THE LONG READ: The Dungeon on Seymour Avenue

Michelle Knight is famous for surviving 4,000 days of rape and torture. But that doesn’t pay the rent or buy back her life, writes Abigail Jones.

A young woman walked into a Family Dollar store in the US city of Cleveland, exhausted, sweaty and desperate. Michelle Knight was 21 and she’d spent the past few hours searching for the location of a crucial meeting. The appointment, with social services, was to discuss how she might regain custody of her two-year-old son, who’d been placed in foster care a few months earlier after her mother’s boyfriend got drunk and, Knight says, became abusive and broke the boy’s leg.

It was August 2002 — years before smartphones and Google Maps — and after nearly four hours of wrong turns, Knight spotted the Family Dollar store. She bought a soft drink and started asking people for directions. A woman in the aisle couldn’t help. The cashier couldn’t either. Knight was about to walk out when she heard a male voice: “I know exactly where that is.” She looked up and saw a man with thick, messy hair and a potbelly, dressed in black jeans and a stained flannel shirt.