When the truth became clear, Keith Papini’s described response was a combination of humiliation and grief. He told investigators he had been “the idiot husband who stayed around the whole time.” He said she had “committed to the lie every single day.” He said she had “taken advantage of everybody’s kindness.”
He filed for legal separation on March 3, 2022 — the same day Papini was arrested. He filed for divorce and sole custody of their two children in April 2022, within days of her guilty plea. His decision to seek sole custody was noted in reporting as an indication of the severity of the breakdown in their relationship and his concerns about their children’s wellbeing.
In a June 2024 interview, more than two years after the arrest, Keith said he and Sherri were still working through a custody arrangement for their children, who were then approximately nine and eleven years old. He described the ongoing legal process as one more dimension of an experience that had not ended when the criminal case ended. He said the ordeal still haunted him. He expected it always would.
He denied, in interviews after the hoax was exposed, that he had ever physically or mentally abused Sherri. The allegation she had made to Reyes — that Keith was abusing her — was, in Keith’s account, entirely false. He described the false abuse allegation as a specific injury on top of all the others, something that struck at his identity and his relationship to his children and community in a way that the other deceptions, extensive as they were, did not.