After a headline-making rescue in March 2003, Elizabeth Smart became known as the brave girl who survived a kidnapping nightmare.
Nine months earlier, on June 5, 2002, Smart, then 14, was taken in the middle of the night from a bedroom of her family’s Salt Lake City home. The second of six children in the devout Mormon household, Smart was held against her will by pedophile Brian David Mitchell, then 48, a self-proclaimed prophet who went by the name Immanuel, and his wife, Wanda Barzee, 56, known as Hephzibah.
During Smart’s captivity, Mitchell raped her up to four times a day, sometimes leaving her bleeding, walked her like a dog with a cable around her neck and forced her to drink alcohol to lower her resistance. A steely courage she never knew she had kept her alive.
The author of two bestselling books, Smart, 38, now an advocate for sexual assault survivors and the families of missing children, has told the story of her frightening ordeal before and has been portrayed in TV movies.
But in a new Netflix documentary, Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart, premiering Jan. 21, she, alongside members of her family, reveals in unsparing detail the trauma she endured as well as the guilt and shame she carried as a result.
“After I was rescued, I was very embarrassed by what had happened to me,” she tells People. “Even though my head totally knew it wasn’t my fault, I couldn’t make my heart feel the same way. I felt I’d be judged for it. I ended up feeling very alone and very isolated.”
As the years went by and Smart began to work with survivors of sexual assault through her nonprofit the Elizabeth Smart Foundation, she met countless others who shared her sense of shame.
Now, says the mom of three, “I want survivors to know they are not alone. There’s so many of us. And I want people who have never experienced this to get a taste of what it’s really like—the depth of fear—to be forced to do things you would never do. There’s a purpose to sharing my story.”
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Smart couldn’t wait to get to sleep on the night of June 5, 2002. For the eighth grader living in Salt Lake City’s Federal Heights neighborhood, it had been an exhausting day of end-of-year activities at her junior high school and preparing for graduation the following day. Just before midnight, after reading pages of Ella Enchanted in the bed she shared with her younger sister Mary Katherine, then 9, Smart fell asleep.
The next thing she remembers is a strange man with a beard standing over her and holding a knife to her neck. Threatening to kill her if she screamed, he led Smart out the back door and along a rugged trail into the mountains.
Stricken with fear, Smart asked him whether he planned to rape and kill her. He replied, “Not yet.”
Hours later they arrived at a desolate encampment where she met Barzee. After washing Smart’s feet, Barzee tried to take off Smart’s pajamas and dress her in a loose-fitting robe. “She said, ‘If I can’t change it, [Mitchell] is going to come in here and rip the clothes off,’ ” Smart recalls.
Then Mitchell entered the tent and raped her for the first time in a series of countless assaults. “I screamed out, ‘No!,’ and he said, ‘If you ever scream like that again, I will kill you,’ ” she says.
Trying to hold him off, “I thought if I rolled onto my stomach, he wouldn’t be able to rape me. And of course that was not true.” During the assault, “I begged him to stop.”
Raised in a religion that forbids sex outside of marriage, she couldn’t think about anything except how worthless she felt—and how painful it was. “I could see blood running down my thighs,” she says. “Then I passed out.”
Over the next several months, Mitchell raped Smart on a regular basis. For Smart, who had been told about sexual intercourse by a friend but had never discussed it with a parent or teacher, the repeated assaults left her feeling “ruined beyond repair” and unworthy of love. “I thought, ‘Is it better to die than to be a pariah?’ ”
She also worried about getting pregnant. “My period started when I was in captivity, so that was definitely a fear.”
Every day, Mitchell found ways to humiliate Smart, while Barzee—who was angry that he was having so much sex with Smart—encouraged him. “When he took me to the spring where we’d collect water, he would hold the cable and basically walk me like a dog,” says Smart. “I was forced to drink beer after beer until I finally threw up, and he had just left me there face down in my own vomit.”
Outwardly Smart behaved submissively, following her captors’ instructions while always looking for a way to escape. “That was the best way to survive,” she says.
Finally a concerned citizen— who had seen the missing girl and her captors on America’s Most Wanted—spotted the group on a street in Sandy, Utah, on March 12, 2003.
A police officer pulled her aside and asked if she was Elizabeth Smart. Her response, “Thou sayest,” ended months of torture and led to her reunion with her family.
“It was one of the happiest days,” she says. “I knew that my family was the reason I wanted to survive.”
Following her release, Smart sought healing through her faith and time with family. Her parents, Ed, 70, and Lois Smart, 68, threw a party to celebrate her 15th birthday, which had passed while she was being held captive.
She started high school the next fall and went on to graduate from Brigham Young University.
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It was while serving as a Mormon missionary in Paris that she met her future husband, Matthew Gilmour, a fellow missionary from Scotland.
After Smart and Gilmour, 36, became parents in 2015, she gained a new perspective on what her mother and father experienced during her kidnapping.
“When I first got home, I remember thinking, ‘What I went through was the worst thing ever. Nobody was hurting you. Nobody was depriving you of food or water, or chaining you up. You all had each other, and I had no one,’ ” she says.
“Now, watching their pain and emotion play out [in the new documentary], I know that if they could have gone through it themselves to protect me, they would have. That’s just what parents do.”
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