Will the Real SHERRI PAPINI Please Stand Up?

Or maybe sit down. The woman known as the IRL Gone Girl is back to clarify her story again, and while some of us are eager to hear it, others would prefer she disappear

- by CARLA SOSENKO

"I get to use my voice now," Papini says. "It's about stepping in and going, 'Hey, I'm a person. I'm here.""

Sherri Papini’s new memoir — Sherri Papini Doesn't Exist: The Lie That Defined Me, The Media That Destroyed Me, and the Truth That No One Heard — opens, as most memoirs do, with a disclaimer. It says in part that the book, which came out on June 26, “reflects my personal memories, experiences, perceptions, and emotions surrounding real events in my life. While I have made every effort to be truthful to the essence of what I experienced, memory is imperfect, especially under trauma.”

If it were anyone else, you wouldn't think much of it. But this is not anyone else; it’s the woman famously dubbed the real-life Gone Girl, and her memory — and claims about her memory — have not always been reliable or true.

In 2016, Papini disappeared during a jog in Redding, California, where she lived with her husband, Keith, and kids Tyler and Violet, then 4 and 2. She reappeared 22 days later — bound, bruised and branded — with a story about being abducted and brutalized by “two Hispanic women.” By 2022, that story had unraveled, and Papini was arrested and charged with lying to the FBI and mail fraud. She pleaded guilty and admitted that it was her ex-boyfriend James Reyes — with whom she'd been having an emotional affair — who had taken her.

He said he took her at her instruction, telling the FBI and Shasta County police in 2016, “She's a good friend of mine and I didn’t kidnap her... A friend in need asked me for help.” (Us was unable to reach Reyes for comment.) Papini maintained, in her mind and subsequent interviews, including in the June Investigation Discovery docuseries