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## The Plea: April 18, 2022
On April 18, 2022, Sherri Papini appeared in United States District Court in Sacramento and pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements and one count of mail fraud.
The thirty-three additional mail fraud counts were dropped as part of the plea agreement. She admitted to orchestrating the hoax. She acknowledged having provided false information to FBI agents, including during the August 2020 confrontation interview when she had maintained her kidnapping account even after being told that Reyes had spoken to investigators.
In a written statement accompanying the plea, she said she was “deeply ashamed.”
The plea agreement, approved by the court, established the factual basis for sentencing. Prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California — Assistant U.S. Attorneys Veronica M.A. Alegría and Shelley D. Weger — handled the case through the plea and subsequent sentencing.
The formal legal record was now clear: the kidnapping had been a hoax. The two Hispanic women did not exist. The captivity did not happen. The injuries were staged. The claims to the Victim Compensation Board were fraudulent. The statements to federal agents were lies.
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## What the Investigation Found About the Injuries
The forensic and medical examination of Papini’s injuries was one of the clearest investigative threads in the case, and one that investigators cited as generating early skepticism about her account.
The brand on her right shoulder — which she initially said resembled a verse from the book of Exodus — was one of the first elements to generate inconsistency. Her explanations for how it came to be there, and what it signified, shifted across interviews. FBI forensic examiners and medical personnel who examined the wound characterized it as consistent with a controlled application, not with a forced branding.