Here's Michelle Knight's Gut-Wrenching Testimony Against Ariel Castro

Today at the sentence hearing for Ariel Castro, Michelle Knight, one of the women who Castro brutalized and held captive for over 10 years, bravely stepped forward to give testimony and detail the horrors she experienced since being kidnapped in 2002.

“I cried every night,” Knight testified. “I worried about what would happen to me and the other girls every day. Days never got shorter. Days turned into nights. Nights turned into days. The years turned into eternity.”

She also described the emotional torture that Castro inflicted upon the women in addition to the physical torture. According to Knight, he would often tell them that no one on the outside cared about them and say that they should feel lucky that he didn’t kill them.

“I spent 11 years in hell, and now your hell is just beginning,” Knight told Castro in the courtroom. “I will overcome all of this that happened. You will face hell for eternity. From this moment on, I won’t let you define me or affect who I am. You will live. I will live on. You will die a little everyday…The death penalty would be so much easier. You don’t deserve that. You deserve to spend life in prison.”

Castro has accepted a plea deal to serve a 1,000-year prison sentence without parole.