in a lot of really interesting ways and really make the audience sort of feel what it was like to be kind of inside Keith’s head for this six year period of time, which was not a great place to be.
MovieMaker: Why did you feel like now was the right time to tell this story?
Michael Beach Nichols: Speaking for Keith, he just got a divorce in 2022. So, up until very recently, he was still in this. So he’s just come out the other side. We started production in 2023. So for Keith, it was really vital for him to, to get his story out there, because he is so fearful that Sherri will be believed, because he believed her. The FBI believed her. Law enforcement believed her, the wider sort of world believed her.
And so he really wants to have his story on record, as almost like a defense against what she may do, because she is still telling a lie right now. She’s still maintaining this lie. And so for Keith, he’s really worried about custody issues with his children. And so for him, his children are the stakes in wanting to get his story out there. And so that was a big part of his motivation, I think.
MovieMaker: How did you approach telling a story like this in an era where it’s so important for women to be believed?
Erin Lee Carr: I mean, it goes against every fiber of my being, right? This is actually what I stand for, is women believing women, telling women’s stories. My whole career is about telling women’s stories. So this is why potentially why I’d not feel able to tell it, right? I have a certain bias. But I did know what the deal was. But I think understanding that there’s a really, really, really, really small percentage of women that lie about being harmed, a nd we don’t want this to ever feel like the precedent — it’s the exception to the rule.
I knew that Mike was going to be able to turn it… it wasn’t going to be believing this man or this woman, but understanding the very nature of deception and self-deception. And I think that’s where we really sort of zoomed in. And also evidence, the facts, all the archive, all these things to make sure we were doing our due diligence. But obviously, it’s a really complex and tangled part of it, specifically for me as a filmmaker, and I felt really grateful that Michael got that nuance and was really able to prove that it’s the exception to the rule.
Michael Beach Nichols: This was something that we went in very, very delicately, and Erin and I had a lot of conversations just during pre-production really sort of assessing everything that we knew to make sure that we had had all the facts, essentially. Because there were a lot of allegations against Keith coming in from, police calls to neighbors and friends of Sherri’s, and those were really alarming at the very beginning, especially before we really knew Keith and before we knew Sherri’s sort of historical pattern where she has a history of making allegations against partners in her life that are then proved to be just complete fabrications.
So once we established that there was this pattern that she had been doing this for her entire life, it became — we were able to trust Keith fully and to understand that this was something that Keith was a victim of Sherri, and Sherri is definitely the exception. I don’t think there’s a lot of people at all like Sherry Papini.
The Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini is now streaming on Hulu.
Main Image: Keith and Sherri Papini pictured in The Perfect Wife, Hulu
