Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus escaped the home of Ariel Castro on May 16, 2013—10 years after he'd abducted them. Just four months later, they connected with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan to see if the pair (who are married) were the right people to help them share their harrowing story with the world. "There were some really weird stories being told about what was happening, and they were a little mystified by all that," says Sullivan. "They realized it would probably be best if they could just tell the story—tell the truth, the real story—in one place, one time, so if someone said, 'Well, what was it like?' they could just kind of forever and ever say, 'Read the book.'"
Jordan and Sullivan instantly hit it off with Amanda and Gina, and they've since spent hundreds and hundreds of hours speaking with the two women in the name of getting every detail right in Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland. We spoke with Jordan and Sullivan to find out what was most difficult for the women to open up about, how the child Amanda had with Castro became the women's saving grace, and how the survivors are moving past the tragedy.
WH: What really intrigued you about Amanda and Gina’s story and made you want to work on this project?
Mary Jordan: The whole issue of how you get over tragedy and pain and suffering is just inspiring. I just wanted to hear their story: How do you do it? How do you cope, and then how do you rebuild your lives?
Kevin Sullivan: We spent a lot of years overseas in some pretty tough places writing about people in really tough circumstances, and we always used to talk about resilience. We always used to talk about how people got over the terrible things that we saw. And so when this came along, we said, "Yeah, this is something we've been interested in for a very long time."
Jordan: Unfortunately, there's a lot of bad things that happen out there. And you don't know why horrible things happen, but you can talk to people about how they get through them. And that was a lot of this book: How do you pick up and go on?
Sullivan: We tried not to make it just a litany of the terrible things that had happened to them. We have to talk to them about them, but we really thought the much more interesting thing and the much more important thing is how do you do it—how do you get over it?
WH: Do you feel like they have gotten over it?
Jordan: I think it's a process, and it's not a straight shot to healing. But I think it's remarkable—just utterly remarkable—how they're coming to life again. They spend a lot of time with their family. Gina particularly likes to go roller skating. Amanda loves to walk outside and feel the sun on her face. They laugh. I mean, it's not easy, right? Gina said the other day, "I still, when I'm walking down the street, turn my head, and I'm so worried someone's following me." You know, it's not easy, but it is really amazing. They are doing well. They're moving on. They're making plans to finish their high school degree, get jobs, and kind of start again.
Sullivan: They're actually really fun to be around. They both laugh a lot. They have great senses of humor. They're not dark. These are people who really love life, and they're, you know, they went through a terrible thing. And they'll always be coping with that. As Mary said, it is a process to get over something like that, if you ever do completely. But, boy, they are fun. They are making the most of their reclaimed lives.
WH: Was it difficult to gain their trust at first?
Jordan: It took a long time. You know, I think we clicked right away, but it was a long process. And even seven, eight months in, we were still learning big new things. And it wasn't so much the trust as it was they needed time to get ready, to be able to talk. And certain things would trigger. We were lucky because one would remember something, and then we'd go back to the other one to fill back in. We interviewed them separately and together.
I think really one of the mechanisms is to block things out so it took a little while to go over all that happened there. We were greatly, greatly aided by Amanda's diary. She had written dates and times and specific things in shorthand, and then we could go over that and say, "You wrote out this date about this," and then details would come flooding back.
Sullivan: But we did, we really hit it off right from the beginning. The first time that I ever met Amanda, there was some work being done on her house, and we ended up sitting on the floor of her bedroom going through her old piles of diaries and notes and poetry and artwork, and there was just kind of a lot of laughing. There were some tears, but it was right from the beginning, Mary and I realized we really liked her and we really liked Gina and we were interested. We felt we had a kind of connection and it was going to work, and it did.
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WH: Did you set any ground rules with the women before you started interviewing them for the book?
Sullivan: The only ground rule that we had was that we said that we would do this project only if they agreed to tell the truth and tell us everything. We didn't want to do something that was a white wash or something that was just nice for the sake of being nice. We really wanted to tell the truth of what happened to them, and that's what they wanted, too. More than anything, they wanted the book to be absolutely 100-percent true and honest, and it is.
WH: Amanda seemed more forthcoming about her experience with Ariel Castro in the 20/20 video than Gina was—was that your experience with the women, as well?
Jordan: Gina's just shier just generally, and she'll tell you that. She's just always been that way, and you know, remember she was only 14 when she was taken and was just shy to begin with. So I think they're just very different personalities. It's much harder for her. She doesn't like crowds.
Sullivan: She was shy in private interviews in her home with us. Imagine what it must have been like for her to deal with cameras and lights and Robin Roberts and people and makeup and, you know, the whole thing. That's really daunting for anybody, let alone someone as shy as Gina.
WH: It seemed like Jocelyn may have helped give Amanda more of a reason to hold on and get through—do you think that's true?
Jordan: Oh my goodness, yes. Jocelyn got Amanda through it and got all of them through it. Jocelyn was absolutely key because she made, the baby made [Castro] less horrible—at times even happy—and when he was happy, it was better for everybody, right? So she was the catalyst, and literally everything changed because of Jocelyn. When she got older and started asking about the thick chains and why her mother and the other girls were chained to the radiators, at first they were able to say it's bracelets because they didn't want her to know how abnormal [it was], that they were imprisoned. But as she got older, she couldn't do that. So that meant the chains came off. He still locked them up, but...he was better to them when the baby was around, happier when the baby was around. And ultimately, it was Jocelyn who helped them escape because she was the lookout running downstairs, telling her mother that he wasn't home.
WH: So Castro never locked Jocelyn up?
Jordan: No, never.
Sullivan: Never. He treated her like an angel. He absolutely adored her, she adored him, and he would never have done anything like that to her.
WH: And they said in the 20/20 interview he would even take her to the park?
Jordan: Isn't that amazing? He took her to the park, he took her to fly a kite, he took her to a carnival, he took her to the mall. She didn't go outside for the first couple of years, and it was a big moment. Amanda talks about crying. She was so happy that the baby finally got to get some fresh air and go outside. And then once Jocelyn started talking, you know, this beautiful little girl was saying, "Daddy, I want to go outside." It was very hard to say no, and so he took her places. She was 6 when they escaped, and at that point, it was getting harder and harder to contain her.
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WH: Does the fact that her daughter’s tormenter is the father of her daughter weigh on Amanda at all?
Sullivan: No, not at all. Not at all. Amanda has said from the beginning that this is, "She's mine, she came from me," and she considers Jocelyn 100 percent her daughter and she would never think that way about her.
Jordan: It's interesting; the baby, Jocelyn, was born Christmas Day right after her mother died, and so in her mind, this was a gift somehow. Her mother brought this baby so she wouldn't be alone in the house, and then when Jocelyn was born, everything got better. That's how she thinks of it. I know exactly what you're saying—anyone would say that, right? The guy who is raping you is the father, but this is what she says and what she firmly believes: that her baby was a gift somehow. Her mother was in heaven. This was, you know, a gift from heaven basically. Because she wasn't alone and then everything got better.
WH: What was the hardest thing for the girls to talk about with you?
Jordan: Some of the abuse. You know, it was tough to go over the worst days there. Some days he raped them many times in the same day.
WH: How are the women's everyday lives now affected by their experience?
Jordan: I think they make a point of enjoying the little things because it turns out that that's what they missed the most. They missed the freedom to go outside, to go to the store, to pick what you want to eat, to pick up the phone. You know, they talked to four people—four people!—in 10 years, and one of them was the kidnapper. So I think—they will say this to you: They came out of this really enjoying the moment and the little things in life. Like, they like sitting on grass and feeling grass, feeling the sunshine, feeling the wind. Really, that is the true joy. And calling their friends and not being alone. They hate being alone.
Sullivan: Amanda loves grocery stores. She loves to go to the grocery store and pick out whatever she wants and not have anyone tell her what she can or can't eat. And that's a beautiful thing for her these days.
WH: Do you still keep in regular contact with Amanda and Gina?
Jordan: Every day. We are lifelong friends.
WH: What do you hope people will take away from the book?
Sullivan: You can go through things you never would have imagined you would go through in your life, and you can overcome it. And these were just normal young girls in Cleveland, 14 and 16 years old, and they were thrust into this absolutely indescribable pain and darkness. And they had the strength inside them to endure it and to overcome it and now to recover from it, which is just remarkable. I think more than anything it's just the strength that everybody has inside them to overcome something like this and how amazingly well these girls did it.
Jordan: I think it's all about the power of the human spirit because, you know, I think a week is a long time when I'm having a bad time. I mean, think of a month of bad time. This was year after year, and so I think the big takeaway is the strength that people have that you can get through things, you can get through real hardships. You can get through hardships and live again, start again.
Sullivan: Somebody could do a book about something like this and call it House of Horrors or some terrible thing, where it's just a litany of the misery. And you know, we very specifically didn't do that. We didn't write the book that way, and there's a reason that the book is called Hope. These girls inside never gave up hope, and they would often just write the word over and over and over again. They would write "hope, hope, hope, hope, hope, hope, hope" on a piece of paper. And that gave them strength. The book is titled very accurately for the situation.
Jordan: I think one important thing is, you know, how you cope with the horrible things. And both of them tried to focus on one good thing—like just one thing to hang onto. So if they heard a song on the radio, they'd take that as a sign, "Okay, things are going to get better. I just heard a favorite song, a song that my mother liked." Or, "Today he gave us a little more food." You know, I just think it's fascinating that the human instinct is to be hopeful and focus on the positive. And that was the key to how they coped was, even when it was so dark, to focus on one good thing that was happening, and then that would keep them strong.
I think women are strong. I'm so happy these women outlasted their captor.
This interview has been edited for space and clarity.
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