Post by Admin on May 17, 2014 14:06:41 GMT
Michelle Knight, one of three women who were held captive for 11 years by Ariel Castro, has spoken to the BBC about her brutal experience. Ms Knight, Gina DeJesus and Amanda Berry were held together by Castro, who was imprisoned for life for the crimes. He committed suicide in prison last September.
There's a hard life – and then there's the stuff of nightmares. Before Aug. 22, 2002, Michelle Knight was living the former. After growing up poor on Cleveland's rough west side and suffering long-standing sexual abuse at the hands of a relative, she had run away, lived for a time under a bridge and given birth to a son who'd been placed in foster care.
At 21, "I thought my life was going nowhere," Knight tells PEOPLE's Elaine Aradillas. And then her path crossed Ariel Castro's. Kidnapped and held for more than a decade by Castro, who was the father of a friend, she endured horrors almost beyond imagining until her headline-making rescue along with Castro's two other victims, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, on May 6, 2013. Now, 33, Knight is marking the first anniversary of her freedom with the publication of her memoir, Finding Me.
When Michelle Knight was growing up, she would sometimes go door-to-door asking neighbors for ingredients so she could make her younger siblings something to eat. During a troubled childhood, cooking was one of the few things that gave her pleasure. "My brothers were the ones that told me I should actually become a cook, because my food was so delicious even though we only had salt, black pepper and beans," she tells PEOPLE. "I still managed to make it presentable to eat."
It has been a year since Knight, along with two other women – Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus – escaped from their captor, Ariel Castro, who had kept them locked inside a Cleveland house. For years, she was given rotten burgers and spoiled beans, she writes in her memoir, Finding Me, which was published Tuesday. "Being just hurts," she says.
In January, Knight decided she wanted to improve her cooking skills and enrolled at Ohio's Cuyahoga Community College's Culinary Arts program. Chef Brandt Evans, executive director of the school's program and owner of Pura Vida restaurant in downtown Cleveland, has been helping her get acclimated. "Food is life and it's a representation of her new start," says Evans. "My heart went out to her. It was like someone punched me in the gut. I felt so bad. But then I saw her smiling and so cheerful – it made my day and the following days."
There's a hard life – and then there's the stuff of nightmares. Before Aug. 22, 2002, Michelle Knight was living the former. After growing up poor on Cleveland's rough west side and suffering long-standing sexual abuse at the hands of a relative, she had run away, lived for a time under a bridge and given birth to a son who'd been placed in foster care.
At 21, "I thought my life was going nowhere," Knight tells PEOPLE's Elaine Aradillas. And then her path crossed Ariel Castro's. Kidnapped and held for more than a decade by Castro, who was the father of a friend, she endured horrors almost beyond imagining until her headline-making rescue along with Castro's two other victims, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, on May 6, 2013. Now, 33, Knight is marking the first anniversary of her freedom with the publication of her memoir, Finding Me.
When Michelle Knight was growing up, she would sometimes go door-to-door asking neighbors for ingredients so she could make her younger siblings something to eat. During a troubled childhood, cooking was one of the few things that gave her pleasure. "My brothers were the ones that told me I should actually become a cook, because my food was so delicious even though we only had salt, black pepper and beans," she tells PEOPLE. "I still managed to make it presentable to eat."
It has been a year since Knight, along with two other women – Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus – escaped from their captor, Ariel Castro, who had kept them locked inside a Cleveland house. For years, she was given rotten burgers and spoiled beans, she writes in her memoir, Finding Me, which was published Tuesday. "Being just hurts," she says.
In January, Knight decided she wanted to improve her cooking skills and enrolled at Ohio's Cuyahoga Community College's Culinary Arts program. Chef Brandt Evans, executive director of the school's program and owner of Pura Vida restaurant in downtown Cleveland, has been helping her get acclimated. "Food is life and it's a representation of her new start," says Evans. "My heart went out to her. It was like someone punched me in the gut. I felt so bad. But then I saw her smiling and so cheerful – it made my day and the following days."