5 hours ago
3
Survivor season 48 contestant Shauhin Davari has a surprising connection to infamous kidnapping hoaxer Sherri Papini.
Shauhin, 38, revealed to Inside Edition in 2022 that he had dated Sherri, 42, when he was 15 years old and she was a 20-year-old youth counselor. “In retrospect, sure, tons of red flags,” he said. “That she was a counselor that was going out with a 15-year-old.”
Shauhin also called the Redding, California, native a “compulsive liar,” explaining, “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.”
The Costa Mesa, California, native shared some of Sherri’s alleged lies, including that she loved surfing — but she was never able to go surfing with Shauhin, who loved the sport.
“I surfed all the time when I was 15, 16 years old,” he revealed. “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.”
Her alleged fictional tales also went deeper than faked shared interests, as Shauhin claimed that Sherri lied about having a heart 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,” he continued.
Shauhin was skeptical when he heard that Sherri was allegedly kidnapped in November 2016. “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 admitted.
Sherri reportedly disappeared while out on a jog a mile away from her Redding, California, home in November 2016. She was found three weeks later, on Thanksgiving Day, on the side of County Road 17 near Interstate 5 in Yolo County after she was reportedly freed by her alleged captors. She was bruised and branded.
Sherri claimed that she was taken by two Hispanic women who hid their faces from her for the duration of her alleged kidnapping. She also claimed that they locked her in a closet with a bucket filled with kitty litter as a toilet and kept her wrists chained.
However, authorities had doubts about Sherri’s story and believed that she had been staying with a former boyfriend, James Reyes, the entire time. She allegedly harmed herself in order to make her story look plausible.
Sherri, who had received more than $30,000 from the California Victim Compensation Board between 2017 and 2021, was arrested in March 2022 for allegedly faking the abduction. She later signed a plea deal admitting to the hoax and pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud and one count of making false statements. Sherri was sentenced to 18 months in prison and three years of supervised release, as well as a $300,000 fine. She was released from prison in August 2023.
In his interview, Shauhin — who was recently announced as a new cast member on Survivor 48 — said that he wanted to clear up rumors that he was the former boyfriend who allegedly housed Sherri during her faked kidnapping.
“I want to stop people from thinking I am the guy who hid her or helped or had any contact with her,” he concluded.
English (US) ·