Denise Huskins was at the center of the kidnapping featured in Netflix’s ‘American Nightmare.’ But what happened to Denise Huskins at the time?
It’s been six years since the night that Aaron Quinn and Denise Huskins awoke in his Vallejo home to a man’s voice saying, “Wake up. This is a robbery.”
That terrifying night, both of them were bound and Huskins was kidnapped. Huskins was held captive for just over 48 hours before being released, but the couple continued to fear for their lives with a kidnapper on the loose and the police dismissing their account of the incident as too incredible to be believed.
Denise Huskins was kidnapped and then blamed for her disappearance.
Denise Huskins was kidnapped in 2015 from her home in Vallejo, California, along with her then-boyfriend, Aaron Quinn.
The kidnappers, who were allegedly wearing scuba suits, bound the couple with zip ties and forced them into a closet. They were drugged and blindfolded with blacked-out goggles and told that the attackers were part of a well-organized, highly-trained group that collected financial debt.
The attackers’ plan was to kidnap Denise and return her after Aaron paid a ransom. Denise was taken captive to a remote location, where she was drugged and raped twice by her abductor.
She was released two days later on March 25 near her mother’s home in Huntington Beach, California, as the kidnapper had promised Huskins previously.
The police blamed Quinn and Huskins for her kidnapping, using their confirmation bias to draw ties to ‘Gone Girl.’
When Huskins was kidnapped, Gone Girl was at the forefront of the cultural landscape. When Quinn went to the police, they started questioning him instead of helping him. They even forced him into traditional prison garb and held him for investigation. They believed that he was covering up for Huskins’s Gone Girl-esque escape or that he had murdered his girlfriend.
The case was initially considered a hoax by the police, but the kidnapper, Matthew Muller, was later arrested and sentenced to 40 years in prison. Denise and Aaron sued the City of Vallejo for defamation and won a $2.5 million settlement in 2018.
Denise and Aaron released a book in 2021 titled Victim F: From Crime Victims to Suspects to Survivors, which they wrote with former PEOPLE senior writer Nicole Weisensee Egan.
Today, with their assailant Matthew Muller in prison, they’ve chronicled their story in a new book called “Victim F: From Crime Victims, To Suspects, To Survivors.”
Huskins says that in the end, the couple’s experience of trauma and survival is ultimately a love story with a happy ending. Huskins and Quinn married in 2018 and had a daughter, Olivia, who was born five years to the day that Huskins was released by her kidnapper, she said.
“You can go through any kind of trauma to where it leaves you devastated and in a place where you just think, ‘This is impossible to move forward from. What do I do next?'” she told ABC News’ Amy Robach. “I think ours is an example of that. There is hope. It might take time and it might be a lot of hard work, but there is hope.”
