The story of Natascha Kampusch's eight years in captivity is utterly compelling - but she should be left alone now, writes Lucy Mangan
The only person who hasn't called is Spielberg, apparently. Anyone who's anyone - and quite a few who aren't - are desperate to secure the rights to Natascha Kampusch's story. Perhaps the reason Spielberg hasn't called is that he is the only one who realises that almost nothing could be done to improve - dramatically speaking - upon the tale, and that any audience reaction to a film would be a pale imitation of the horror and sympathy the reality has evoked.
Kampusch was kidnapped by Wolfgang Priklopil in 1998 when she was 10. He took her to his house, where he had prepared an underground cell in which she was imprisoned for the next eight years, save for occasional closely supervised shopping trips with her captor and a few hours a day in his house doing chores.
Two weeks ago she was vacuuming his car and he moved uncustomarily far away from the noise to take a call on his mobile phone. When his back was turned, she ran. When Priklopil realised that his captive had escaped, he drove his car to the nearby railway line and killed himself by jumping in front of a train.
KAMPUSCH'S EMERGENCE CAUSED, naturally, a media sensation, accompanied equally naturally by the fear that she might have exchanged a concrete jail for the prison of unrelenting press and public attention.
In an effort to deflect the latter, Kampusch released a letter a few days later describing her daily routine as a captive and the moment of her escape, and saying that she understood people were curious about her circumstances "but I can assure you in advance that I am not going to answer any questions of an intimate or personal nature".
Unfortunately, the letter - an unusually and unexpectedly articulate gobbet of common sense and unsentimentality amid all the feverish hype - contained in its measured sentences a tantalising hint that their writer was suffering from Stockholm syndrome, as the press had been speculating since the news broke, and if anything did more to stoke than dampen interest in her.
On Wednesday, Kampusch gave a much fuller account of her eight years in captivity. In two print and one televised interview on the Austrian equivalent of the BBC, she spoke of her initial horror ("You have seen my dungeon and you know how small it was. It was a place to despair"), Priklopil's threats of murder and suicide ("I knew of his death in advance. In the seconds of my escape I knew without a shadow of a doubt that he would kill himself"), her determination to escape, and even of her plans to cope with the media interest afterwards. The interviews were given in the hope that she will be granted her privacy in return.
Obviously, it is to be hoped that this happens. At the same time, we must be excused our fascination with the case (though not, of course, indulged for ever more in it).
It is not, after all, going too far to say that the reappearance of a girl even her parents must surely have assumed was gone for ever seemed like a miracle - the closest thing we will see to a resurrection of the dead. Even in this sensorily overloaded age, that's still enough to make you sit up and pay attention, and so it should be.
And the miraculous element has continued since then, as Kampusch has been revealed as a young woman of almost preternatural maturity and dignity. Though some of her interview answers bear a trace of passing through the filters of her attendant media adviser and psychiatrist, her perceptions, analyses and self-control are clearly her own, hard-won over the past eight years and not the quick work of professionals over the past 10 days. She describes, for example, Priklopil's occasional suggestions that she should escape "as if he wanted me to get free some day. That it all falls apart - that somehow justice prevails," and her conviction at 12 that she would escape as "a pact I made with my later self, that I would free that little 12-year-old girl".
AS MORE AND more details emerged during the interviews, however, the case seemed to take on the quality of a medieval folk tale. Hardly surprising, of course, given that folk tales and fairy stories were originally designed to warn children of just the kind of adult cruelties and random evils that stepped into Kampusch's path, but the archetypes that inhabit her story only intensify the draw: with her crimson jacket in the photo released at her disappearance, she's resourceful Red Riding Hood, skipping off to school instead of grandma's, while the wolf waits across the road (Wolfgang Priklopil was appropriately named) and dragged deep underground instead of deep into the woods. And if her confession of dreams of chopping off Priklopil's head with an axe don't make you wish that there had been a timely knock on the door by the woodsman, then you clearly didn't read enough as a child. And in myth and reality the villain dies in the end.
BUT IF IT speaks to age-old concerns and deepest fear, there is at least one facet of the case that appeals to less forgivable, voyeuristic instincts - namely the question of whether or not Kampusch was sexually abused by Priklopil. There was a suggestion from a police officer, in the early days, that she had been, but there has never been any official confirmation and Kampusch has always been adamant that this aspect is no one's business but her own.
In one of the interviews, when asked what has annoyed her most about the press coverage, she goes as far as to say, "Things that are simply untrue, like the abuse." Nevertheless, the tabloids generally have been unable to resist descriptions of Priklopil's dungeon as "the perv's cell" and the Daily Mail's coverage refers to her repeatedly in its headlines as a "sex slave", in an unedifying testament to the desire to will more suffering into existence and add the one missing salacious element needed to perfect the story.
But for most readers the story is almost unprecedentedly satisfactory. Unlike so many other "extreme" cases that have revealed to us new depths of human depravity, such as Rose and Fred West, Harold Shipman, or the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, without redemption, it offers, in the intelligent, dignified form of Kampusch, a sense of triumph - of the human spirit, of her hope over appalling adversity, hackneyed phrases both, but true. She is in the strange position of being both victim and consoler.
We should leave her alone now, not just out of decency but out of gratitude.