Natascha Kampusch, who survived an eight-year kidnap ordeal after being seized at the age of 10, is to give her first interview on Wednesday night to Austrian TV as part of a series of highly lucrative media deals likely to make her a millionaire.
Kampusch is expected to talk in detail for the first time about her ordeal at the hands of Wolfgang Priklopil, who snatched her on her way to school and kept her in a basement in his Vienna home.
On Tuesday Christoph Feurstein, the journalist who will conduct the interview for the Austrian state broadcaster ORF, said he would not be asking Kampusch any ”intimate” personal questions about her relationship with her 44-year-old kidnapper, who flung himself under a train hours after her escape last month.
The interview will instead dwell on her future. Kampusch had selected questions from a list of 50, Feurstein said, adding: ”It’s entirely clear that I won’t be asking her about any sexual relationships. This is a very sensitive area. The public shouldn’t have any interest in this,” he told ORF’s website. It would be up to Kampusch whether she showed her face before the cameras, he added.
Although ORF has not paid for the exclusive, the broadcaster has agreed to sell the interview on her behalf to other media outlets. Germany’s RTL is believed to have paid â,¬100 000 for rights, and Kampusch has given a print interview to the Austrian tabloid Kronen Zeitung and the Austrian magazine News.
A spokesperson for the Kronen Zeitung said the paper’s interview would appear on Wednesday — along with exclusive new photographs. There have been no contemporary pictures of her since Kampusch staggered, ghost-like and emaciated, from Priklopil’s home in the suburb of Strasshof on August 23.
Newspapers have had to rely on a police simulation of what she looks like now, together with photos of her taken aged 10, just before she vanished.
A spokesperson for Kronen Zeitung said: ”We intend to sell them as a package on Natascha’s behalf to other media organisations. She will get the money.”
The Kronen Zeitung and News appear to have clinched their exclusives by offering Kampusch a comprehensive package of benefits, including paying for her education, providing her with a flat and even putting her on the payroll. They are also believed to have paid her a lump sum of between â,¬250 000 and â,¬300 000.
But there have been growing concerns this week about the wisdom of Kampusch’s forthcoming multiple media appearances, and whether a vulnerable young woman who has spent more than eight years in a subterranean prison is now being exploited again.
Kampusch’s parents and sister have complained repeatedly that they are being prevented from seeing her by a group of experts with their own interest in her. Kampusch’s father Ludwig Koch (51) and mother Brigitta Sirny (56) have been invited to appear on an ORF panel discussion immediately after her interview. But according to Austria’s Ã-sterreich newspaper, both are furious at the way in which she is being advised.
Over the weekend they hired a lawyer to try to stop the interview. ”Natascha is being manipulated by her own carers,” her father told the paper, adding: ”What has happened to my girl is absolutely crazy.”
Their now grown-up daughter has her own PR agent, Dietmar Ecker, who has been handling more than 300 interview requests from newspapers, magazines and TV stations around the world.
In a statement on his website, Ecker described the media interest in Kampusch as enormous. She had decided to give her first interviews to the Austrian media because it had been ”the Austrian people who had worried about her for eight years, and who were very pleased by her release”, he said.
In addition to Ecker, her team includes two child psychiatrists, Professor Max Friedrich and Dr Ernst Berger, as well as Monika Pinterits, the head of victim support organisation Weisser Ring, and top corporate and media lawyer Gabriel Lansky from Lansky, Ganzger & Partner. None of them appear to have dissuaded her from going on TV.
On Tuesday, however, a spokesperson for ORF denied that Kampusch was being exploited and said that it was the teenager’s choice to give a wide-ranging TV interview. ”It was her idea,” said ORF spokesperson Michael Krause. ”She said she wanted to do it with us because she regards us as a quality broadcaster.”
Whatever the case, Kampusch now has the kind of financial security most teenagers can only dream of. As well as around â,¬600 000 from her interviews this week, she is also likely to gain â,¬664 900 from the criminal injuries compensation board. She also has a claim on the house owned by Priklopil, his two cars, and 24% of the firm he worked for. There have also been donations from the public.
The police investigation into her abduction is continuing, meanwhile. Searches of Priklopil’s heavily fortified house have turned up few new clues. Although they have managed to piece together some details of Kampusch’s life with Priklopil many questions have not been cleared up.
In a statement last week she gave brief details of how she managed to flee, explaining she had taken her ”opportunity” while vacuuming her kidnapper’s car.
She spoke affectionately of Priklopil. He was, she said, ”part of my life”. She said she ”mourned” his death to a certain extent, saying it had not been ”necessary”. – Guardian Unlimited Â