Law Office of Lowell Steiger

Details of Elisabeth Fritzl’s Abuse at the Hands of Her Father, Josef


Author: Lowell Steiger

Published On: March 17, 2009

I am sickened by the account of Josef Fritzl’s treatment of his daughter, Elisabeth Fritzl, during the 24 years that he imprisoned her in a purposefully built cellar.

This Josef Fritzl calls himself a man, a human being. I don’t perceive him as human. The horrors that he bestowed upon his daughter beginning with drugging her at age 18 in order to imprison her in the dungeon that became her 24 year torture chamber and the deceit that he so brazenly perpetrated to friends and family during that time boggle the mind and shock the conscience.

Here is, in part, what the indictment states:

  • He chained his daughter up, strapping up her arms and tying her hands behind her back with an iron chain, which he then secured to metal posts behind her bed. She could only move approximately half a metre either side of the bed.
  • After two days he gave her more freedom of movement by attaching the chain around her waist. Then around six to nine months into her imprisonment, he “removed the metal chain”, because “it was hindering his sexual activity with his daughter”.
  • He forced her to endure sexual abuse and rape at his hands sometimes several times a day, from the second day of her incarceration right up until her release last April. During the first nine months he kept her on a lead and “constantly covered her mouth and prevented her from breathing”.
  • He repeatedly threatened her with the statement: “If you do not do as I say, your treatment will get worse and you will not escape from the cellar anyway.”
  • He repeatedly beat and kicked her.
  • Subjected her to humiliating sexual abuse, including forcing her to reenact scenes in pornographic films with him as well as inserting objects into her in a violent manner.
  • Fritzl threatened Elisabeth and her children, warning them that if they tried to escape they would be killed. “He told them he had installed a system so that the doors would give them electric shocks if they tried to open them and that poison would be released into the cellar if they tried to escape, killing them all instantly.”
  • He would punish her by switching off all the power to the cellar for days at a time “so she was left alone in total darkness”.
  • The jury will hear three expert testimonies including the psychiatric assessment of Fritzl, and evidence from a technical expert and an electrical engineer who have inspected the dungeon prison, including its complex locking system and the eight doors which separated Elisabeth and her family from the outside world.

The poison that ran through this man’s veins is incomprehensible. I’m speechless.

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