The August 2020 interview was structured to present Papini with the evidence and observe her response. Keith was present for at least part of the session.
Her responses to the disclosure of the Reyes DNA match, as documented in reporting on the case, followed a pattern of deflection and denial. She said there was “no way” the DNA was Reyes’s. She characterized Reyes as someone who loved her, who would never be part of anything that implicated her in a fraud. She acknowledged, when pressed, that she had had contact with other men and that she had engaged in flirtatious communications. She maintained the essential structure of her kidnapping account.
She also made a specific statement that investigators and subsequent reporters noted for its revealing quality: she said that there was “no way” it could be Reyes because he had shared with her details “nobody else would know.” The phrasing was taken by investigators as an implicit acknowledgment that she and Reyes were in closer contact than she had previously admitted, while simultaneously being deployed as a deflection from the implications of the DNA evidence.
Keith Papini, present for the confrontation, walked out of the room at one point. He told investigators afterward that he had been “the idiot husband who stayed around the whole time.” The statement captured his position: he had spent years believing an account that he had now been told, with DNA evidence, was fabricated. He had publicly supported his wife. He had organized searches. He had given interviews to People magazine and other outlets characterizing her as a warrior and a devoted mother who had been victimized by strangers. All of it, as he now understood, had been built on a lie.