You didn’t ask me, but here is what I think is hanging a lot of folks up.
Yes, she was abducted, and fucked over real good. A crime was committed against her, no doubt.
But I suspect she knew damn well who did it, and why, and maybe/probably had something to do with the “why”.
Nobody deserves what she got. But some people ask for it. What her involvement in getting what she got is what people are speculating about, and are dubious of the narrative.
Or I could be talkin’ out my ass… I do that now and then.
That message board is very strict about not posting anything negative about a victim, even if the details of the case are not fully known and the victim’s story could be regarded as suspicious. The moderators there don’t want to have to monitor the thread 24 hours for arguments or rule violations, so they lock it to prevent that.
All of which might be a very good reason the police don’t publicize the details - you don’t want to alert the suspects before you arrest them, and you don’t want to risk contaminating a potential jury pool.
Or she got caught up in something she really didn’t want to be part of and tried to get out unsuccessfully. Or stumbled across something. Or maybe she’s an asshat and stirred up trouble. Again, we just don’t know.
But I agree, no one deserves the sort of treatment she apparently got.
That’s taking internet speculation way too seriously, and taking themselves too seriously, as well. They’ve decided that Papini is a victim, and they are almost certainly right, but they don’t know shit…just like everyone else. Closing threads for 12 hours a day is a crap way to run a board, but they can do whatever they want. I guess a lot of armchair detectives dig it.
The notion that’s alien to me is the idea that Christine Everson, after getting out of her car and walking up to these guys’ truck and questioning the woman inside multiple times as to whether she was Sherri Papini, and after offering to take her inside the truck stop where the men were to get help, or to get her to a shelter, or whether she should “call 911 right now”, she was suddenly so fearful of being seen on her phone that she had to drive five to seven miles down the highway before she felt it was safe to get on the phone and call the police.
And there are forms of torture that don’t leave physical signs - waterboarding, chinese water torture, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation … shrug until she discusses what was done to her in addition to the visually obvious, we don’t know what all happened to her.
For many women the cutting of the hair, breaking and the branding would be very disturbing, many women and men are bound up in their visual appeal that the simple physical surface damage would be very upsetting. It could even have been part of further torture - do <whatever> or I will cut your nose off, or I will slice your face open.
True - unless her chosen form of exercise is self defense, even strength vs numbers wouldn’t keep her safe.
Though again, as someone said it could be warning from a loan shark, rival dealer, romantic rival [if she was screwing around with someone’s husband] and so forth.
Believe me, I have done enough reading in my 55 years that if I wanted to go psycho, I could torture some person in a number of ways that wouldn’t leave more than the damage Sherri Papini is reported to have. While I am not squeemish about the sight of blood, there are much better ways to torture someone psychologically. Heck, some of the tricks we did in psychology class [the whole hot and cold switch is a perfect example - if someone is blindfolded and touched with an ice cube they can be fooled into thinking it is a hot coal] are perfect for torturing someone without really doing much in the way of damage. Even screwing with someone’s sense of time can do a number [you screw with the light/dark cycle by shortening the days or nights, sometimes in combination with screwing with the food choices - if you move from dark to light and feed a breakfast food you can convince someone it is 7 am instead of 10 pm … making them think that they were captive for a month instead of 2 weeks - odd stuff like that. Normally done to men as women generally have a built in monthly cycle timer as it were.] You can also screw with someone with drugs - something like rohypnal to blank out stretches of time. There were a number of experiments done with people’s circadian cycles and messing with them can have funky results.
[hanging out with trained special forces guys discussing what can be done to people can mess with your head … knowledge can be fun to get but make you appear really screwed up if people don’t know your background. I also know how to make simple IEDS, not that I am interested in making or using the things. But it is great for writing fanfiction!]
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What strikes me as odd is that reports still use the word “alleged” in their headlines. Obviously skepticism is still rampant.
I think it’s odd that they are at home for her convalescence. If someone kidnapped a family member and brutalized them for 6 weeks, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t take them back to my home after they were released; I’d go into hiding until I knew who it was and what their motive was.
I agree that the whole story is very, very bizarre.
(That being said, Elizabeth Smart’s kidnapping was equally bizarre, yet I have no doubt of her veracity.)
I have no idea if the story as presented now is the truth or not, but I know that the police are very motivated concerning the case.
I do know that human trafficking Does Exist… and that human traffickers Do Exist.
I know that women who are towards the upper end of the physical beauty curve have historically been targets of them.
It has LONG been reported that tattoos and even brands are used to mark abducted women as ‘property’. Cite. Cite. The Language of the Traffickers from Daily Kos more than 6 months before the kidnapping.
Before I blame the victim, I want to see proof… because people just like who she described operate in almost every country on the planet.
They prey on women who aren’t any different than the ones who probably sat at Thanksgiving dinner tables near you the other week.
What we hear about those kidnappings is that victims are high profile/wealthy and money is demanded. That didn’t happen here.
I don’t know. If it turns out there are two sociopathic/demented/thrill-seeking Hispanic women running around kidnapping and abusing female victims at random, I’ll be quite surprised.
In all likelihood, because a complete and coherent sketch of her situation was released within days. Not every detail, no. But a coherent, understandable story, a graspable narrative, no matter how unlikely and horrifying its details.
Whatever happened to Sherry Papini, there is no (as yet - to be fair) understandable narrative, noreason for the murkiness, contradictions, defensiveness of the family and deep reticence of the authorities to say anything very concrete. Those are all hallmarks of deception and dissimulation on someone’s part, and I doubt it’s the cops’.
News organizations long ago adopted the use of “alleged” in order to protect themselves legally from lawsuits even when the event or person involved is obvious and beyond question. I don’t think in this case it means the news media knows or suspects something beyond what the rest of us know.
They aren’t staying at home. It was stated in the 20/20 interview with Keith Papini last Friday night that they are staying in an undisclosed location. The show did, however, air video of their actual house several times, which I thought was odd, uncalled for and irresponsible.
This has long been my chief suspicion. It also fits with Keith Papini’s comment about her being chained in the car and taken places from time to time.
Another suspicion too is that it was the men she was rented out to who are the ones who beat and tortured her. From accounts I’ve read in the past, it’s not unusual for the type of men who pay for the use of captive and trafficked women to take out their sadistic or violently misogynistic impulses on them as well.
This would all be understandable to me in the event she had been abducted and passed around by sex traffickers.
If there was a credible claim she was captured by a “human trafficking ring” I’ve failed to see it… so this reads as if “I think that… therefore…” which is completely congruent with the mishmash of bullshit that the media has been re-re-regurgitating as news throughout this case. Lacuna becomes guess becomes supposition becomes not-denied becomes fact, which is then used to justify the next level of guessitude.
Defend her as you see fit, but don’t construct factoidlets of strained BS to do so.
Let’s not go down the path of name-calling against other posters, even if they aren’t specifically named. Should be easy enough to steer clear of in this thread. Thanks.
Making a supposition in one paragraph and then treating it as a fact in the next is not voicing an opinion; it’s doing what the circle-jerking press is doing with this case. Not helpful.
The verifiable facts in this case would fit on a matchbook cover and are lost as a filler corner in the broadsheets of bullshit that have been thrown out - here and in the media - as “possibilities.” Draw a stronger distinction between your thoughts and reality so as not to keep compounding the problem.
Someday we’ll chat about how un-sheltered my life has been, but that’s neither here nor there.
While you can stretch the notion of being a White Slave to fit what’s known, consider this: do you really think she would be so abused by men who limit their injuries to the trivial (the branding aside, possibly), and could be recognized by her later, while her abduction/disappearance is #1 news in the area? And that a group as hardass and vicious as a slave ring would just let her go? The idea has as many or more holes as every other scenario.
Which would explain why she was purportedly seen in the truck with the two men by the woman that called it in. If she was whacked out on some form of date rape drug to make her obey, she would sit in the truck calmly being delivered to some place where she was hired to be used. If she was on ketamine or something that would explain why details are lacking, she may be missing a fair amount of time. And if she doesn’t have useful memories, then they could dump her out of the vehicle somewhere with impunity using a pair of underlings [the hispanic women] that if they got caught would be a dead end.
The confused people who don’t understand the facts they’ve been presented w/ as the abduction it claims to be simply haven’t seen the movie or tv show that did so. I think they feel a little dumb and are trying to deflect that by showing how this lady’s not going to make them feel foolish w/ her lies.
I’m guessing most bruising and swelling will go away in a couple weeks? Maybe three at the most after a bad beating?
Sherri was released 10 days ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if she does a interview next week or two.
The burning/branding may require surgery to remove. Maybe dermabrasion and dermaplaning procedures?. This article says burn scars need a year to fully heal before smoothing them out.
I would have thought it went without saying that the suppositions in the second paragraph were based on the suspicions outlined in the first paragraph. Perhaps I should have started the second paragraph with “Assuming the above scenario to be true…” since we’re apparently word lawyering and all rather than just tossing out impressions we’ve gotten from the case.
I haven’t had in mind White Slavers or a large, organized slave ring. All it would take is for someone steeped in a drugs and badass outlaw culture of the type one finds in biker bars or strip clubs in a bad part of town to pull off a scenario like the one I’m thinking of. In one case I read about online, a teenage girl was killed after having been kidnapped and held prisoner in a bedroom of her abductor’s house. One after another different guys who either knew the kidnapper or heard about the girl’s availability by word of mouth would pay the kidnapper for the use of the girl, go into the bedroom where she was kept, and have sex with her. Some of them beat her as well. (And guess what? There were no reports of broken bones or amputated body parts. Her injuries were…wait for it…trivial! :rolleyes:)
Anyway, one day while this guy was outside his garage talking to a friend his victim managed to break free and make a run for it. He chased her down and dragged her back into the house, where shortly afterward a gunshot was heard by the guy he was talking to outside the garage. Eventually the kidnapper was caught and this information came out in the testimony of the friend who witnessed it.
The point being, Sherri Papini could have been kidnapped by a couple of low-life assholes (male or female) who thought that because she was so hot they could make some really big bucks (for them) pretty quickly by making her available for sex to some of the badass outlaw types in their circle. But in addition to raping her, their customers beat the crap out of her too with the result that she was no longer so great looking, and her abduction had unexpectedly become a huge deal with lots of publicity and $100,000 reward being offered to anyone who ratted out where she was, and what with murder being very hard to get away with, especially for amateurs, they decided their best bet was to cut her loose. It’s unlikely that if she were kept in a town 150 miles from home (or in a completely different town anywhere in California and merely dropped off where she was to throw off investigators) that she would recognize or be able to identify any of the guys who raped her unless they were already found to begin with, which isn’t likely unless the kidnappers were found and ratted them out for reduced sentences.
All in all and assuming any of this bears resemblance to reality, it must be very uncomfortable to be any of the people involved, with the guys who paid for her waiting to see if the other shoe drops and perhaps wanting to eliminate the kidnappers, and the kidnappers fearful of both the police and the guys who paid for her and anxious about their next move.
So basically what I’m envisioning is a rather amateurish small-time operation involving some really bad people and intended to bring in a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars a day until it was time to cut their current girl loose and find their next victim, only to find their enterprise undone by having their captor’s abduction turn into a publicity nightmare. So see? Easy-peasy and no sophisticated white slavery ring necessary at all.
The people of Redding have come together to stage a large outdoor welcome home party for Sherri Papini. Good for them!
Such support has to be very welcome and very encouraging for Sherri and her husband as she attempts to recover from what happened to her. It must be nice to see such a large public affirmation of people’s love and support for her after all the doubt and speculation about hoaxes.
