'She Has Serious Issues': Ex-Boyfriend Reacts To Sherri Papini's Charges
COSTA MESA (CBSLA) — Even though it has been 20 years, a Costa Mesa man said he can't forget how Sherri Papini lied to him during the brief time they dated in the early 2000s.
"She definitely had a compulsive lying habit," said the man who did not want to be identified.
The pair met in Northern California where he was a student and she was a youth leader. He recounted the times he would ask her to go surfing and how she claimed she had a heart condition at the time.
"Eventually found out that was a lie," he said.
Officials accuse Papini of lying to authorities after she claimed to be kidnapped at gunpoint, beaten and branded by two women in 2016.
Even though the man that spent time with her in the early 2000s had not seen Papini since high school he said he was suspicious when her apparent abduction made national headlines.
"I remember pointing it out to my brother and just saying there's no way," he said. "There's no way that she's missing. She is perfectly fine I guarantee it."
According to the FBI, for the three weeks Papini was missing, she was in fact hiding out with an ex-boyfriend in Costa Mesa. According to the complaint, an Honest Honey Green Tea bottle found in a Costa Mesa trashcan matched unknown male DNA collected from Papini's clothing and eventually helped officials track down her whereabouts.
"It is crazy to find out now that she was hiding out at an ex-boyfriend's house in Costa Mesa," the man said. "I was living in Newport Beach at the time. Definitely very, very odd."
In an admission found in court documents, the ex-boyfriend who helped Papini told agents "she had something planned up" and he tried to help her get away from her husband, to be a good friend.
"I cannot even imagine what [her husband] is going through — what the kids are going through," the man reliving the strange coincidence said. "So my heart goes out to him and her kids and to her. She has clearly serious issues."