First, Natascha Kampusch, the 18-year-old girl held prisoner for eight years in the cellar of a suburban house in Vienna, was portrayed as the ultimate victim – a young woman deprived of her teenage years by a paedophile monster. It was a story to touch the heart - to use tabloidese - and it was swallowed without question by eager journalists and public alike.
Then, two weeks after her escape, it was reported that Natascha not only regularly left the house with her kidnapper, Wolfgang Priklopil, but had also travelled on holiday with him to a ski resort. It appeared inconceivable that this girl, such a strong character in media interviews, had not been able to escape before she did.
Overnight, she became - in the fickle public mind - villain not victim, and the hate mail is flooding in. "She has been playing us all for fools,"
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The Austrian public is turning on Natascha Kampusch, reports robert chesshyre. Does she deserve it? |
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wrote one disgusted Viennese.
Whichever way you look at it, Natascha's tale is remarkable. Hollywood is after her story, and she herself has suggested that she should be played by Scarlett Johansson. But journalists and Hollywood executives like stories to be simple - black or white. It now seems that Natascha's true tale might just be that unfashionable media colour, grey.
Martina Prewein, writer on the Viennese magazine News, which carried an interview with Natascha, told The First Post that the Austrian media had known from the beginning that Natascha had come and gone with her captor (he committed suicide when she did finally escape).
However, in her first (apparently sincere and terrified) account of her ordeal, she had told police that Priklopil swore that he carried a gun, and, should she seek to escape, 
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