FIVE YEARS LATER

‘Slender Man’ Stabbing Victim Payton Leutner Speaks Out for First Time

She was 12 years old when she was stabbed 19 times by her sixth grade classmates in the national-headline grabbing case.

The 12-year-old Wisconsin girl who was stabbed 19 times by her sixth grade classmates in the national-headline grabbing “Slender Man” case is speaking out for the first time in an interview with ABC’s 20/20 that will air on Friday. Payton Leutner, now 17, said she has “come to accept” all of her scars since she nearly died in the May 2014 attack. Leutner’s friends Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier hatched a plan to please the fictional horror character Slender Man, lured her into woods, stabbed her with a steak knife, and left her to die. Leutner crawled to a path where a bicyclist found her, saving her life. Geyser and Weier are currently serving a combined 65 years in a mental hospital. “I feel like it’s time for people to see my side rather than everyone else’s,” Leutner told ABC.

“Once I look back on it, I was like, that is really weird,” she added. “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.”