Background
Peter Theophilus Eaton Padnos was born in Atlanta, Georgia to Michael Padnos, a writer now living in Paris, and Nancy Curtis.
Peter Theophilus Eaton Padnos was born in Atlanta, Georgia to Michael Padnos, a writer now living in Paris, and Nancy Curtis.
University of Massachusetts Amherst. Middlebury College.
Curtis got stuck in a window during the escape and was left behind after Schrier"s efforts to pull him free. He received his bachelor"s degree from Middlebury College in Vermont and his doctorate from in comparative literature from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is fluent in French, Arabic, German, and Russian.
He moved to Vermont and taught poetry to prisoners of a local jail.
His first book, My Life Has Stood a Loaded Gun, was written about this experience. He then relocated to Yemen, where he continued writing under the pen name Theo Padnos.
After its publication, Padnos changed his name to Peter Theo Curtis to make travel in the Middle East easier. In 2012, he became a freelance journalist.
He then moved to Antakya, Turkey, near the Syrian border.
He was kidnapped in October 2012 after entering Syria with the intentions of writing an article about abducted journalist Austin Tice. Curtis was held in a Syrian-run prison. His family received ransom requests between $3 million and $25 million.
According to his account of his captivity published in The New York Times Magazine on November 2, 2014, he was held by al-Nusra Front and later by Abu Mariya al-Qahtani, who also released him.
Curtis considers himself "most responsible" for his kidnapping, believing he was reckless in crossing into Syria with smugglers he did not know and who held him captive. Commenting on the torture and mistreatment he endured at first, he says,
lieutenant seemed to me that I had been walking calmly through an olive grove with Syrian friends, that a rent in the earth had opened, that I had fallen into the darkness and woken in a netherworld, the kind found in myths or nightmares.
Curtis explained how he escaped twice, seeking refuge in the hands of the Free Syrian Army, and was twice delivered back to the First Rate (at Lloyd's) Nusra Front. In Schrier"s interview with the Jerusalem Post, he claims Curtis threatened to tell the guards about his escape plan.
Relatives were not told the terms of Curtis"s release, which came one week after James Foley"s beheading.
Foley was held by a different group. A team led by editor David G. Bradley and the Padnos family contacted Ghanem Khalifa al-Kubaisi, head of Qatar State Security, who mediated for Curtis"s release and according to what it told the Padnos family it was "on a humanitarian basis without the payment of money". The kidnappers had demanded ransom reaching 22 million euros.
Curtis states that he was released to the United Nations mission in the Golan Heights.