‘Slender Man’ victim speaks
The Wisconsin girl stabbed 19 times by her best friend and another sixthgrade classmate to please fictional bogeyman “Slender Man” has spoken publicly for the first time since the shocking 2014 crime, saying she has “come to accept” all of her scars.
“It’s just a part of me. I don’t think much of them. They will probably go away and fade eventually,” Payton Leutner, now 17, told ABC’s David Muir in a “20/20” episode airing Friday.
Leutner was 12 when schoolmates Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier lured her into woods in Waukesh on May 31, 2014, after hatching a twisted plan to kill their friend to appease the online fictional character — a shadowy figure who stalks children.
Geyser stabbed Leutner 19 times with a steak knife while Weier egged Geyser on, according to investigators. Leutner survived the attack and managed to crawl to a path, where a bicyclist found her.
The two other girls are now serving a combined 65 years in a mental hospital for the attack, during which the knife blade missed Leutner’s heart by just a fraction of an inch.
“I feel like it’s time for people to see my side rather than everyone else’s,” Leutner told ABC as she works to rebuild her life.
She said that she had been a hopeful and positive person before that fateful day — and that she tried to see the good in people, including Geyser, who had struggled to make friends.
“She was sitting all by herself and I didn’t think anyone should have to sit by themselves,” Leutner recounted about the time she befriended the girl in fourth grade.
She said that by sixth grade, she considered ending her friendship with Geyser, whose buddy relationship with Weier was blossoming, but decided to stick it out despite Weier’s growing fixation with “Slender Man.”
Recalling the attack, Leutner said she initially thought the girls wanted to play hide-and-seek in the woods, where Weier told her to lie down.
“Anissa told me to lie on the ground and cover myself in sticks and leaves and stuff to hide, in a sense,” Leutner said. “But it was really just a trick to get me down there.”
Leutner says she now sleeps with a pair of broken scissors under her pillow, “just in case,” and has advice for parents whose children might not understand the difference between what is real and fake online.
“Parents need to talk to their kids directly, saying, ‘This is not real. This is fake,’ ” she said.