Interview With Kidnapped Girl Attracts Viewers -- and Critics

Austrian teenager Natascha Kampusch showed both fragility and strength in her first interview since fleeing captivity last month.

The TV interview garnered massive ratings -- and not a little criticism.

She told an Austrian interviewer that she had never abandoned dreams of freedom, saying: "I only thought about fleeing."

Kampusch, who appeared poised in the interview, was snatched off a Vienna street in 1998 when she was 10. She spent eight years in a dungeon-like cell in the basement of the home of her captor, Wolfgang Priklopil. Priklopil committed suicide after Kampusch escaped on Aug. 23.

Media frenzy

Kampusch's escape set off a media feeding frenzy. The interest in her case is so intense in Europe that even the bidding war for the interview became a subject of intense speculation. In the end Kampusch -- whose team of aides now includes a media representative as well as psychologists -- chose the news program on Austrian public broadcaster ORF to make her first public appearance.

In Germany, the rights to the interview were bought by private television station RTL, which reported viewership of more than 7 million, or nearly 23 percent of the audience.

In the interview, Kampusch said she had thought at times about decapitating her kidnapper, a 44-year-old telecoms technician.

"Sometimes I dreamt of chopping his head off, if I had an axe," she said. "You see how the brain works when it's looking for a solution. I kept thinking, I surely was not born to let myself be locked up and have my life ruined."

A "story of freedom"

Kampusch made clear that her extraordinary story, which has brought 50 foreign television crews to Vienna, was about freedom.

"I am a great lover of freedom," she said. "I am thoroughly drunk with the thought of freedom.

"I always sought the moment when the time would be right, but I could not risk anything," the young woman said about her escape, adding that "a failed attempt could have meant I would never come out of the dungeon."

Kampusch fled when Priklopil, who occasionally let her out of her claustrophobic cell to accompany him and work on his house, got distracted by a telephone call while she was vacuuming his car.

She said her escape was "completely spontaneous" and that she just "ran when I saw him on the telephone."

Limited questions

On television, Kampusch, wearing jeans and a purple shirt with a long pink and purple scarf tied around her head, appeared relaxed and often smiling, even joking at times with the interviewer.

Suffering from a cold however, she spoke with a hoarse voice and often closed her eyes against the light as she told ORF of her attempts to attract attention when she was out with her kidnapper.

She said Priklopil threatened to harm anybody who tried to help her and so she never cried for help.

Kampusch had said in advance of the interviews that she would not answer questions about her personal life, including speculation that she had intimate relations with Priklopil.

Criticism from observers

She also refused to talk about her captor, saying it would be unfair since he was not there to defend himself.

The interview itself was followed by the inevitable rash of media analysis. It seems no TV program or newspaper in Europe wanted to miss their chance to comment on details of the young woman's appearance.

The intense bidding war for Kampusch's story was also a topic for media commentary.

Several observers criticized Kampusch and her handlers, saying they went public too soon.

German child psychologist Christian Lüdke, who specializes in treating victims of attacks or kidnappings, told AFP that Kampusch's first public appearance gave a "completely false image" of the victim. It showed a "strong, pretty young woman" when in reality Kampusch is a "small, wounded girl, who has lived through hell," he said.

A "very, very early" move

"From a therapeutic point of view, I would have strongly advised her against" giving the interview, he said.

German criminologist Christian Pfeifer also told AFP that it was "very, very early" to go public with Kampusch's story, saying that "her body language continued to show all the signs of being a captive."