Twelve years after Lauren Kavanaugh was found emaciated and imprisoned in a tiny urine-soaked closet, she has revealed her extraordinary strength.
Speaking to the Dallas Morning News in a series of powerful interviews, the now-20-year-old shared how she has struggled to gain control of her life after suffering six years of sexual, emotional and physical abuse at the hands of her mother and stepfather, Barbara and Kenneth Atkinson.
'I'm hoping one day I'll be able to have a normal life,' Lauren, who now lives in Canton, Texas with her adoptive mother, told writer Scott Farwell. 'Of course, my life hasn't ever been normal.'
Lauren was nearly two when the courts ordered her adoptive parents, Bill and Sabrina Kavanaugh, to hand her back to her biological mother, Barbara Atkinson.
Atkinson, then Barbara Calhoun, had given up Lauren at birth but eight months later the Kavanaughs received a call that she had changed her mind and wanted the little girl back.
During the adoption process, their lawyer had mistakenly never filed the paperwork to terminate Atkinson's parental rights and they lost on the technicality, sending the little girl back to her mother.
In the following six years, Lauren endured sickening abuse at the hands of the couple, who starved, confined and allegedly raped her and handed her over to other men to sexually abuse.
When she was found in 2001, she weighed just 25.6 pounds, the size of an average two-year-old. She was potbellied with malnutrition and doctors had to use a feeding method devised for Holocaust victims.