He may have stolen a decade of their lives but he couldn’t break their spirit.
In their first-ever broadcast interview, Cleveland kidnapping victims Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus will sit down with ABC News anchor Robin Roberts on a special Tuesday night edition of ABC’s 20/20 to talk about their 10-year ordeal locked inside the Cleveland home of depraved former school bus driver Ariel Castro.
Castro had already held his third victim, single mother Michelle Knight (with whom Berry and DeJesus now have little contact) for more than a year when he captured the two then-teens, eventually fathering a daughter with Berry. Castro doted on the child and the three women did their best to make as normal a life as possible for her.
In the hourlong 20/20 interview, Berry and DeJesus will discuss their captivity, the details of their dramatic May 2013 rescue, what their lives are like now and why they choose to chronicle the experience in their new memoir Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland, cowritten with Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalists Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan. The book will be released Monday, April 27, and also features more than 1,200 pages of the girls’ diary entries and the journalists’ additional discoveries about Castro’s life and why it took law enforcement so long to find the three young women.
Castro pled guilty in July of 2013 to most of 977 charges relating to the trio’s ordeal and was sentenced to life plus 1,000 years. On Sept. 3, 2013, the 53-year-old was found hanging in his rural Ohio prison cell.
On May 2, Lifetime will present its harrowing original film, Cleveland Abduction, based on Knight’s own memoir, Finding Me: A Decade of Darkness, a Life Reclaimed.
See Robin Roberts’ revealing interview with Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus on a special edition of 20/20, Tuesday, April 28 at 10pm ET/PT on ABC.
