Kampusch on Facebook, Online Dating and Those Who Escaped Justice
Austrian kidnap victim Natascha Kampusch says she does not have a Facebook account because the social network giant had refused to believe who she was.
The 26-year-old has been out of the news lately, admitting that she has been trying to find herself.
She said: “It was a deliberate decision to have a quieter life for a while, I am in a phase where I am looking for myself, and my talents, and to find out what it is that I want from life.”
She said that one of the things she had played around within this time had been Facebook, and that she had managed to successfully set up a Facebook account, but after she lost the password when her phone broke, she had tried without success to regain it. She said Facebook had decided that the account in her name was fake.
She said that an attempt to create a new page in her name had also resulted in it being classed as a fake page, and as a result she had given up on the page.
The young Austrian woman was kidnapped on the way to school aged 10 by pervert Wolfgang Priklopil, and kept prisoner for 3,096 days before she finally freed herself. The story of her ordeal was recently made into a film starring Irish actress Antonia Campbell-Hughes.
But although the 26-year-old was constantly in the media with her plans for the future she has now become withdrawn and isolated. She said: “I like to stay at home on my own, waiting for the day when I’m not so famous and no one will recognise me. Alternatively, I like to go out in the stormy weather when it’s raining for example, and I can have a big umbrella that I can hide behind.”
She said that she would like to have a boyfriend, but when she had her tried online dating, as soon as she had mentioned her name it had completely overshadowed anything else.
She said that she had tried using a different name every time the man had requested a photograph and she had refused, he had then broken off the contact.
She said: “They either told me that I was too complicated, or mysterious, and some accused me of being a man.” She said that the difficulties in meeting a partner was one of the reasons that she had also given up any thought of having children of her own. But she said she could imagine meeting a partner who already had children.
She added: “It is not really so important for me now. Perhaps at some stage I might get to meet someone who already has children, and might eventually get to know them as well. I don’t ask myself anymore the question about whether I might get children now or not.”
Kampusch also revealed this week that she has given up trying to get her high school leaving certificate and has even stopped taking driving lessons because she cannot handle the contact with other people. She has admitted that she has not yet managed to complete her plans to graduate from school because she is too nervous being near class colleagues, saying: “The regular contact with fellow students was really a horror scenario for me.”
And she has also failed in the plan to do her driving test, because it caused feelings of panic every time she saw her driving teacher. She added: “Being in the car memories of the day I was kidnapped, and once that was in my mind I couldn’t bear to continue with the lessons anymore.”
She has also put on weight significantly, in contrast with wafer-thin Antonia Campbell-Hughes who admitted she went on a massive diet in order to portray the kidnap victim in the film 3,096 Days.
It was also revealed that in 2016 the crime against her will time out, which will mean that it will be too late after that to prosecute anybody who might also have been involved or who might have failed to act to see her freed earlier.
But she said that she had already given up any hope that any more light would be shared on the failure to free her earlier. She said: “There is a lot more that needs to be explained, but the people that are to blame over the fact that I wasn’t found for years, they certainly won’t be getting in touch and saying “Yep, that was me, hands up”. I wish it were so, but sadly, it won’t happen.”