The piece below appears in today's Irish Times. Michelle Knight is on a book tour for her autobiography.
Michelle Knight sits in a room with glass walls, wearing a woollen cardigan that is several sizes too big for her, so big that the cuffs are rolled up. She borrowed it earlier at a television studio. Knight hates the cold.
In 2002, she was kidnapped by Ariel Castro, the father of a friend, near his home in Tremont, Cleveland, Ohio. “The day I disappeared, not many people even seemed to notice,” she writes in her book recounting 11 years “locked away in hell”.
Along with Amanda Berry and Georgina DeJesus, Knight was tied up, raped, beaten and forced to have abortions. They were badly fed and subject to the whims of their Cuban-American captor, who often tearfully convinced himself he and his victims were “a family”.
Knight remained there until May 8th, 2013 – losing contact with her son, Joey, who was eventually adopted – until police arrived following Berry’s escape with her six-year-old daughter, who Castro had fathered.
Quickly arrested, Castro pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life without parole. One month later, he died in jail, hanging himself with a sheet.
Knight cried when she heard. “I wanted him to sit in his cell and rot away a little bit at a time for the rest of his life, just like he forced me to do,” she writes in Finding Me: A Decade of Darkness.
Knight is in the middle of a book tour for her autobiography, which recounts a troubled family background, abuse, homelessness, drug peddling – and all of this before she was kidnapped by Castro clutch at a Family Dollar discount store.
The diminutive 33-year-old says she has moved on. “I used to think about all the things he did, I used to have bad dreams, but after a while, I started to slow down.”
She has put the years of abuse behind her, she says, and thinks about them only when she is asked. “When people bring it up, yes, but otherwise I don’t think about it at all.
“If you never forgave the person who hurt you it eats you away inside, you don’t want to feel that pain. You want to be able to overcome it without the pain of suffering, of holding it in.”
Most of all, she does not want to be pigeon-holed, she says, leaning forward to pull up a leg of her trousers to show a tattoo.
“I see myself as a victor – I never see myself as a victim, just like my tattoo says: ‘Know me as a victor, not a victim’.”
But the past has left unresolved tensions and grief. Knight will never know her son.
She is no longer in contact with Berry or DeJesus, who are working together on their own book.
Knight’s family ties are nonexistent. Her father disappeared years ago; her relationship with her mother is difficult.
“My family were always the type of people who were never there and they never will be,” she says.
Writing the book helped, she says. “During the time I was held captive I kind of lost myself along the way, so it helped me slowly, day by day, to find myself. It helped me to find out that I am a strong woman. And I realise that I could help others.”
She brims with plans, including the possible release of a song that she cowrote with a 16-year-old friend, Mitchell.
“I see quite a few things in my life: opening up my own restaurant, winning my first fight.” (She has taken up boxing.)
For now, she relishes the ordinary. “I wake up early, I go to basketball games, baseball games with the children of my friends. I drink coffee, eat cereals, normal things that I never got to do for years. I look out at the sky.”
She pulls the cardigan tightly once more. Soon she will leave Cleveland, “not because of what happened to me but because Cleveland is too cold for me. I hate the cold, I’m anaemic. Cold to me is like a bitter, numb feeling,” she says.
Besides the warmth, the future will come under a new name, Lily, she says.
“It is a desire to break with the past. Every brand new beginning needs a brand new start. I came up with Lily because I love the flower and I didn’t like my name, ever since I was seven.”
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