Elizabeth Smart: ‘I Want People to Know What It Was Really Like’

IN SUPPORT OF OTHER SURVIVORS, THE MOM OF THREE TALKS CANDIDLY ABOUT HER BRUTAL KIDNAPPING AND SEXUAL ASSAULT IN A NEW NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY

- K. C. BAKER

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.”