The kidnapping of Jaycee Lee Dugard, then aged 11, took place on June 10, 1991, in Meyers, California, United States, when she was abducted from a street while walking to a school bus stop. Searches began immediately after Dugard's disappearance, but no reliable leads were generated, even though several people witnessed the kidnapping. Dugard remained missing for over eighteen years until 2009, when a convicted sex offender, Phillip Garrido, visited the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, accompanied by two adolescent girls, now known to be the biological daughters of Garrido and Dugard, on August 24 and 25 that year. The unusual behavior of the trio sparked an investigation that led Garrido's parole officer to order him to take the two girls to a parole office in Concord, on August 26. He was accompanied by a woman who was eventually identified as Dugard.

Garrido and his wife, Nancy, were arrested by police after Dugard's reappearance. On April 28, 2011, they pleaded guilty to kidnapping and sexually assaulting Dugard. Investigators revealed that Dugard had been kept in concealed tents, sheds, and lean-tos in an area behind the Garridos' house at 1554 Walnut Avenue in Antioch, California, where Phillip repeatedly raped Dugard during her captivity. During her confinement, Dugard gave birth to two daughters, who were aged 11 and 15 at the time of her reappearance. On June 2, 2011, Garrido was sentenced to 431 years' to life imprisonment; his wife, Nancy, was sentenced to 36 years to life. Phillip is a person of interest in at least one other missing persons case in the San Francisco Bay Area.

As Garrido had been on parole for a 1976 rape at the time of her kidnapping, Dugard sued the state of California, which had taken over his parole supervision from the federal government in 1999, on account of the numerous lapses by law enforcement that contributed to her continued captivity and sexual assault. In 2010, the state of California awarded the Dugard family US$20 million. Dugard also sued the federal government on similar grounds pertaining to Garrido's time as a federal parolee, but in a 2—1 ruling, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed that suit because Garrido had not victimized her at the time he was placed under the supervision of the federal parole system, and that as a result of this, "there was no way to anticipate she would become his victim."In 2011, Dugard wrote an autobiography titled A Stolen Life. Her second book, Freedom: My Book of Firsts, was published in 2016.