Inside The Cleveland Kidnapping Survivors' Lives Today

The story of the Cleveland Kidnapping Survivors is a heart-wrenching one.

On May 6, 2013, Cleveland resident Charles Ramsey heard screams coming from the house of his neighbor, Ariel Castro, and assumed it was some kind of domestic dispute. If he'd ignored the ruckus, then Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight might still be missing today, but, luckily for the girls and their families, he decided to check it out. "I see this girl going nuts trying to get outside," he told News 5. "I go on the porch and she said, 'Help me get out. I've been here a long time.' She comes out with a little girl and says, 'Call 911, my name is Amanda Berry.'"

Ramsey broke through the screen door, freeing Berry and her daughter (who was fathered by her captor) before alerting police. After arriving on the scene, officers discovered DeJesus and Knight inside the run-down house on Seymour Avenue, later dubbed the "Cleveland House of Horrors" in the media. The three women had been abducted between 2002 and 2004 after accepting rides from Castro, who was later indicted on 997 counts, including kidnapping, rape and aggravated murder for the brutal termination of unwanted pregnancies.

The 53-year-old Puerto Rican man was sentenced to life in prison plus 1,000 years, though he only wound up serving a month behind bars, committing suicide in his cell. 

The lives of the women he imprisoned and tortured for a decade are just now beginning.

As part of her moving on process, Knight decided to change her name. She now goes by Lily Rose Lee, though she still uses her birth name in a professional capacity. In 2018, she released her second written account of her time imprisoned by Castro, entitled Life After Darkness: Finding Healing and Happiness After the Cleveland Kidnapping. Speaking to the Associated Press (via Chicago Sun Times) ahead of its publication, the proud survivor revealed her reasons for adopting a new name and discussed what she hoped to achieve with her harrowing memoir.

"I just wanted a new beginning," she said. "I wanted a new start to my new journey. I just wanted to be able to say that, 'I own this, this is me, this is who I am now, and I'm proud of who I am.'" Her new purpose in life is to help those who have been through similar ordeals come through them as stronger people. "[I want them] to know that they have the power to strive, be happy, and get over things in a period of time. We'll never be fully healed, but at least we know we have the power to strive and survive in this world as a normal human being."

With a house of her own and a loving husband at her side, Knight can finally feel safe again, but the memory of her ordeal will never fully fade. When she sat down to discuss her new life with NBC News on the fifth anniversary of her rescue, Knight revealed that she sometimes suffers painful flashbacks. "I do have triggers," she said. "One of the meals he made for us was hot dogs, rice and eggs, all cooked in bacon grease and all served together in a bowl ... I get a nauseous feeling when I smell that."

Simple things like watching television can often be a minefield for her, especially if a horror movie comes on. "Certain TV shows I will not watch because of certain things that are in it," she told People. "I can watch some horror flicks, but I can't watch them all, because they'll have chains, guns." Of course, this can be avoided by simply not watching TV, but her phobias are often set off by everyday items as well. "I was horribly afraid of cloth napkins," she revealed in her second memoir. "Whenever I would go to a nice restaurant, I would have to ask for a paper napkin instead of a cloth one. Cloth was what Castro would shove into my mouth so I couldn't scream whenever he had people over to the house."

In May 2018, a 28-year-old DeJesus sat down with WKYC to discuss how she had progressed in the five years since she found freedom. The survivor explained that, while she's "not shy anymore," the attention she got (and is still getting today) hasn't really helped her move on. "The first day when I came home, I put my thumbs up," she recalled. That image of hope was beamed around the world, but at the time she didn't realize just how many cameras were on her.

"That's when I put my hood on, and everyone was like, 'We wanna know what she looks like.' They just stayed outside my house, and I couldn't do nothing, I couldn't go outside." She became famous against her will, and that fame has stopped her from living the normal life that she craved for nine long years. "Sometimes, you've got some people who just stare at you, or they'll come up to me and they'll want hugs and pictures," she said. Writing her joint memoir with Amanda Berry became a form of therapy for DeJesus, but reliving the ordeal wasn't easy. "Towards the end they would read it back," she said, "and I was like, 'That was my life for nine years.' It was horrible."

She might be confident enough to host her own news segment, but it took a long time for Berry to even be comfortable in her own skin. For 12 months she was terrified of going outside because she feared that she would end up in a similar situation again, but she gradually gained enough confidence to not only go out into the world but to also share her story with others. "In the first year, it was so hard to just go out and live a normal life because I was still so scared of all the possibilities, everything that could go wrong — the scary things," Berry told her employers at Fox 8.

After a decade in captivity, being a prisoner became the norm for her, and this mentality was hard to shake. She described being freed after so long as a "surreal" experience, but she's now able to take it all in her stride. "I think now I'm getting a little more comfortable in my skin, making decisions for myself," she said. "That was really hard in the beginning, making decisions for myself because being told what you're doing for 10 years, what you're eating, when you're going to sleep — I mean, all those things get to you and you kinda get used to it and that's your normal."

Sadly, Castro wasn't the first man to sexually assault Knight. Speaking to New York Daily News, Knight's great-aunt revealed that her son, Joey, was the result of a gang rape that took place when she was still in junior high. Joey was just two years old when his mother was abducted by Castro in 2002, the first of his three victims. Knight had every right to claim him once freed, as Dr. Charles Sophy confirmed during Knight's 2015 appearance on Dr. Phil. However, she chose not to follow this path and allowed him to stay with his adoptive parents, putting her son's "emotional state" above her own desire to see him.

When she spoke to the Associated Press in 2018, she went into more detail about her painful decision. "I decided a while back to let him be able to go through school, and heal in a certain way, and then when later on in life he was ready to come and talk to me, I would be [there with] open arms," Knight explained (via Chicago Sun Times). She also revealed that she has chosen not to reconnect with her own birth family. "I feel that family doesn't have to be blood, it can be who you choose to come into your life that loves and supports you for who you are, not what they want from you."