What is Gina DeJesus doing now?

 After her escape from captivity, Gina DeJesus has made great efforts to assist people who have faced a similar ordeal as she did.

Gina was reported to be last seen on April 2, 2004, when she was 14 years old at a payphone on her way home from her middle school at West 105th Street and Lorain Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. Gina was friends with Ariel Castro's teenage daughter, so she assumed Castro, who she trusted, was picking her up to drop her off at home. This was not the case.

What is Gina DeJesus doing now?

In 2018, Gina launched a nonprofit, Cleveland Family Center for Missing Children and Adults, to help families whose loved ones have been abducted.

Gina states "I want to help families because my family didn't have anything. They didn't get help. My parents didn't have people actually helping them do the flyers and stuff. We could actually help other families with all of that instead of them worrying and freaking out."

Today, Gina and her family travel around the U.S. to train law enforcement agencies on how to deal with families of missing persons.

Read her book titled, Hope, here.

Michelle Knight is Married

Listen to a free sample of Finding Me: A Decade of Darkness, a Life Reclaimed here

Michelle Knight met her husband Miguel Rodriguez, a 39-year-old courier, through mutual friends on Facebook. They had been speaking on the phone for some time until meeting in person for the first time by running into each other at a restaurant.

“I looked up and said, ‘I’m not catfished. You’re really, really real,’ ” she remembers.

As their bond grew in strength, Knight still remained anxious about physical intimacy. In addition to Castro’s sexual abuse, Knight also had been abused as a child by a relative.

“I had some fears that any intimacy might feel like what Castro had done to me, what others had done to me,” she wrote in Life After Darkness. Click here to listen to a free audio sample of the book.

Life After Darkness. Click here to listen to a free audio sample of the book.

“We waited; we took our time,” she wrote. “When it did happen, I realized I didn’t have anything to fear. The experience was entirely different. What made the difference was love.”

Where Are They Now?

Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight were held captive for nearly 10 years before they were rescued in 2013

In 2013, kidnapping victim Amanda Berry miraculously escaped from a boarded-up Cleveland home after nearly a decade of captivity and called 911.

"Help me. I'm Amanda Berry," she told the dispatcher. "I've been kidnapped and missing for 10 years. I am here. I am free now."

Within minutes, Cleveland Police also discovered Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight, who had been chained, tortured and abused along with Berry for almost a decade. Their captor, Ariel Castro, was convicted of kidnapping and raping the three women and sentenced to life in prison. A month later, he was found hanging by a bedsheet inside his cell, dead by suicide.

Since then, the three women have gone their separate ways and continue to heal from the decade-long trauma.

Get this special edition magazine here 

Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland

Two victims of the infamous Cleveland kidnapper share the story of their abductions, their decade in captivity, and their final, dramatic rescue.

On May 6, 2013, Amanda Berry made headlines around the world when she fled a Cleveland area home and called 911, saying: “Help me, I’m Amanda Berry...I’ve been kidnapped, and I’ve been missing for 10 years".

A horrifying story rapidly unfolded. Ariel Castro, a local school bus driver, had separately lured Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight to his home, where he kept them chained in the basement. In the decade that followed, the three were raped, psychologically abused, and threatened with death. Berry bore a child - Jocelyn - by their captor.

Drawing upon their recollections and the diaries they kept, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus describe a tale of unimaginable torment, and Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporters Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan interweave the events within Castro’s house with the ongoing efforts to find the missing girls.

The full story behind the headlines - including shocking information never previously released - Hope is a harrowing yet inspiring chronicle of three women whose courage, ingenuity, and resourcefulness ultimately delivered them back to their lives and families.

Listen to a free audio sample below here