Photo: Deborah Feingold
Michelle Knightwas in a hurry, racing to a meeting about the young son she’d lost to foster care and hoped to reclaim, when she stopped at a store to ask for directions.
“He said, ‘You’re not gonna leave for a long time,'” Knight says on ABC News’20/20, which revisits the women’s stories of recovery in a broadcast airing Friday at 9 p.m. ET. “And then he starts undressing himself. I dropped to the floor begging him to let me go. Begging him, saying, ‘I need to get to my son. This can’t happen.'”
Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight.
Berry has hosteda news segmentabout missing people in Ohio, and DeJesus has been working at anonprofit to help the families of missing people. Knight, now married and abest-selling author, has become an advocate for victims of domestic violence and human trafficking.
“I want to be that voice for the voiceless who can’t speak for themselves,” shetold PEOPLE in 2019. “I want to give them a way to raise their voice and speak out against those things that are happening in their life.”
Michelle Knight and her husband Miguel Rodriguez.Melanie Acevedo
On August 23, 2002, Knight was lost on her way to a hearing in family court with hopes of winning her son back when she encountered Castro, who offered assistance with directions to the court. “He said, ‘I know where it’s at. I can take you straight to it. It’ll only take me … five minutes.’ And I’m like, ‘OK. I’m gonna make it. This is gonna happen,” she says.
But at his home, where Castro had claimed he needed to pick up his daughter and wanted to show Knight some puppies, he instead took Knight hostage.
“He ripped up my son’s picture right in front of me — the only picture I had — and said, ‘You will never see him.’ … That [hurt] so bad. The knife felt like it was going deeper and deeper into my chest.”
Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Sign up forPEOPLE’s free True Crime newsletterfor breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases.
After Berry, then 16, was kidnapped in 2003 and DeJesus, then 14, was kidnapped a year later, the families of the two younger girls were a regular presence on local media pleading for their safe return. Berry eventually gave birth while in captivity.
But Knight’s disappearance appeared overlooked.
“‘Your families don’t care about you. Ain’t you glad I took you?'” Knight recalls Castro telling her. “I felt like he hated me the most, because I was the one that stood my ground.”
Much later, after denouncing Castro at his sentencing, Knight tells20/20, “I chose to forgive [Castro], because I didn’t want the emotional chain of that situation. I didn’t want it to hold me back or control my life anymore, so I had to break free.”
20/20airs Friday at 9 p.m. ET.
source: people.com
