Mother: Slender Man victim still scarred, fearful three years after stabbing attack
WAUKESHA, Wis.—The victim in the infamous Slender Man stabbing shows outward signs of recovery but still carries deep fears and insecurities, as well as physical scars from the attack and the surgeries that saved her life, her mother says in a new court filing.
In a compelling two-page victim impact statement, Stacie Leutner describes how her whole family has suffered along with daughter Payton, who in 2014 was stabbed 19 times by her friends Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier after a sleepover party for Morgan’s 12th birthday.
Both were charged as adults and found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect earlier this year. Experts said they suffered from a shared delusion that Slender Man—an internet boogeyman—would harm them or their families if they didn’t kill their sixth-grade classmate.
Weier’s sentencing—really the judge’s parameters of her civil commitment at a state mental hospital—is Thursday.
On the one hand, her mother wrote, Payton has done well in the wake of the attack: She survived, she returned to school, she made new friends and traveled with them to the East Coast, and to Canada with her school’s French club.
“But she was different,” her mother wrote. “She was more reserved and more cautious. She held everyone at arm’s length and never let anyone get too close. She immersed herself in school in an attempt to distract herself from the uncertainty of her life; everything she knew about her home and her family was different.
“And she didn’t know how to cope with that.”
In addition, extensive scarring— marks from stabbings, six from surgeries, 25 in all—on her arms, leg, torso, and chest constantly remind Payton of the incident, and make swimsuit shopping a challenge.
Stacie Leutner details the effect on Payton’s younger brother, who was 10 at the time and felt “like a forgotten child” in the wake of her return home and the constant attention she required for recovery.
“He still struggles with … the belief that he is somehow less important than his sister,” she said.
The event also stressed her marriage, Stacie Leutner said, creating “a cavern” between the couple.
She wrote that Payton supported the final resolutions of the cases for two reasons. First, she did not want to testify; she has never spoken of the attack since her interview with a detective from her hospital bed.
Second, she agrees that treatment in a secure hospital is best for both Geyser and Weier, even though she will not feel safe if either is ever released back into the community without supervision.
Her mother said it was Payton’s own compassion that took her into the Waukesha woods where she was attacked by the other girls she thought were friends.
“Payton knew that if she wasn’t Morgan’s friend, then Morgan wouldn’t have any friends,” and believed everyone deserved at least one friend.”
The letter is the most extensive remarks from the Leutner family since their appearance on ABC’s “20/20” program a few months after the crime. Stacie and Josef Leutner and their parents and other relatives—but never Payton—have attended nearly every hearing over the 3½ years of the case but always declined to speak with reporters.