‘Slender Man’ stabbing victim Payton Leutner on the friends who tried to kill her

The Wisconsin girl stabbed 19 times by her best friend and another sixth-grade classmate to please fictional bogeyman “Slender Man” has spoken publicly for the first time since the shocking 2014 crime, saying she has “come to accept” all of her scars.

“It’s just a part of me. I don’t think much of them. They will probably go away and fade eventually,” Payton Leutner, 17, told ABC’s David Muir in a “20/20″ episode airing Friday.

Leutner was 12 when deranged schoolmates Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier lured her into woods in Waukesh on May 31, 2014, after hatching a twisted plan to kill their friend to appease the online fictional character — a shadowy figure who stalks children.

Geyser stabbed Leutner a total of 19 times with a steak knife while Weier egged her on, according to investigators. Leutner survived the vicious attack and managed to crawl to a path, where a bicyclist found her.

The two girls are now serving a combined 65 years in a mental hospital for the brutal stabbing, which missed Leutner’s heart by just a fraction of an inch.

“I feel like it’s time for people to see my side rather than everyone else’s,” Leutner told ABC as she works to rebuild her shattered life.

She said she had been a hopeful and positive person before that fateful day — and that she tried to see the good in people, including Geyser, who had struggled to make friends.

“She was sitting all by herself and I didn’t think anyone should have to sit by themselves,” Leutner recounted about the time she befriended the girl in fourth grade.

Geyser seemed like a happy girl, albeit “a little lonely,” while they were friends and they enjoyed sleepovers together, playing outside and drawing — “all the things that kids do,” Leutner said about her best friend.

But “everything went downhill” at one point, she said.

In the sixth grade, Geyser became friends with Weier and began talking to Leutner about “Slender Man,” she said.

“I thought it was odd. It kind of frightened me a little bit,” Leutner said. “But I went along with it. I was supportive because I thought that’s what she liked.”

Eventually, though, Geyser’s fanciful stories about the tall, faceless creature who could use tendrils growing from his back began to creep her out, so she asked her mom, Stacie Leutner, whether “Slender Man” was real.

“I told [Geyser] that it scared me and that I didn’t like it,” Leutner said. “But she really liked it and thought it was real. I saw the change from fifth to sixth grade when she met Anissa.”

She said she considered ending the friendship with Geyser, whose friendship with Weier was blossoming, but decided to stick it out despite her fixation with “Slender Man.”

“I didn’t like [Weier] at all,” Leutner told Muir. “I just hung out with her because I knew that Morgan really loved her as a friend. But she was always cruel to me. I feel like she was jealous that Morgan was friends with me and her.”

Leutner said she had no clue what the two girls had plotted when she arrived to Geyser’s 12th birthday party.

The three girls had roller-skated together and enjoyed frozen yogurt before their slumber party — but Leutner felt something was amiss that night.

“Something was strange because at all of our past sleepovers, [Geyser] always wanted to stay up all night because she could never do that at home,” Leutner. “But on [the night of] the birthday party, she wanted to go to bed.”

She continued: “Once I look back on it, I was like, that is really weird. Why didn’t I see something? Why didn’t I notice something was weird? But I’m not blaming myself at all. Because who could ever see something like this coming? Nobody could ever see something like this coming.”

Leutner said she thought the girls wanted to play hide-and-seek in the woods, where Weier told her to lie down.

“Anissa told me to lie on the ground and cover myself in sticks and leaves and stuff to hide, in a sense,” Leutner said. “But it was really just a trick to get me down there.”

Geyser then whipped out the kitchen knife she brought from her home and began to stab Leutner repeatedly.

The badly injured girl summoned the strength to pull herself out of the woods and seek help.

“I got up, grabbed a couple trees for support, I think. And then just walked until I hit a patch of grass where I could lay down,” she said, adding that a passing bicyclist spotted her and called 911.

In the ambulance, she struggled to focus “because my body was working so hard to keep itself alive. It was probably like, ‘Vision isn’t really a priority right now.'”

Two of the 19 stab wounds hit major organs. One had cut through her diaphragm, damaging her liver and stomach. The other almost penetrated her heart and missed a major artery by less than a millimeter.

When she awoke from surgery, she immediately wondered whether her attackers had been caught.

“I wrote on whiteboards to communicate because I couldn’t speak much,” Leutner said. “I had the intubation tube in my lungs because I couldn’t breathe on my own for a while.”

When she learned why Geyser had stabbed her, she said, she wasn’t surprised by the unhinged motive.

“After I heard why she did it, I was like, ‘Well, this doesn’t surprise me at all because she believed so hard in this thing that she would do anything for it,’” she said.

What did surprise her was that the girls had immediately confessed to the crime — and that they’d told investigators that they had been planning it for a long time.

“It was a little shocking to me to see that they had this big, huge plan that they had been working on for months,” Leutner said.

Leutner said she knows Geyser is already eligible to petition a court for release from the mental institution — but said she doesn’t fear her eventual release.

“If she ever like tried to come by me, she would go right back where she was,” she said.

The high school senior plans to attend college next year and pursue a career in the medical field — a goal she believes was inspired by what happened to her.

Leutner — who sleeps with a pair of broken scissors under her pillow “just in case” — said she has advice for parents whose children might not understand the difference between what is real and fake online.

“Parents need to talk to their kids directly, saying, ‘This is not real. This is fake,'” she said.