Diane Sawyer began Tweeting Friday ahead of tonight’s live tweet of her Jaycee Dugard special. (Sawyer’s second Tweet was about the death of former First Lady Betty Ford). It was Dugard’s first interview since being set free from 18 years of captivity at the hands of a deranged, convicted rapist and his complicit wife.
Sawyer has spent the last 12 days working on the special, including two days of interviews with Dugard late last month. Sawyer, along with Chris Cuomo, who investigated the inaction by local, state and federal authorities, taped their on camera portions this weekend. Sawyer watched the special at ABC News headquarters tonight along with ABC News newsmagazine EP David Sloan (below).
The special leaned heavily on passages from Dugard’s book, “A Stolen Life” which comes out Tuesday. In it, Dugard describes her last feeling of freedom along a South Lake Tahoe road on that June morning in 1991 — a pine cone, which, 20 years later is a symbol of the hope that kept her alive. (Video of Dugard talking about the day she was kidnapped, after the jump.)
Dugard now wears a pine cone charm necklace, and presented Sawyer with one of her own, which Sawyer showed at the close of the show, and Tweeted later (above). Sawyer (@dianesawyer) had about 7,000 followers at the start of her special and more than 10,000 by its end in the Eastern and Central time zones.