Can You Stab Some That Has Sold Ypoy in the Woods if They Come Near Ypu Again

'Slender Man' stabbing victim speaks publicly for kickoff time: 'Without the whole state of affairs, I wouldn't be who I am'

Payton Leutner was 12 when two friends led her into a park and stabbed her.

Until now, Payton Leutner had never spoken publicly about what happened to her in the woods at the hands of her best friend and another classmate.

Her scars -- from the 19 times she was stabbed on May 31, 2022 -- evidence to that moment of expose. But, they likewise marking her incredible strength to survive.

"I've come to accept all of the scars that I have," Leutner said in an exclusive interview with ABC's David Muir. "It's just a part of me. I don't remember much of them. They will probably go away and fade somewhen."

Leutner survived an assail that captured headlines worldwide after her assailants, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, claimed they did information technology to please a fictional character named "Slender Man." Leutner, Geyser and Weier were all 12 years one-time at the time.

"20/20," which has followed Leutner's case closely since her set on as well as her recovery for years, spoke with her parents exclusively in 2014. Leutner, who was nevertheless recovering after the stabbing, appeared aslope her parents on "20/20" but chose not to speak out at that time.

At present 17, Leutner has worked hard over the last five years to heal and rebuild a normal life. She told ABC News that she was set up to reclaim her story.

"I feel similar it's time for people to run into my side rather than everyone else's," she said.

Payton, Morgan and Anissa become friends

In 2014, Leutner was a sixth-grader in Waukesha, Wisconsin, when Geyser and Weier attacked her later on a slumber party at Geyser's home. They had been celebrating Geyser's birthday the previous night.

Leutner described herself as hopeful and positive before the assail, and said she'd tried to run across the practiced in people, including Geyser. Leutner said Geyser had struggled to make friends and that in fourth grade she'd befriended Geyser herself.

"She was sitting all past herself and I didn't think anyone should take to sit by themselves," Leutner told Muir.

While they were friends, Leutner said, Geyser seemed like a happy girl, albeit "a lilliputian lonely." They would have sleepovers together, play exterior and draw -- "all the things that kids do," Leutner said.

Leutner said she'd considered Geyser her best friend and thought Geyser was somebody she could trust.

"She was funny, I will requite yous that," Leutner said. "She had a lot of jokes to tell. … She was great at drawing and her imagination always kept things fun."

Then, "everything went downhill," she said.

Around the time Geyser became friends with Weier in sixth course is when Geyser also started talking to Leutner about "Slender Man," she said.

"I thought it was odd. Information technology kind of frightened me a little bit," Leutner told Muir. "Only I went along with it. I was supportive considering I idea that's what she liked."

Eventually, though, the fictional stories Geyser told about "Slender Man," a tall, faceless brute in a conform that could utilize tendrils growing from his back, became as well frightening, Leutner said. She even asked her mother, Stacie Leutner, whether "Slender Man" was real and was relieved when she was told that he wasn't.

"I told [Geyser] that it scared me and that I didn't like it," Leutner said. "But she really liked information technology and thought it was real."

Leutner even considered catastrophe her friendship with Geyser, she said.

"I saw the change from 5th to sixth course when she met Anissa," she said. "That's when I was actually wanting to become out of that friendship."

Ultimately, however, Leutner stayed friends with Geyser. She said she felt bad for her friend and didn't want her to exist alone. Geyser even "guilted" Leutner into staying friends, Leutner said.

"Payton was such an empathetic child," her mother, Stacie Leutner, told ABC News in a new interview. "She recognized that Morgan perhaps wasn't the healthiest friendship to have. Simply if Payton wasn't her friend, she wouldn't have whatsoever other friends. So, she thought everyone deserved at least one friend."

As Geyser's fixation with "Slender Homo" grew, it appeared to Leutner that Geyser's friendship with Weier blossomed, besides. Weier lived in the same apartment complex as Geyser and rode the passenger vehicle with her to school.

"I didn't like [Weier] at all," Leutner said. "I just hung out with her because I knew that Morgan actually loved her equally a friend. But she was e'er brutal to me. I experience similar she was jealous that Morgan was friends with me and her."

It was Weier who had "really convinced" Geyser that "Slender Human" was existent, Leutner thought. Leutner said she is now convinced that Geyser and Weier were a toxic combination.

Morgan Geyser has her 12th birthday political party

Leutner said she had no idea what the two girls had planned for her in the name of "Slender Man" when she arrived to Geyser's 12th birthday political party. The trio had skated together at a local roller rink and eaten frozen yogurt before the slumber party. Looking back, Leutner said she thinks she can recognize a glimpse of something feeling off that nighttime.

"Something was strange because at all of our by sleepovers, [Geyser] always wanted to stay upwards all night because she could never exercise that at dwelling house," Leutner said of Geyser. "But on [the night of] the birthday party, she wanted to go to bed."

"Once I look dorsum on it, I was like, that is really weird," she told Muir. "Why didn't I see something? Why didn't I discover something was weird? But I'k not blaming myself at all. Considering who could ever see something like this coming? Nobody could always see something like this coming."

Geyser and Weier after told investigators that they had planned to kill Leutner in her slumber that night, co-ordinate to their police force interviews, only then they inverse the plan to kill her the next morning at a nearby park.

"I remember waking up," Leutner said. "They had already gone, woken upwards and gone downstairs on the computer. So I woke upwards and I went down with them. We had doughnuts [and] went to the park."

Leutner said that information technology was Geyser'due south idea in the morn to become to the park and that normally Geyser wouldn't accept been allowed to go without an developed. Just considering she was with friends and it was her birthday party, her mother had let the three girls become on their ain, Leutner said.

Once the girls got to the park, the plan to kill Leutner changed once more. Weier told investigators that she suggested they get for a walk to play hide-and-seek in nearby woods.

"They just wanted to go on a walk," Leutner said. "And I didn't think much of it. It's just a walk. Information technology's in Waukesha. What bad stuff happens in Waukesha, Wisconsin?"

In the forest, as they prepared to start what Leutner idea would be a game of hide-and-seek, Weier told Leutner to lay downwards.

"Anissa told me to lie on the ground and comprehend myself in sticks and leaves and stuff to hide, in a sense," Leutner told Muir. "But it was really just a play a trick on to get me down at that place."

With a kitchen knife Weier told investigators Geyser had brought from her habitation, Geyser repeatedly stabbed Leutner.

Leutner said she didn't remember every detail of her brutal attack and was glad for the relief in non knowing. But, she said, she does think her trust being broken by her best friend and not believing that Geyser and Weier were going to get help for her.

Later Geyser stabbed Leutner with the pocketknife, she and Weier left Leutner alone in the woods. Injured and bleeding, Leutner did what many couldn't believe she had the strength to do: She pulled herself out of the woods and into the open up where someone could detect her.

"I got upward, grabbed a couple copse for support, I retrieve," she said. "And then just walked until I hit a patch of grass where I could lay down."

It was there, at the end of Big Curve Route, that a bicyclist constitute her and called 911. Law and EMT workers arrived. Leutner's focus, she said, faded in and out while in the ambulance.

"I couldn't focus much because my torso was working so hard to keep itself alive," she said. "It was probably like, 'Vision isn't really a priority right now.'"

Payton Leutner undergoes surgery in the hospital

At the hospital, she told Muir, she remembers seeing her mother as nurses counted her wounds.

"I said, 'You're gonna be OK. It's gonna be fine,' just I could run into that she was covered. Her arms and her legs and her abdomen, they were covered in stab wounds," Stacie Leutner told ABC News in 2014.

The doctors at ProHealth Waukesha Memorial Infirmary performed emergency surgery and were shocked by Leutner's disquisitional injuries. The stab wounds she'd suffered to her artillery and legs had only damaged soft tissue, but the ii to her torso had hit major organs. One had cut through her diaphragm, damaging her liver and stomach. The other had nearly penetrated her heart and missed a major artery by less than a millimeter.

"If the knife had gone the width of a human being hair further, she wouldn't have lived," Dr. John Kelemen, who operated on Leutner that day, told ABC News in 2014.

When she awakened subsequently 6 hours of surgery, Leutner said, she first started worrying about where her attackers were.

"I recollect the first thing that I idea later I woke upwardly was like, 'Did they become them?'" she said. "'Are they in that location? Are they in custody? Are they still out?'"

She said she was relieved to hear that constabulary had captured both Geyser and Weier as she struggled with the hurting from the assail and surgery.

"I wrote on whiteboards to communicate considering I couldn't speak much," Leutner said. "I had the intubation tube in my lungs because I couldn't exhale on my own for a while."

Her recovery was difficult, both physically and emotionally. She said she was also frightened later the attack and slept in the bed with her mother so she wouldn't be alone at night.

To this day, Leutner told Muir, she sleeps with a pair of broken scissors nether the pillow next to her "just in instance."

When Leutner learned why Geyser had stabbed her, she said, she wasn't surprised by the motive: The girls had intended to kill her to appease the fictional character "Slender Human" and prove that he was existent.

"After I heard why she did it, I was like, 'Well, this doesn't surprise me at all because she believed so hard in this thing that she would do annihilation for information technology.'"

What did surprise Leutner, she told Muir, was that Geyser and Weier had immediately confessed to the assail and that they'd told law they had been planning it for a long time.

"It was a lilliputian shocking to me to see that they had this big, huge plan that they had been working on for months," Leutner said.

Payton Leutner regains a sense of normalcy in her life

Since the attack, Leutner said she has done her best to resume a normal life despite the notoriety of the case and the years of litigation. Trusting others, especially new friends, she said, has been particularly hard subsequently the assail.

"She has friends, but initially, fifty-fifty with those friends, she kept them at arm'due south length," Stacie Leutner said. "And for a long time, fifty-fifty trusting family members was hard for her."

Payton Leutner told Muir that she sometimes thinks about her erstwhile best friend's mother, Angie Geyser, with sympathy.

"I've thought about what she's going through and how hard it must exist for her," Leutner said. "Because I'1000 sure a lot of people are trashing on her and hating her. And maxim that information technology was her fault, she raised [Geyser] wrong."

"It wasn't [Angie'south] fault," Leutner continued. "Morgan'southward schizophrenic. There is nothing that she could accept done to stop that or control that. Information technology was not her fault."

In 2016, Geyser'south female parent told a newspaper that her daughter had been diagnosed with early onset schizophrenia while in custody. A forensic psychologist also testified for the defense force during a 2022 hearing that Geyser'southward father had been hospitalized several times every bit a teenager because of mental affliction, according to that newspaper.

Stacie Leutner also said she has thought nearly the female parent and father on the other side of the shattered friendship.

"I was aroused for a long time, especially [at] Morgan'south parents, knowing that Morgan's dad had schizophrenia. ... For a long time I thought that they were maybe simply in denial and ignoring her symptoms," Stacie Leutner said. "But I'm not angry anymore, because I recognize that they're going through their own hell."

Geyser and Weier were charged in adult court with first-degree attempted intentional homicide after the attack.

Weier pleaded guilty to a lesser accuse and was constitute by a jury to be non guilty past mental disease or defect in 2017. Geyser pleaded guilty to the kickoff-degree charges against her. In 2018, as a role of her plea agreement with prosecutors, Geyser was convicted just found not guilty by reason of mental illness or defect.

Weier and Geyser each were sentenced to up to 25 years and up to twoscore years, respectively, in a mental health institution.

Leutner said she is aware of the longstanding public debate about whether the ii girls were quondam plenty to be charged in adult court, but doesn't herself question whether their cases should have been handled in juvenile courtroom.

"Adult crime is adult court," Leutner said. "If they had stolen a candy bar, sure that's a child. But you lot tried to kill somebody. That's an adult crime."

Leutner said she doesn't ever want to see or talk to Geyser or Weier once more, and said what Geyser did was "probably unforgivable." She knows Geyser is already eligible to petition the court for release from the mental institution, but said she doesn't fear her eventual release.

"If she e'er like tried to come by me, she would go right dorsum where she was," Leutner said.

Stacie Leutner acknowledged her own reservations about Geyser potentially petitioning for release soon.

"I don't know that I'm comfortable with her being released correct at present," Stacie Leutner said. "I know that their sentences were upwardly to 25 and forty years, and if that'southward how long information technology takes, so that's how long it takes."

Payton Leutner on what she would tell her former all-time friend who attacked her

Payton Leutner even surprised herself when responding to the question of what she would similar Geyser to know, she said.

"I would probably, initially thank her," Leutner said to Muir. "I would say, 'Just because of what she did, I have the life I have at present. I really, actually like information technology and I have a plan. I didn't have a programme when I was 12, and now I do because of everything that I went through.'"

"I wouldn't recall that someone who went through what I did would ever say that," Leutner said. "Only that's truly how I feel. Without the whole situation, I wouldn't be who I am."

Leutner is a senior in loftier school and plans to attend college in fall 2020. She said she'd like to pursue a career in the medical field, which she believes is a goal inspired past what happened to her.

To the many people who supported Leutner and sent her well-wishes through the years, she said she is "very grateful for all of the love and support." She said she now wants people to know that she is doing well and that her promise for moving forward is to "put everything behind me and live my life ordinarily."

"We've seen her go from a victim to a survivor," said Leutner family spokesman Steve Lyons of SJL Government Affairs and Communications. "Now she'south a immature lady with a really brilliant future ... [She has] great grades, swell friends. She's got then much to live for and I tin can't wait to see what the side by side affiliate of her life is."

As far as "Slender Man" goes, Leutner said she had advice for parents whose children might not empathize the difference betwixt what is real and simulated online.

"Parents need to talk to their kids direct, maxim, 'This is not real. This is fake,'" she said to Muir.

She also shared some sage advice to young people regarding bad friendships that she wished she'd known at 12 years erstwhile.

"Get out before something bad happens to you," Leutner said. "Even if y'all're guilted into it, if you've been friends with them for years. … If you feel something is bad, you need to go out while you still tin can."

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Source: https://abcnews.go.com/US/slender-man-stabbing-victim-speaks-publicly-time-situation/story?id=66268385

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