Next week, two of the three Cleveland kidnapping victims will talk about staying hopeful in an impossible situation, finding the light in the dark and the day they escaped their kidnapper.
When Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight escaped their captor, Ariel Castro, two years ago, their story rocked the community. How could someone be capable of such evil? What could we expect from the women whose lives he tried to steal when they were just teenagers?
Two years later, Ariel Castro is dead, and two of his victims are ready to tell their story. That story is one of hope and triumph and is proof that in this case, goodness prevailed.
Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus will sit down with Robin Roberts of ABC News to tell their story for the first time next Tuesday, April 28, on 20/20.
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In the interview, Amanda Berry, who was just a teenager when she was taken sometime between 2003 and 2004, talks about the moment she realized she was free of the terror she’d lived for a decade.
“I didn’t know what to do. My heart immediately started pounding, because I’m like, ‘Is — should I chance it? … He could be here any minute. If I’m going to do it, I need to do it now,'” she describes. It’s the first time we have an opportunity to hear what went on in what some people have dubbed “Cleveland’s House of Horrors” and how the women who were Castro’s captives managed to keep their humanity during their captivity.
For Berry, her daughter Jocelyn, 8, fathered by Castro, was instrumental to that end. Amanda told ABC: “When I was playing with Jocelyn, Jocelyn made me forget everything.”
DeJesus and Berry have also written a book together that chronicles their terrifying ordeal and the aftermath of being rescued. It is called Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland, which will be released the day before the Robin Roberts interview.
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