She wants to be known as Lily.
Michelle Knight, one of the three women who escaped from Cleveland monster Ariel Castro’s house of horrors, has chosen a new name to go with her new life.
It’s “my favorite flower,” she told People magazine, and it symbolizes renewal.
Knight, who was 21 when she was kidnapped in 2002, was the first of Castro’s victims and the one who suffered the most at the hands of the sexual sadist.
Michelle Knight has not kept in touch with her fellow captors since their rescue last year.
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Amanda Berry was one of the three women held captive in Ariel Castro’s Cleveland house of horrors.
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Gina DeJesus was the last woman to be kidnapped by Ariel Castro and held captive for years.
The victims of Ariel Castro’s house of horrors, Michelle Knight (from left), Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, have not maintained close contact since their rescue.
“Everything in the house was unexplainable,” said Knight, who is now 33. “It happened. I don’t know the reasons why.”
Knight said she has seen little of Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, the other two victims, since they were rescued on May 6.
The plucky survivor insists there is no bad blood and that after years of being yoked together by a madman they need to heal on their own.
“I love them and they love me,” she said. “Hopefully we’ll all get back together again.”
Knight is living in her own apartment in Cleveland, taking cooking classes and relishing her freedom.
“I don’t take things for granted anymore,” she told the magazine. “Not even the little things like looking out a window. I went through years of torture, and now I’m back. I’m free to fly.”
Her memoir, “Finding Me,” is expected to be published on the first anniversary of the women’s escape from Castro’s clutches. Berry and DeJesus are also working on books.
Excerpts of Knight’s tome will be featured in next week’s issue of People.
They are likely to include Knight’s horrific accounts of being chained to a pole in the basement, repeated rapes and how Castro impregnated her five times and beat her so she would miscarry each time.
Castro, 53, later hanged himself in prison.
Knight told People she and the other women clung to the hope that one day they would be free.
“I think basically every day we told each other we’d make it out alive,” she said.
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