Payton Leutner, whose best friend and another classmate said they stabbed her 19 times in 2014 to please a fictional horror character called “Slender Man,” has spoken out for the first time. Leutner still wears the scars of the attack, showing how she has strived to survive since that horrific night. To this day, she still has fears though, admitting she sleeps with a pair of broken scissors under her pillow “just in case.”
“I’ve come to accept all of the scars that I have,” Leutner told ABC News‘ David Muir for Friday night’s 20/20. “It’s just a part of me. I don’t think much of them. They will probably go away and fade eventually.”
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On May 31, 2014, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier stabbed Leutner 19 times in Waukesha, Wisconsin. All three girls were 12 at the time. The case made international headlines when Geyser and Weier said they stabbed their classmate to please Slender Man, a fictional character created in 2009. They told police they were planning to kill Leutner in her sleep, but decided to kill her in a park the next day instead. Last year, Geyser and Weier were both found not guilty by mental disease or defect. They were sentenced to state psychiatric institutes.
Leutner is now 17, and told ABC News she wants to reclaim her story.
“I feel like it’s time for people to see my side rather than everyone else’s,” she told Muir.
Before the attack, Leutner was close friends with Geyser and always looked for the positives in people. She became friends with Geyser in fourth grade and described Geyser as a happy girl who seemed “a little lonely.” They were celebrating Geyser’s birthday the night before the attack.
“She was funny, I will give you that,” Leutner said of Geyser. “She had a lot of jokes to tell. … She was great at drawing and her imagination always kept things fun.”
In sixth grade, Geyser became friends with Weier and started talking to Leutner about Slender Man. Geyser thought it was real, and Leutner said she was relieved to hear her mother say the character was fictional.
Leutner said she felt bad for Geyser and continued to be friends with her. She felt Geyser “guilted” her into staying friendly.
“Payton was such an empathetic kid,” Leutner’s mother, Stacie Leutner, told ABC News. “She recognized that Morgan maybe wasn’t the healthiest friendship to have. But if Payton wasn’t her friend, she wouldn’t have any other friends. So, she thought everyone deserved at least one friend.”
Leutner admitted she did not like Weier, who “really convinced” Geyser Slender Man was real, at all.
Once the fateful sleepover started, Leutner knew something strange was going on.
“Once I look back on it, I was like, that is really weird,” she said. “Why didn’t I see something? Why didn’t I notice something was weird? But I’m not blaming myself at all. Because who could ever see something like this coming? Nobody could ever see something like this coming.”
Leutner said she does not rmemeber the details of the attack, and is happy she does not. After her classmates left her behind, bleeding, she used a tree to help herself get up and was discovered by a bicyclist, who called 911.
Leutner was rushed to ProHealth Waukesha Memorial Hospital, where doctors performed emergency surgery to save her life. The stabs to her torso caused major damage to her liver and stomach, and another missed a major artery by less than a millimeter. She was in surgery for six hours.
Aside from the pair of scissors, Leutner told Muir she was afraid to sleep alone at night after the attack. However, she is looking forward to college in fall 2020, and hopes to pursue a career in the medical field.
Muir later asked Leutner what she would tell Geyser if she ever saw her again.
“I would probably, initially thank her. I would say, ‘Just because of what she did, I have the life I have now. I really, really like it and I have a plan,” Leutner explained. “I didn’t have a plan when I was 12, and now I do because of everything that I went through.’”
She continued, “I wouldn’t think that someone who went through what I did would ever say that,” Leutner said. “But that’s truly how I feel. Without the whole situation, I wouldn’t be who I am.”
20/20 airs Friday at 9 p.m. ET on ABC.
Photo credit: ABC News/20/20
