Dugard speaks about 18 years as sex slave, life after release
By Martha Groves, Los Angeles Times
As 14-year-old Jaycee Dugard struggled in a crude backyard shed to deliver her baby daughter, the serial predator who had abducted and raped her stepped in to unwrap the umbilical cord that trapped the infant.
“She was beautiful,” Dugard said of the child she birthed three years into her captivity in Northern California. “I felt like I wasn’t alone anymore. I knew I could never let anything happen to her.”
ABC News' Diane Sawyer, left, speaks with Jaycee Lee Dugard in her first interview. Photo/Jill Belsley-ABC News
In an exclusive interview with Diane Sawyer broadcast Sunday on ABC, Dugard, displaying remarkable poise and smiling often, provided chilling details about the 18-year ordeal she endured at the hands of her captors, an increasingly deranged parolee named Phillip Garrido and his wife, Nancy, who aided the abduction and condoned his rapes.
Dugard’s memoir, “A Stolen Life,” to be released Tuesday, tells how the Garridos informed her she was pregnant when she was 13. At the time, she knew she was putting on weight and waddling, but she didn’t know why.
A naive, toothy-grinned blond when she was taken captive at age 11 in 1991, Dugard is now 31 with brown, shoulder-length hair and impossibly young skin — the result, she said, of years spent with little exposure to the sun. Around her neck she wears a pine cone on a chain.
A pine cone, she told Sawyer, was the last thing she grabbed after Phillip Garrido shocked her with a stun gun and Nancy Garrido dragged her into the car as she walked toward the school bus on the street in front of her South Lake Tahoe home.