Peter Theophilus Eaton Padnos was born in
Atlanta, Georgia, to Michael Padnos, a writer now living in
Paris (then he worked as a lawyer), and Nancy Curtis. He received his bachelor's degree from
Middlebury College in Vermont and his doctorate 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 Had Stood a Loaded Gun, was written about this experience. In this book he firstly shows his interest in writing about disaffected youth. He then relocated to Yemen, where he changed his legal name to
Peter Theo Curtis, under which he continued writing. Padnos began his study of Islam in Yemen at
Dar al-Hadith, before moving to Damascus, Syria, to enroll in an Islamic religious school. Since he had declared allegiance to Islam in public, the book could be interpreted as
apostasy. He then moved to
Antakya,
Turkey, near the Syrian border. Although Padnos originally claimed in his NY Times article that he went to Syria to "stop into villages and interview people, telling the story of a nation with many identities, dissatisfied with them all, in trouble, wanting help," he later completely changed his story in his documentary, claiming he was there to "follow some refugees back into Syria and write about the adverse conditions in the camps." However, in his former cellmate's book, "The Dawn Prayer," Matthew Schrier claims Padnos told him he was in Syria to write a story about abducted American journalist Austin Tice, and provided documentation proving so in the form of an email Padnos wrote to Tice's editor shortly before he was kidnapped asking him to "commission" the article. According to Padnos, many story ideas were floating around in his head as he crossed over into Syria. ==Abduction and imprisonment==