Pictured are Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight, and child serial rapist and kidnapper the late Ariel Castro

Kathy Wray Coleman is a community activist, legal and political reporter, and a 22- year investigative journalist who trained for 17 years at the Call and Post Newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio.

(www.clevelandurbannews.com) / (www.kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com)

CLEVELAND, Ohio-Famed Hollywood actor, and comedian the late Joan Rivers last year refused to apologize for a joke she made about the Cleveland House of Horrors on Twitter and the Today Show. The then 80-year-old comic compared living in the small size guestroom of her daughter Melissa as part of their reality show  WEtv series “Joan and Melissa: Joan Knows Best?’’ to the rooms in the Seymour Avenue house of rape and torture in Cleveland, Ohio that held Ariel Castro victims Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight against their will and in bondage for a decade.

Rivers, who later said that her joke was secondary and what is more important is that the three women got out alive, died roughly four months later on September 2, 2014 from complications or alleged negligence from unauthorized surgery, her family has said in a pending lawsuit .

In their book,"Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland," which is written with Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan, published by Viking Press Publishing Company, and was released for sale on April 27, Berry and DeJesus , both teens when they were abducted, describe their daily lives in captivity and say that they lived in constant fear of Castro, and were repeatedly raped while in chains.

Knight released her book titled "Finding Me" last year.

May 6 marks the second anniversary of the May 6, 2013 rescue of the trio and Berry's then seven-year-old daughter that Castro fathered while she was in captivity. And community activists groups, area clergy and some elected officials have said that they will rally in Cleveland on that day at 4:30 pm at 2207 Seymore Avenue against violence against women. (Contact the Imperial Women Coalition by phone at (216) 659-0473, or by email at editor@clevelandurbannews.com for more information. Other activists groups include Puncture the Silence, Revolution Books, Sister to Sister, the Laura Cowan Foundation, the Carl Stokes Brigade, adelicaterose.org, the Brown Report Newspaper, and Cleveland Urban News.Com, Ohio's Black digital news leader).

A movie on cable on the House of Horrors from the perspective of Knight premieres at 8 p.m. Saturday, May 2, on the cable network Lifetime.

Activists and family members looked for the young women for years, and held rallies and annual vigil

The decade long captivity of the three women made national news.

Their celebrated rescue by a Black next door neighbor who afterwards told reporters that he sometimes smoked marijuana with Castro but had no idea that women and children were being held prisoner in a home just next door to the home he rented made national headlines too.

Charles Ramsey, who kicked the Castro house door down, with another guy, and after he heard Berry scream, is a local hero, some say.

A fired Cleveland public schools bus driver and widower, who also allegedly beat his wife, and once knocked her down a flight of stairs at their home, Castro was  52-years-old at the time of his arrest in 2013.

All three women were initially chained in the basement of the two-story home,which was later demolished as part of a plea deal with Castro, though Berry ultimately became Castro's upstairs bedroom slave.

All three women were initially chained in the basement of the two-story home, though Berry ultimately became Castro's upstairs bedroom slave.

Knight said that Castro would string her up like a fish, rape her, and punch her in the stomach, and that he allegedly killed at least three of her unborn fetuses. He did not want her children that he fathered, said Knight, and resented her most of the three prisoners he held hostage, partly because he thought initially that she was younger than 21 because she stands only 4' 7", and because she was outspoken.

Castro, who was Hispanic, pleaded guilty to numerous criminal charges, including multiple counts of rape and kidnapping in exchange for a life sentence without the possibility of parole. He told Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas Judge John Russo at sentencing in 2013 that he and his victims were one "happy family."

He hanged himself in his  prison cell with a bed sheet at the Correctional Reception Center in  Orient, Ohio on  September 3, 2013, just over a month into his sentence.

Rape of all ages is a national epidemic across racial and socioeconomic lines and, according to a U.S. Department of Justice study, poor women and women of color are disproportionately targeted.

Seventy-four percent of abducted children who are ultimately murdered are dead within three hours of the abduction, a National Crime Information Center Report reveals.

Somewhere in America, a woman is raped every two minutes, a national report by the Washington Coalition of Assault says. The data also show that 22 percent of repeat victims were younger than age 12 when they were first raped, and 32 percent were between the ages of 12 and 17. Twenty-five percent of girls and 17 percent of boys are sexually abused before the age of 18. Seventy percent of rape and sexual assault victims know their attacker prior to the assault, data reveal. (References by the Washington Coalition of Assault Programs http://www.wcsap.org/).

Ariel Castro victim Amanda Berry was snatched up on April 21, 2003, blocks from her home on the city's largely White west side while she was leaving her job at the Burger King Restaurant at West. 110th Street and Lorain Avenue.

Berry turned 29 on April 22, and was nearly 17 when Castro kidnapped her. Gina DeJesus, now 25, knew Castro's now grown daughter, a peer, and was 14 when she was kidnapped. Like Berry, DeJesus grew up in the neighborhood, and close to the Castro home on the now infamous Seymour Avenue.

Michelle Knight, now 33 and a women's advocate spokesperson, was a small frame 21-year-old when she was abducted by Castro.

Knight, the first to get kidnapped, disappeared on August 21, 2002, Berry on April 21, 2003, and DeJesus, on April 2, 2004.

Rescuer Charles Ramsey, a likable Black guy with bad teeth,  has written a book too, published last year, and titled "Dead Giveaway, an expose of his brief moment of fame.

Ramsey says in the book, among other soliloquies, that when Berry, as a White woman, flew into his arms as he stormed the house after hearing screaming  for help outside, that it was a dead give away that something about Castro's setup was suspect.

Greater Cleveland, and the city of Cleveland in particular, have made a name for themselves in recent years relative to missing persons, serial killers, and unprecedented cases of rape, kidnapping and murders of innocent women, most of those murdered of whom were Black, and poor.

The Castro victims' rescue in 2013 came on the heals of convictions, in 2011,of rape, murder and other charges as to convicted serial killer and death row inmate Anthony Sowell, who strangled 11 Black women to death and raped three others at his since demolished Imperial Avenue home on Cleveland's largely Back east side.

A likely serial killer that murdered Christine Malone, 43, Jasmine Trotter, 20, and Ashley Leszyeski  21, their bodies discovered behind abandoned homes or in a fields along a mile strip of East 93rd Street between Bessemer and Harvard Avenues on the city's east side in 2013, is still at large.

Suspected serial killer Michael Madison awaits trial before Common Pleas Judge Nancy McDonnell and is accused of killings in East Cleveland, an impoverished majority Black suburb of Cleveland, of Angela Daskins, 38, Shetisha Sheeley, 28,  and Shirellda Terry, 18.

But rape or murder have no mercy even for women of means.

The killer of Aliza Sherman, a 53-year-old  upper middle class Jewish woman of Beachwood,Ohio, a Cleveland suburb, and a Cleveland Clinic nurse when she was  stabbed to death in broad daylight on Sunday afternoon, March 24, 2013, in downtown Cleveland while leaving the office of her divorce attorney, remains at large. And police have few substantive leads, in spite of a reward offered by family members and friends of $50,000, the largest reward for information leading to an arrest  in the history of Cuyahoga County, one of 88 counties of Ohio.

(www.clevelandurbannews.com) / (www.kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com)