Sherri Papini was charged last week with lying about being kidnapped while jogging and tortured before she managed to break free in 2016.
Now, a man who claims he once dated Papini says he’s not a bit surprised she’s in hot water. He also hopes to clear his name following her arrest.
“She’s a compulsive liar,” Shauhin Davari told Inside Edition. “She would not talk to you for three or four days, and then all of a sudden there’d be some fantastical story about what happened.”
Davari claims that he dated Papini as a youth counselor at age 20. He was only 15 years old.
“In retrospect, sure, tons of red flags — that she was a counselor that was going out with a 15-year-old kid,”Davari said.
Now 35, the college professor says Papini’s lies were never-ending — for example, he says she kept insisting she was a skilled surfer.
“I surfed all the time when I was 15, 16 years old,” he said. “It’s something that I really enjoyed doing. And she told me that she surfed as well. There was always an excuse as to why she couldn’t go surf. And she had to have her surfboard that was at her house, but didn’t have any pictures.”
Davari also said that there was an unknown medical condition.
“She was faking a heart condition at one point, and eventually, not only me, but a bunch of people figured out that that was not true,”Davari
So when Davari heard that Papini was kidnapped in 2016, he was skeptical.
“I was like, there’s no way. She’s fine. I promise you she’s fine. There’s just no chance that she got kidnapped,”He stated.
Papini was last Thursday arrested and charged with faking an abduction that riveted the U.S. almost six years ago. After her husband reported her missing, she was discovered wandering around, bruised, and branded.
Papini claimed she was kidnapped in Mexico by two Hispanic ladies who placed her in a closet with buckets containing kitty litter for her use as a toilet. She said that they had a chain tied around her waist.
However, cops believe Papini was in fact hiding at her ex-boyfriend’s Costa Mesa residence the entire time. Authorities say that Papini demanded her ex-boyfriend punch her in the face to support her claim of kidnapping. He refused. Papini then allegedly hit her head in the bathtub and on the bathroom floor.
According to authorities, the ex-boyfriend also told them that Papini asked him to name her.
Davari claims he has been wrongly identified by the ex-boyfriend who allegedly concealed Papini.
“I want to stop people from thinking I am the guy who hid her or helped or had any contact with her,”Davari stated.
Papini was charged with mail fraud and making false statements to federal law enforcement officers. If she is convicted of both, she faces a maximum sentence of 25 years.
