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ABC’s 20/20 Revisits Samantha Stites’s Decade-Long Stalking and Her Account of an Alleged 2022 Kidnapping

The two-hour broadcast presents police interviews, storage-unit surveillance, phone data that bring new public scrutiny to Stites’s allegations.

Overview

  • Reporting says the harassment began after a 2011 meeting between Samantha Stites and Christopher Thomas and continued for years at restaurants, stores and public events.
  • Coverage describes an alleged escalation in 2022 when Thomas reportedly entered Stites’s home, abducted her and kept her in a soundproof bunker built inside a nearby storage unit.
  • Stites’s firsthand account, shown on the program, focuses on how she survived confinement and ultimately escaped, with the show using her interviews as its central source.
  • The 20/20 special, which aired Friday and will stream on Disney+ and Hulu, includes police interview footage, storage-unit surveillance video and material recovered from the accused’s phone.
  • Reports call the 2022 events alleged and do not provide full public records or law-enforcement statements about charges or convictions, and past coverage includes a prior Hulu docuseries on the case.