[7] In her memoir, A Little Piece of Light (2018), Hylton characterized the first 20 years of her life as "adult hands harming me instead of protecting me.
"[8] During early childhood, Donna Patricia Walden[9] lived in her birthplace of Port Antonio, Jamaica, with her mother, a devotee of Obeah, a spiritual practice of the West Indies.
Hylton felt that her mother, who may have been bipolar, used her as a "real-life voodoo doll", and recalled, "It was routine for her to burn me with fire and cut me with a knife.
In March 1985, Miranda enlisted Hylton in a scheme to recover money he believed had been swindled from him by a business partner.
[16] On March 20, 1985,[17] Donna Hylton and three female accomplices drugged and kidnapped 62-year-old Long Island real estate broker Thomas Vigliarolo at the behest of Louis Miranda, who thought Vigliarolo had cheated him out of $139,000 on a mutual con[4] in which the two allegedly sold shares in New York City condos and pocketed the money.
During that time, three men and four women, including Hylton, starved, burned, beat, sexually assaulted/raped, and tortured the white man.
[5] Delivering a ransom note and tape to a friend of Vigliarolo, who got a partial license plate number of the car she was driving, led to Hylton's capture by police.
[17] In January 1991, the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division rejected Hylton's challenges relating to duress and found her other arguments "unpersuasive and meritless," noting that she had made an "elaborate confession, which was corroborated by ample evidence.
In November, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that Hylton's petition for habeas corpus was untimely on its face, having been filed ten years after the effective date of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 imposing a one-year statute of limitations.
Consequently, the court dismissed her case without addressing Hylton's claims of judicial impropriety and bias and ineffectiveness of trial and appellate counsel.
[17] Hylton's involvement in the high-profile case was the subject of a 1995 article in Psychology Today magazine written by Jill Neimark.
[31] In 2016, it was announced that Rosario Dawson was attached to a movie version of Hylton's life story, A Little Piece of Light.
Not a day goes by that I don't think of his family, the fear they must have felt as they imagined him in fear, wondering where he was for eleven nights and worried for what he might have been experiencing.”[35] On August 20, 2020, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) included Hylton in a list of 22 of "America's most impactful community leaders" who participated in a video reading of the Preamble to the Constitution during a televised portion of the convention.