Sherri Papini is firing back at allegations her ex-husband, Keith Papini, made in the 2024 docuseries Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini. Speaking out for the first time in the new four-part ID docuseries Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie, Sherri responded to Keith’s claims that she “poisoned” their two children by making them breathe in rubbing alcohol while they were sick.

Sherri claimed that Keith was “furious” when he found out she was using a secondary phone to communicate with her ex James Reyes. “He tried to get me to sign a contract that stated that I would relinquish all of my parental rights,” Sherri alleged. “The leverage he had over me was my kids. He said, ‘This is the easy way. If you sign this, this is the easy way.’ I chose not to sign the contract and everything that I’d been afraid of happening if I told the truth [about James], happened. Everything he threatened to do, happened.”

Six weeks after the confrontation, Sherri said she got a call from a member of Child Protective Services (CPS), who “questioned [her] about [her] methods with the children” and asked if she’d “ever encouraged [her] children to huff rubbing alcohol from a bag.” She insisted, “It’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard. The allegation is that I poisoned my children.”

Sherri revealed that CPS did an “incredibly thorough” investigation in 2022, which has “been closed [and] unfounded.” However, Keith’s allegations were made public when he spoke about them in Perfect Wife two years later.

In the 2024 doc, Keith said, “One day, after Sherri was already in prison, as I go and lay my daughter to bed, I push off the bed, and I kind of make a little grunt sounds, like, ‘Ah!’ You know, I was a little bit sore. Violet, she was like, ‘Daddy, are you sick?’ and she goes, ‘Why don’t you do mommy’s trick?’ I was like, ‘Mommy’s trick? What are you talking about?’ She was like, ‘Well, you just breathe in this rubbing alcohol,’ and I was like, ‘What?’ She goes to the bathroom, she knows right where the rubbing alcohol is. She wads up a thing of toilet paper and just soaks it and then hands it to me to breathe.”

Keith claimed his daughter told him they breathed in the rubbing alcohol “every single day” when they were sick. “[I] find out Sherri would soak rags of alcohol and put it in a Ziploc bag and tie a string…” he alleged. “Would tie a string around their neck onto the Ziploc bag… so that they would continue to smell the fumes to make them not feel good so that she could take them to the doctor.”

However, Sherri had a much different version of the story. “When [the kids] sick, stuffy, nose is running, most moms would want to rub Vick’s on their skin and help them breathe,” she explained. “My kids have sensitive skin, so instead of that, I take essential oils, and I put it on a cotton ball, and I put it in a cloth bag and I wrap it around their neck. It’s loose. It’s obviously something that can be pulled off. I don’t let them sleep with it. It’s just something to help them breathe.”

Keith filed for divorce from Sherri in April 2022 after she pled guilty to mail fraud and making false statements. Her guilty plea was part of a plea agreement where she admitted to faking her own kidnapping in 2016 (now, she says she was legitimately kidnapped by Reyes, and claims the only thing she lied about was the identity of the person who abducted her).

While Sherri was serving her prison sentence, her divorce from Keith was finalized and he received sole custody of the kids. “My children were not taken away from me. They were stolen by my ex-husband,” she said in the new docuseries. “I was never ruled as a danger or a threat to my children. My children were never taken by court. They were taken by Keith. Before I went to prison, he filed an order to get 100% physical and legal custody, and it was granted because I was going to prison.”

She added that she now has phone calls with the kids every Sunday, but accused Keith of having the “tendency to cancel” or “shift the schedule” at the last minute. “It’s been that way for almost two years now,” she shared.

However, Sherri isn’t giving up. “Sherri continues to fight in family court for custody of her children,” a title card at the end of the series read.

Keith did not appear in the ID docuseries, but in a statement via his lawyer, he denied any “allegations of severe abuse, manipulation, and lying” made by Sherri, insisting that they are “false and disproven by a mountain of documentary evidence and objective, indisputable facts.”

Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie, Monday and Tuesday, May 26 and 27, 9/8c, ID and Max