After being convicted of murdering her roommate in 2007, then acquitted in 2011, Amanda Knox is now facing a re-trial to determine whether or not she killed Meredith Kercher in Italy. Visibly falling to pieces, Amanda spoke with Diane Sawyer in an interview which aired April 30 on ABC — and the 25-year-old revealed what she fears most about facing her accusers again.

Amanda Knox’s Interview With Diane Sawyer: What She Revealed

Amanda revealed that what happened to her, being jailed for the murder of her former roommate, “could have happened to anyone.” Being falsely accused of murder was “surreal” she said, but added that the most painful part was what she experienced while inside the courtroom when an Italian court decided she needed to stand trial again.

“I felt like after crawling through a field of barbed wire and finally reaching what I thought was the end, it just turned out that it was the horizon,” Amanda told Diane. “And I had another field of barbed wire that I had ahead of me to crawl through.”

She also revealed that during the murder investigation, she was interrogated to the point of admitting a false confession. The authorities told her she would never see her family again, and that her recollection of the night Meredith died was “wrong.” So in court, it was misconstrued as confessing to the crime.

“What happened to me, hit me like a train and there was nothing I could do to stop it…I was really afraid.”

Amanda says on the night that Meredith was killed, she was with her new boyfriend at his house watching a movie.

“I asked the police if I should have a lawyer, and they said ‘No”, that it would make it worse for me…I didn’t confess. They acted like my answers were wrong. They told me I had to answer correctly or I would never see my family again. I was incredibly vulnerable. I was demolished in that interrogation.”

Why Was Amanda Doing Cartwheels?

“I never did a cartwheel,” Amanda said. “I did do the splits and that was once…I think everyone reacts differently to death. My friend had been murdered, and it just could have possibly been me.”

Amanda Knox Says Labeling Her a Devil Is ‘Wrong’

She also admitted that being attacked in the media was harsh, but being called vicious names in court was the most difficult part.

“I was in the courtroom when they were calling me a devil,” she told Diane. “It’s one thing to be called certain things in the media, and it’s another thing to be sitting in a courtroom fighting for your life while people are calling you a devil. For all intents and purposes I was a murderer, whether I was or not. I had to live with the idea that that would be my life,” she said.

When the court ruled that Amanda was guilty, she said, “I couldn’t breathe…I lost it.”

Amanda was also told she was HIV positive—and then later told that it was in fact a mistake, that she was not infected with the virus.

Amanda Considered Suicide

When asked if she thought about suicide, Amanda said yes, that she had considered killing herself.

“I had panic attacks. I was losing my hair…I felt guilty about what they (her family) had to sacrafice for me. I wanted them to move on.”

Amanda Wants Meredith’s Family To Know The Truth

Amanda said she tried reaching out to Meredith’s family, but they don’t want to have any communication with her.

“I hope that one day I can have their permission to pay my respects,” Amanda said.

HollywoodLifers, did this interview change your mind about Amanda? Do you think she’s guilty or innocent?

WATCH: ABC News – Amanda Knox: Diane Sawyer’s Exclusive Interview

— Sandra Clark

More Amanda Knox Trial Coverage:

1. Amanda Knox’s Diane Sawyer Interview: Court Ruling Is ‘Painful’
2. Amanda Knox Retrial: Italian Court Rules To Re-Hear Murder Case
3. Amanda Knox’s Ex Raffaele Sollecito Describes ‘Bizarre’ Romance In Book

Two years after former Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot in the head by gunman Jared Lee Loughner, she sat down for an exclusive interview with ABC News’ Diane Sawyer, during which she and her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, announced that they’ve grown fed up with Congress’ lack of urgency for gun control reform, and are forming a political action committee to urge for the changes they find necessary.

On Jan. 8, Gabby and Mark spoke with Diane and announced that they were forming Americans For Responsible Solutions, a common-sense consensus led by gun owners. (Gabby and Mark both own guns.) Their hope is to drive Congress to action on issues of mental health, high-capacity gun magazines, and background checks when it comes to the process of gaining possession of a gun.

When Diane says that the NRA will only rebut that people can find guns illegally, regardless of regulations, Mark replied, “I don’t agree with that. The gun lobby even opposes a gun purchaser being checked against the terrorist watch list. I mean, doesn’t that seem like a common sense thing to do?”

The Happiest & Hardest Parts Of Gabby Giffords’ Life, Currently

Diane asked the couple what the happiest part of lives was at this moment? “Family,” Gabby replied. When asked about the hardest part, Gabby struggled to articulate it, but it was the fact that her injury has affected her sight, making it difficult to see on her right side.

She and her husband admit that the next hurdle they hope to cross is the ability for the two of them to have a quick back-and-forth conversation. At this point in Gabby’s recovery, there is still difficulty in turning thought into speech.

Gabby’s recovery has been nothing short of heroic, and we hope she and Mark are successful with their campaign in Congress.

Watch Gabby and Mark’s full interview below!

ABC News

– Billy Nilles

More Gabby Giffords News:

1. ‘The Protestor’ Named TIME Magazine’s Person Of The Year
2. Gabby Giffords Opens Up About Her Emotional Recovery: ‘I Will Get Stronger. I Will Return.’
3. Gabrielle Giffords Smiling In New Pics! She Looks Amazing!

As Jaycee Dugard, 31, tries to give her 17- and 14-year-old daughters the most normal lives possible, she tells ABC’s Diane Sawyer in tonight’s interview that she’s grown angrier with Philip and Nancy Garrido, who kidnapped her in 1991 when she was only 11 years old.

“I am angry for what they did, for what they took away,” reveals Jaycce, “but on the other hand, I have two beautiful daughters.”

Although the two perpetrators have not tried to contact her, Jaycee reveals she continues to stay in hiding.

“For eighteen years I had to hide…even now I feel like I have to hide,” she tells Diane. “I want my girls to have a normal life as much as possible. I feel like on some things I have to do it a little bit differently…not be recognized…for their sake.”

She continues: “I think in time as they get older they’ll know how to deal with it better and that would be the time that we would come out.”

Regardless of her traumatic past, Jaycee stresses that she hasn’t been dwelling on it and instead is focusing on her foundation and riding horses as part of her therapy.

“It’s not with me every day. That is over. Nancy and Philip are behind bars,” she says. “There is so much out here to do and feel. I feel like I can make a difference. I don’t want to be remembered for what happened.”

Catch Jaycee’s interview with Diane Sawyer tonight on ABC’s World News at 6:30pm.

More Jaycee Dugard News:

1. Jaycee Dugard Suing The US Government Over Her 18 Years Of Captivity!
2. Jaycee Dugard’s Captors Caught On Camera Abusing 20 OTHER Young Girls!
3. Jaycee Dugard Shares Details Of First Encounter With Captor Nancy Garrido: She Was Jealous Of Me & Phillip Wanted Threesomes

In her new memoir, ‘A Stolen Life,’ which hit book stores today, July 12, Jaycee opens up about kidnapper Phillip Garrido’s ‘runs,’ which she describes as ‘the most horrible moments of my life.’

After watching Jaycee Dugard‘s interview with Diane Sawyer, we learned what these “runs” or “long days of sex” consisted of — Phillip Garrido would get high on meth and dress Jaycee up in absurd outfits for hours, switching and contorting her body into “perfect positions,” while making her listen to the voices coming from the wall. In her new book A Stolen Life, out today, Jaycee goes much more in-depth into these drug-induced and terrifying moments of her captivity.

“The ‘runs’ were some of the most horrible moments of my life,” Jaycee writes in the book. “I can’t think of a good moment even when a ‘run’ was over. I always knew there’d be a next time. I could see no end in sight.”

Jaycee describes the moments vividly, saying Phillip would make her wear makeup and dress her in “tight clothes,” which had “holes in weird places.”

“He tells me to lay on the bed in a certain way and then he gets undressed. He has a little bag of white powder. I’m not sure what it is. Maybe that’s the crank he talked about… He asks if I want some and I say no. He says it helps him stay up, he calls it speed or crank.”

Jaycee writes that Phillip told her he had a sex problem and that she was helping to cure him, “so he wouldn’t have to bother anyone else.” She believed him. He told her he would teach her how to be the best “sex slave” ever. Just heartbreaking.

He would tie her up in certain positions “by those eye hooks on the wall” and then lift her legs “with straps in different positions.” She describes one horrendous moment:

“One night he had been working on the position, trying to get it right for hours and realized he needed to go pick up Nancy from the nightshift where she worked a convalescent home. He said he was just going to leave me tied up because it was the perfect position. He was gone for a while. My legs were in such an awkward position, I got leg cramps and the straps hurt my ankles. I was relieved when he got back, I wanted to get it over with so I could be done and go to bed.”

Can you imagine anything worse than what Jaycee lived through, HollyMoms? It’s hard to believe that someone who faced terrifying experiences like these turned out to be such an amazing and strong woman.

–Leigh Blickley

More On Jaycee Dugard Here

1. Jaycee Dugard Shares Her Heartbreaking Story & The Moment She Was Reunited With Her Mother After 18 Years In Captivity
2. Jaycee Dugard Reveals: I Was SO Lonely Imprisoned In Soundproof Shed
3. Why Jaycee Dugard Was Terrified To Meet Her Mom After Her Rescue!

In her first interview since she was rescued in 2009, Jaycee Dugard, now 31, opened up about her 18 years as Phillip Garrido‘s victim and sex slave, and the complicated relationship her daughters Starlite, 16 and Angel, 13, share with their evil father. They call him ‘Dad!’ Is that wrong?

When Diane Sawyer questioned why she Jaycee called Garrido the kids’ dad on the July 10 ABC special — Jaycee replies, “He is who he is.”

“Their dad did strange things and they knew it, Jaycee tells Diane Sawyer. “They lived like that for so long that I don’t really think that that was that big of a shock to them. Because they knew their dad.”

But what do you think, HollyMoms? If you were in Jaycee’s shoes, would you allow the man that kidnapped, raped and held you hostage for 18 years to be considered your childrens’ father? Share your thoughts.

More On Jaycee Dugard Here

1. Jaycee Dugard Shares Her Heartbreaking Story & The Moment She Was Reunited With Her Mother After 18 Years In Captivity
2. Jaycee Dugard Reveals: I Was SO Lonely Imprisoned In Soundproof Shed
3. Why Jaycee Dugard Was Terrified To Meet Her Mom After Her Rescue!

My babies saved my life Jaycee Dugard revealed in a two-hour special last night, July 10, in an ABC interview with Diane Sawyer, as she talked about her life as a sexually abused prisoner. Here, are the details.

Jaycee Dugard opened up for the first time tonight, July 10, about her harrowing story with ABC News correspondent Diane Sawyer, discussing the moment she was kidnapped by sex offender Phillip Garrido and his wife Nancy at age 11, the happiness that came after the “painful” delivery of her first daughter and the reunion with her mother, Terry Probyn, that she waited and prayed for for 18 years.

“She said she’d give me a kiss goodbye and she didn’t,” Jaycee, now 31, tells Diane Sawyer of her mother the day she was kidnapped in 1991. “I wasn’t mad I just said I’d catch her when I got home. Tell her ‘you got to give me a kiss next time.’” But Jaycee never got her kiss goodbye.

11-year-old Jaycee was walking her usual route up a hill near her South Lake Tahoe, California home to the school bus when her “world changed in an instant.” Phillip Garrido, 40, and his wife Nancy pulled up alongside her in their car, paralyzed her with a stun gun and took her to their California residence, two hours from her home, where she would remain in captivity for 18 years. The last thing she remembers? The prickly feeling of a pine cone, which she now wears on a necklace: “It’s a symbol of hope, new beginnings and that there is life after something tragic.”

But it’s hard to believe Jaycee is so optimistic about life after living through one of the most terrifying ordeals imaginable. Starting at the age of 11, Jaycee was raped repeatedly, in a sound proof shed in the Garrido’s backyard, where she was handcuffed and locked in night after night.

“I was so lonely, I felt so alone,” she tells Diane, adding that she use to stare at the moonlight because it reminded her of her mom, who was desperately searching for her.

And it wasn’t until she learned she was pregnant at the age of 13 that Jaycee finally felt like she was wanted and needed. The baby growing inside her would be the lifeline she craved for years.

On August 18, 1994, Jaycee gave birth to her first daughter in the backyard after almost 24 hours of “painful” labor, which she faced alone at the age of 14. After watching birthing videos, Phillip delivered the baby, using his hand to unwrap the umbilical cord that was wrapped around her neck. “She came out and then I saw her,” Jaycee recalls. “She was beautiful. I felt like I wasn’t alone anymore. I had somebody that was mine. I wasn’t alone. And I knew I could never let anything happen to her. And I didn’t know how I was going to do that, but I did.”

Three years later, she “would have a second little person to love and to love me,” all the while convincing herself that her own mother was “better without me.”
Phillip stopped sexually abusing Jaycee after her daughters were born and moved her out of the shed into her own tent outside, where she got to look up at the sky once again. She taught her girls math, social studies, English and history in the yard, thanks to some books and a T.V. set that she was allowed to watch.

And although Phillip began to take the three girls out in public, the cops never found her, neither did the parole officers, who visited the mentally unstable, sex offender 60 times.

So why didn’t she try to escape – take the girls and run?

“It wasn’t something I felt I could do… because the situation felt like it wasn’t an option,” Jaycee explains to Diane Sawyer. “I don’t know how else to explain it there was no leaving. The mind manipulation plus the physical abuse I suffered in the beginning, there was no leaving. Maybe if one of the girls was being hurt… [But] they were safe. I was being told that the outside world was dangerous. I couldn’t protect them out there. The unknown that was out there was terrifying, especially when I was thinking about the girls.”

At this point she was in her 20s, and was still hanging on to the thought of her mother and younger sister Shana at home. On her list of things she wanted most in life that she scribbled down in her journal were “to see my mom, and ride in a hot air balloon.”

And that fateful day when she would finally be reunited with her mother came in August 2009 after two female campus officers spotted a bizarre Garrido with Jaycee’s daughters at the UC Berkeley campus. Noticing how odd it was that these two young girls were with him, looking miserable, they researched him, discovered his past and ended up rescuing Jaycee and her girls after years in captivity.

“For some reason I looked up and the moon was just bright and beautiful,” Jaycee says of the night the police women reacted to Phillip’s behavior. And Jaycee’s mom Terry agrees: “I remember looking up at the moon saying, ‘Ok, ‘Jayce,’ where are you? Where the Hell are you?’”

After she was rescued, a nervous Jaycee was told she could see her mom. “I remember saying ‘No, your joking. Don’t do this to me, you’re joking,’” Terry explains, while sitting with her daughter, now 31-years-old. “I remember telling you I’m coming baby, I’m coming.”

“And I remember telling her I had babies,” Jaycee says of her daughters, who were 15 and 11 when they were released. “I thought, ‘Babies?’ I can deal with that,” Terry adds.

“I don’t feel like I have this rage inside of me that’s building,” Jaycee concludes with. “I refuse to let him [Phillip] have that. He can’t have me. It would mean like he won.”

“I have more hate in my heart for both of us,” a still heartbroken Terry adds. “He stole her from me. He ripped out a piece of my heart. He stole my baby. He stole her childhood. Your adolescence and prom and high school pictures and memories.”

“But he didn’t get all of me,” Jaycee reassures her mother. “No, he didn’t,” Terry agrees.

–Leigh Blickley

More Jaycee:

1. Jaycee Dugard Talks For The FIRST TIME About Her Kidnapping & Sexual Abuse
2. Jaycee Dugard’s Captors Used A Stun Gun To Keep Her From Escaping! New Detailsa>
3. Jaycee Dugard Will Talk On TV For The First Time, But Her Daughters Are Off-Limits — Thank God!

The veteran anchor revealed details from her upcoming interview with Jaycee Dugard in a recent appearance on ’The View!’

Jaycee Dugard, the 31-year-old woman who was kidnapped at age 11 and held captive for 18 years, is finally speaking out about her tragic captivity in an upcoming interview with Diane Sawyer. Diane stopped by The View today, July 6, discuss the miraculous story and spirit of Jaycee.

“In my long career, I have never met a young woman like her.  I have never heard a story like hers and I have never heard someone come through with radiant spirit, and her message, which is to love your life,” the ABC World News anchor revealed.

Jaycee’s kidnapping is especially notorious for her captor’s treatment of the young girl: after her abductor impregnated her, Jaycee was forced to mother her two daughters, now teenagers, while under captivity in the backyard of her abductor’s home.

“She’s very protective of them and their privacy and they had little schooling: classes every day from 10-2 and she would teach them as much as she could remember about life and the world.,” Diane reveals. “They are brilliant young women and she loves them completely.”

Viewers will also be inspired by Jaycee‘s reunion with her mother. “It’s the most beautiful story of a reunion,” Diane adds. “When you see the two of them the day she came back and her mother’s real feeling, it’s astounding.”

Jaycee’s memoir A Stolen Life comes out on July 12, in which she delivers a firsthand account of her 18 year captivity.  Diane explains, “a lot of people ask, ‘why did you write about the sexual exploitations?’ And she said it’s his shame, not hers.  ‘Out of all the people who are sexually abducted,’ she says, ‘let’s stare at their captors until there isn’t fear anymore.’”

Watch the complete segment from The View and don’t miss Diane Sawyer’s first interview with Jaycee Dugard since her kidnapping this Sunday at 9/8c on ABC.

Diane Sawyer on The View

– Michael Emer

GET MORE:

1. Kidnap Victim Jaycee Dugard Will Reveal Intimate Details of Her 18 Years Of Imprisonment In Her Book
2. Can You Believe The Woman Who Helped Keep Jaycee Dugard Prisoner For 18 Years Is Crying Because Jaycee Hasn’t Visited Her In Jail?
3. Jaycee’s Story Gives Hope to Mom of Missing Boy

The broadcasting veteran has won the battle to land the first interview with Jaycee, who was held captive by evil Philip and Nancy Garrido for 18 YEARS!

Diane Sawyer‘s head-to-head with Jaycee Dugard will air on ABC next month, shortly before the July 12 release of the 31-year-old’s memoir A Stolen Life. Will you watch?

Jaycee’s horrific case captivated America and the interview is sure to attract a huge TV audience.

Let’s hope the interview, and the Garridos’ recent prison sentence — Philip got 431 years, Nancy got 36 years — will give her some closure.

Will you Jaycee’s one-on-one with Diane Sawyer, HollyMoms?

– Ian Garland

GET MORE:

1. Kidnap Victim Jaycee Dugard Will Reveal Intimate Details of Her 18 Years Of Imprisonment In Her Book
2. Can You Believe The Woman Who Helped Keep Jaycee Dugard Prisoner For 18 Years Is Crying Because Jaycee Hasn’t Visited Her In Jail?
3. Jaycee’s Story Gives Hope to Mom of Missing Boy