Sherri Papini disappeared while on a run around her Shasta County neighborhood in 2016. Twenty-two days later, she returned beaten, bound and branded, claiming that her kidnappers spoke Spanish and that one of them had long curly hair, thin eyebrows and a thick accent.On Thursday, authorities arrested Papini, 39, charging her with lying to federal agents in faking her abduction and defrauding a California victims compensation fund of more than $30,000 meant for therapy and other costs. She faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.The racial undertones behind the case are hard to ignore for many who were put on high alert after Papini shared her story about mysterious, menacing Latina abductors.“Saying that these two Hispanic women kidnapped her, and then for all the lies that came out of the story — it’s just too much,” said Araceli Gutierrez, a coaching and business consultant who works with Latinas in Northern California. “All this falsification in her story, it’s just nasty and disturbing.” In Sherri Papini’s telling, two Latina women held her at gunpoint and kept her in a small closet during three weeks of captivity.(Shasta County Sheriff’s Office) Gutierrez, who is also a radio host with the bilingual station Stereo Salvaje in Tehama County, said Papini’s story fed into racist tropes and was especially incendiary coming in November 2016, after Donald Trump had made offensive remarks about Mexican people throughout his presidential campaign.“The Papini story just gave a lot of people reason to believe in Trump’s rhetoric,” Gutierrez said. “It really sowed division.”As Papini told it, two Latina women held her at gunpoint and kept her in a small closet during three weeks of captivity. Investigators say she was actually spending time with an ex-boyfriend in Orange County, whom she had asked to come pick her up in Northern California.Papini claimed her kidnappers drove a dark SUV and made her lie down in the back, saying her hips became sore after lying prone for over 40 minutes. In a 55-page affidavit filed Thursday in federal court, prosecutors said her ex-boyfriend picked her up in a rented sports car. She slipped into the back seat and at one point took a nap as he drove her to Southern California.She told investigators that her kidnappers played “really annoying Mexican music” and that she heard slivers of a plan to sell her to someone in law enforcement as part of a human-trafficking deal. During the time she was missing, prosecutors said, she never left her ex-boyfriend’s home in Orange County.“Ever since 2016, many of our Latino/Hispanic residents were forced to feel like the criminals in a twisted scheme that never, ever happened,” Shasta County resident Alan Phillips, who is part Latino and part Indigenous, wrote in an email. Many Latinos in the community avoided walking in pairs or traveling together in a van for fear they might appear suspicious because of Papini’s story, Phillips said.“They were sent into shock during a time of already growing and rampant anti-immigrant and [anti-]people-of-color politicking and hatred,” Phillips said. Investigators said they looked into whether there were any racial motivations behind Papini’s kidnapping story. A 2007 blog post signed by Sherri Graeff, which is Papini’s maiden name, told a story about her getting into fights with Latina girls because she was “drug-free, white and proud of my blood and heritage.”Papini told investigators she did not write the post and described it as “awful,” according to the affidavit. Investigators did not say whether they tracked down the post’s author.What was clear, according to the affidavit, was that Papini had a reputation of lying. Several men who had dated her told investigators that she fabricated stories about being the victim of abuse in her home.Shauhin Davari dated Papini when he was 15 and she was 20. He was not interviewed by federal investigators but spoke to reporters about their relationship, telling the Sacramento Bee on Thursday that Papini was a habitual liar.“She was allergic to the truth,” Davari later told The Times. “I can’t even really explain it. She would lie about absolutely anything. Even stuff that was irrelevant.”Months before her disappearance, Papini was in contact with the unnamed ex-boyfriend who investigators say brought her to Costa Mesa, according to court documents. The ex-boyfriend told investigators that he helped Papini “run away” and that she said her husband, Keith, beat and raped her. She told her ex-boyfriend that the police in Shasta County refused to help her, but local law enforcement said there were no records of domestic abuse reports from the Papini home.While Papini stayed at her ex-boyfriend’s home in Costa Mesa, search parties in Shasta County scoured the wilderness and hiking trails looking for the mother of two. The community was on edge.“I love to run by myself. When that kidnapping story went down, there were many sleepless nights,” said singer-songwriter Erin Friedman, who lives south of Redding in Cottonwood. “I was worried about her and her kids. It put a crimp into the joy of being outside by yourself at the time.”Friedman bought pepper spray and took it with her during her runs around Shasta County’s riverfront trails. Learning that investigators said none of Papini’s story was real has left Friedman and others in disbelief.“It seemed like such a kick to the teeth to a community that didn’t deserve to be treated like that,” Friedman said. “She stabbed our community in the back with every step she took.”Papini is accused of hitting herself to create bruises and burning herself on her arms to support her story — injuries that her ex-boyfriend said she inflicted on herself around the time he drove her back to Northern California. Federal investigators said he brought her back because she said she missed her children.Papini’s family issued a statement Thursday through a public relations firm saying that they were “appalled” by the way she was arrested and that she was “ambushed” by law enforcement in front of her children. At a Friday court appearance, she was ordered detained as a flight risk, and she remains jailed with a hearing set for Tuesday to determine whether she can be released.“If requested, Sherri would have fully complied and come to the police station, as she has done multiple times before, where this could have been handled in a more appropriate way,” the family’s statement said. “Sherri and Keith have cooperated with law enforcement’s requests despite repeated attempts to unnecessarily pit them against each other, empty threats to publicly embarrass them and other conduct that was less than professional. We are confused by several aspects of the charges and hope to get clarification in the coming days.”The firm did not respond to requests for an interview.Up until May 2018, Keith Papini called federal investigators with updates from his wife as she revealed more details about her supposed captors. In the final update, he said his wife remembered one of her kidnappers trying to pour a sticky substance down her throat. He said she “wiped her mouth off with her underwear” and then fell asleep, leaving the substance on her underwear, according to the affidavit.Forensic analysis revealed an unknown man’s DNA on Papini’s underwear. In March 2020, investigators who had requested a familial DNA search received a hit identifying a potential relative, leading them to the person whose DNA was found on Papini’s underwear. The person was her ex-boyfriend.