Katie Beers doesn’t regret that she was once kidnapped by a pedophile, said J. David Goodman in The New York Times. In 1992, Beers was just 9 years old when family friend John Esposito lured her to his house in Bay Shore, N.Y., and then chained her up in an underground concrete bunker he built specifically for her. Esposito kept her there for the next 16 days and molested her repeatedly. She now thinks that this horrific experience—which drew national attention—changed the trajectory of her life for the better. “If the kidnapping hadn’t happened, I don’t even want to think about where I would be,” says Beers, 30. “I would have never graduated high school or college. I might not even be here, living today.” Raised in a chaotic, broken family, Beers spent most of her time in the home of a godmother, Linda Inghilleri, who, Beers says, treated her like “a slave.” Inghilleri’s husband molested her from the time she was a toddler. But after her kidnapping, Beers was placed with a loving foster family in East Hampton, and they raised her as their own. She went to college, met her husband there, and now has two children and a career in insurance. “Being abducted,” she says, “was, unfortunately, the best thing that happened to me.”
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