- In 2014, 12-year-old Payton Leutner was lured into the woods by two classmates and stabbed 19 times by one of them while the other looked on.
- The two classmates, Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, pleaded guilty to the attack and said they carried it out to please the fictional Slender Man, whose image had circulated as a meme on the internet.
- Leutner gave her first interview since the attack earlier this year, telling ABC's "20/20" program she still sleeps with broken scissors "just in case" she gets attacked again.
- She also said she would "thank" her attacker for what she did, because she now knows what she's wants to do with her life — go to college and work in medicine.
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The victim of the 2014 Slender Man stabbing has said in her first interview since the attack that she still sleeps with broken scissors in case someone tries to stab and murder her again.
Payton Leutner was lured by two of her classmates into a wooded area of a Wisconsin suburb five years ago, and was stabbed 19 times by one of them while the other watched. Leutner survived the attack after crawling out to a nearby path, where a cyclist found her.
Leutner and her classmates were all 12 years old at the time.
The classmates, Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, said they carried out the attack to please Slender Man, a fictional supernatural figure depicted as an unnaturally tall and thin man with a blank face. They later told police that they had been planning the attack for months, ABC News reported.
Weier and Geyser, the two perpetrators, were both charged as adults in court and pleaded guilty. Geyser, who did the stabbing, was ordered to spend 40 years in a mental institution, while Weier was committed to a mental health facility for 25 years, according to the Associated Press (AP).
Slender Man's image was created from Photoshopped images, and spread as a meme on online forums and in other media.
Leutner, now 17, has spoken out about her trauma and said that while she has grown from the attack, she's still haunted by it at times.
She told ABC's "20/20" program, in an interview that airs Friday night, that to this day she sleeps with a pair of broken scissors under her pillow "just in case" someone attacks her again.
She has also found it hard trusting new friends and trying to resume a normal life given widespread reports of the attacks and litigation she has endured, she told ABC.
Her mother, Stacie, told ABC: "She has friends, but initially, even with those friends, she kept them at arm's length. And for a long time, even trusting family members was hard for her."
Payton Leutner has since said though she never wants to speak to Geyser or Weier again, she would now "thank" Geyser for her attack.
"I would probably, initially thank her," Leutner told ABC.
"I would say: 'Just because of what she did, I have the life I have now. I really, really like it and I have a plan. I didn't have a plan when I was 12, and now I do because of everything that I went through.'"
The high school senior now plans to attend university in the fall of 2020, ABC reported. She told the network she hopes to pursue a career in medicine — a career ambition that stemmed from her experience.
The 2014 attack has been fashioned into a movie, named "Slender Man," which released last year. Weier's father slammed the movie as "absurd" and "extremely distasteful."
Bill Weier told the AP at the time: "It's popularizing a tragedy is what it's doing. I'm not surprised, but in my opinion it's extremely distasteful. All we're doing is extending the pain all three of these families have gone through."
Read ABC's full report here.
- Read more:
- What you need to know about the 'Slender Man' movie and the controversy surrounding it
- The story of 'Slender Man' — the internet's creepiest urban legend
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