Elizabeth Smart Bravely Recounts Her Abduction And Abuse 20 Years Ago

Abduction and abused victims mostly find it hard to talk about what happened to them. Most of the time, their family and friends will simply go on with life and prefer not to open painful memories. That’s exactly what happened to Elizabeth Smart. But now, she is ready to talk about what really happened to her in the hands of her abductors 20 years ago.

About two decades have passed since Elizabeth Smart was abducted from her home and abused by the couple who took her captive. She was only 14 years old at the time.

Smart was taken from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah, and was repeatedly sexually abused over the course of nine months. Thankfully, she was rescued just in time before her abductors would take her away from her hometown.

Smart was abducted by street preacher Brian David Mitchell and his wife Wanda Barzee in early June 2002. She was just days away from her middle school graduation. And now twenty years later, she sat down with CBS News to openly talk about her traumatic experience. She shared how she remembers how it all happened.

She said that she can still vividly remember that night that she was taken from her home. With a knife in his hand, Mitchell woke her up and had no choice but to follow her kidnapper out of the house and into the woods.

She said, “At first, I don’t even remember having thoughts of what it was in my mind. I was just in complete shock. I was raped every day. It got to the point where I stopped thinking that I had hit rock bottom because every time I thought that, he would come up with something new. I decided I was going to do whatever it took. It didn’t matter what it was, I was going to do whatever it took to survive.”

Chained to a tree in a remote camp while trying to gain her captors’ trust, they made her drink beer and watch pornographic videos. She was also raped and starved. But there are times that they would leave the camping and go to town to buy some supplies. But for her not to be recognized, they would make her wear a veil to hide her face. And while at the camp, there were times that she could hear her worried relatives and volunteers calling out her name. They were so close to finding her.

Then on March 12, 2003, Smart and her two captors were found wandering the streets of Sandy, Utah, just a few miles outside of Salt Lake City. That’s when Elizabeth Smart was rescued and brought back to her family.

The teenager was happy to finally see her family at the police station in her hometown after nine months of being away from them.

Brian David Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee, were charged in 2010 with a number of criminal offenses related to this case, including kidnapping.

Now a mother-of-three, Elizabeth Smart is currently employed at ABC News.

On October 7, 2017, Smart published the first memoir of her abduction called “My Story.” She then followed it up in 2018 with a second book, “Where There’s Hope: Healing, Moving Forward, and Never Giving Up.”