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I can walk in the next room and see my mom. I can decide to jump in the car and go to the beach with the girls. It’s unbelievable, truly.

So says Jaycee Dugard in an interview with Diane Sawyer that airs Sunday on ABC’s Primetime, as the woman who was kidnapped at the age of 11 and held captive for 18 years speaks out for the first time.

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In June, the man who kidnapped and raped Jaycee, Phillip Garrido, was sentenced to 431 years in prison. He’s the father of Jaycee’s two kids, and she tells Sawyer that she “didn’t know” she was in labor prior to giving birth for the first time. Dugard was 14.

“She was beautiful,” Jaycee says of her daughter. “I felt like I wasn’t alone anymore. [I] had somebody else who was mine. I wasn’t alone.”

 
Incredibly, incomprehensibly, Dugard gave birth to another girl in 1997 and created a school inside the compound for her kids, teaching them as best she could with her fifth grade education.

“There’s a switch that I had to shut off,” Dugard tells Sawyer of the experience. “You can’t imagine being kidnapped and raped, you know? You do what you have to do to survive.”

Jaycee has also written a book about the ordeal, titled “A Stolen Life.” It will be released next month.