Kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard to recount 18-year ordeal on ABC TV

LOS ANGELES — A California woman kidnapped as a girl and repeatedly raped is to give her first media interview about her 18-year ordeal, ABC television said a week after her abductors were jailed.

Jaycee Dugard, who was 11 when she was seized and kept in a back yard compound by Phillip and Nancy Garrido, is to appear on the Diane Sawyer show next month, shortly before a book about her ordeal is published.

"Dugard will be asked about the extraordinary and heartbreaking story of her captivity (and) her reunion with her family," ABC said, adding that the show will air shortly before her memoir, "A Stolen Life" is published on July 12.

Dugard, who is now 31, issued a strongly-worded statement read out in court last week when the Garridos were jailed, telling them: "There is no God in the universe that would condone your actions."

Phillip Garrido, who fathered two children with Dugard after kidnapping her in 1991, was given 431 years, while his wife was jailed for 36 years to life, after a plea bargain.

In grand jury testimony released after the couple were sentenced, Dugard described how she was kidnapped from the side of the road on June 10, 1991 after a car pulled up and its driver asked for directions.

"All of a sudden, his hand shoots out of the car window, and I feel this shock. And I stumble back into the, into the bushes," she said, describing how it felt after Dugard used a Tazer-like stun gun on her.

"I'm sitting now in the bushes, trying to get away, but I feel like my whole body is -- wouldn't work. It was tingly and I can't -- nothing works. All of a sudden, I'm in the car, and there's something on top of me," she added.

She then remembered a man in the car saying "I can't believe we got away with it" and laughing.

For three years she was forced to have sex with Garrido once a week, and she eventually became pregnant. She would watch TV and eat with Nancy Garrido who sometimes offered to have sex with Garrido, so Dugard didn't have to.

After the birth of her second child he stopped having sex with her and they started to "act like a family" and "try to be normal," she said.

She told the grand jury she never tried to escape, explaining: "I was scared. I didn't know what I would do. I was afraid of I guess what he would do."