Flowers in the Cellar
Consider Jezebel your source for all nightmare-inducing horrific
incest dungeon stories, because there's another one hitting European papers: A 45-year-old Polish man named Krzysztof B. has held his now 21-year-old daughter Alicja captive since 2002 in their rural home. In that time, he's allegedly fathered Alicja's two children and forced her to give them up for adoption. Sound vaguely familiar? Well Krzysztof is being called
"Polish Fritzl" after the terrifying Austrian psycho Josef Fritzl, who fathered
seven children by his captive daughter, Elisabeth. And speaking of the unfortunate Fritzl clan, 42-year-old Elisabeth, who was held captive for more than two decades, has
finally spoken publicly about her father's ultra-violence.
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flowers in the cellar
Celebrities know what they're getting into, paparazzi apologists will argue, dismissing the constant haranguing mega-stars and their reality TV counterparts experience at the hands of photographers. But Elisabeth Fritzl, the Austrian woman who was
locked in the family cellar for 24 years by her deranged father, Josef, and in the meantime impregnated with seven children against her will, never asked for any publicity, and yet, photographers are camped outside the private hospital she's been living in since she and her children surfaced last month. Elisabeth has reportedly agreed to a television interview, and people close to the case
think she has submitted to a public appearance merely to get rid of the constant swarm of aggressive lensmen. Seventeen photographers have been arrested so far, according to the
Daily Mail, and just this past weekend "a security guard at the hospital was injured after he fell from a balcony while tackling a photographer."
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Attorney Rudolf Mayer will use an
insanity defense with client
Josef Fritzl , the evil Austrian who imprisoned his daughter Elisabeth in the family basement and fathered 7 children by her. "I believe that the trigger was a mental disorder, because I can't imagine that someone has sex with his own daughter without having a mental disorder," Mayer said, according to the
AP. Mayer plans to push for Fritzl's internment in a psychiatric institution as opposed to a jail, if certified insane and convicted. In other Fritzl news, Josef's sister-in-law,
Christine, has spoken out against him, calling him a "tyrant" and saying that her sister, Josef's wife Rosemarie, was too terrified of her husband to ever cross him. She even stuck by Fritzl when he was convicted of raping a nurse in 1967. Christine says Rosemarie only cared about their children and with the recent, horrific revelations of recent weeks, "For sure, the world has collapsed for her." [
AP via CNN,
AP via MSNBC]
flowers in the cellar
Austrian authorities are still trying to piece together the story of
Josef Fritzl, the man who kept his daughter, Elisabeth, captive in the family cellar for 24 years and fathered 7 of her children. Why, for instance, did he raise three of the children above-ground while keeping the other three surviving children (one died in childbirth) in the basement? According to the
Guardian, Fritzl said that the Lisa, Monika and Alexander "were sickly and cried too much in the cellar for my liking," which is why he didn't bring them out in daylight. The
Guardian points out that Fritzl's logic is completely flawed, as "one would expect that Kerstin, Stefan and Felix [the children raised outside the basement] would also have cried a lot as babies."
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flowers in the cellar
Upon first reading the
horrific story of 73-year-old Austrian Josef Fritzl, who locked his daughter, Elisabeth, in the family cellar in 1984 and proceeded to allegedly father as many as seven of her children, my reaction was damn, that is some
V.C. Andrews shit. But then I read more of the reports, and I can no longer relate Fritzl's crime to a campy, pop culture artifact: Keeping your daughter and half of her children locked for over two decades in what authorities
describe as a damp, narrow "series of underground rooms equipped for sleeping and cooking," according to the BBC, is nothing short of evil. CNN reports that on August 8, 1984 Fritzl's daughter, the now 42-year-old Elisabeth, was enticed by her father "into the basement, where he drugged her, put her in handcuffs and locked her in a room." Elisabeth, who had been sexually abused by Josef since she was 11, was reported missing two weeks later.
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