Elizabeth Smart Reveals Graphic Never-Before-Told Details Of Brutal Rape In Captivity
Nov. 8 2017, Published 8:30 p.m. ET
Elizabeth Smart was tragically kidnapped from her Salt Lake City home when she was only 14-years-old. Almost 15 years later, Smart, now 29, is telling all on the horrors she faced while being held by her captors for nine months, Radaronline.com can exclusively report.
In Smart's upcoming documentary Elizabeth Smart: The Autobiography, she describes how her captor, Brian David Mitchell, got away with stealing her in the middle of the night while she was sound asleep in her bed.
Smart woke up to the threatening voice of Mitchell who had a blade held up to her neck.
"If you scream or you yell I'll kill your family or I'll kill you," Smart recalled Mitchell telling her.
She believed that some of her family had already been dead and she thought to herself "either go with him or die."
As Mitchell, who was 49-years-old at the time, now 64, made his escape with Smart, she recalls they were close to having a run-in with a police car that drove by.
Smart remembers Mitchell saying, "If this work is true, God, then let this car pass."
"He was kidnapping me and he was mentioning God, it didn't make sense," Smart said. "As soon as the police car was out of sight, he had me up and running. He was always right behind me, the knife always on my back."
After running for a while, Smart stopped abruptly and told Mitchell if he was planning to rape and kill her to do it right then in the open field they were in.
"In my mind I was thinking 'I want my parents to know what happened to me. I wanted them to find me even if it was just my body,'" Smart explained.
"He had this smile and it was bone-chilling. He smiled and said 'I'm not going to rape and murder you yet.'"
Smart eventually made it to an isolated part of the woods where she would meet Mitchells wife, Wanda Barzee. Smart described how creeped out she felt the moment she saw Barzee. Within moments, Barzee had summoned her to the tent and forced Smart to take all of her clothes off despite initially refusing several times.
"She threatened if I didn't take my clothes off that she would send in Mitchell," Smart said. Barzee then made her put on a robe.
"The tent door unzipped and in came Emmanuel" — the name Mitchell called himself — Smart said.
"He knelt down next to me and started to speak and I just remember thinking, 'no just go away, just leave me alone.' I calmed down enough to hear the last sentence. He told me that I was now 'sealed to him as his wife before God and his angels as his witnesses and that could never be undone,' Smart recalled. "I just remember being filled with horror, I remember just screaming out 'NO!' and he looked at me and said 'if you ever scream out like that again, I will kill you.'"
Smart said Mitchell repeatedly told her 'it's time for us to consummate' their marriage."
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"I remember thinking 'wait a second, does he mean what I think he means? No, no, no.' I was trying to go over all the reasons why this couldn't' be legal or binding, why this wasn't okay; I was 14-years-old — did he realize that?"
Smart told him that she hadn't even had her period yet, to which Mitchell yelled out from inside the tent to his wife asking if it was still okay to have sex with Smart. Barzee responded with 'it's fine.'"
"No matter how much begging, or pleading or crying I did, it just didn't make a difference to him. He physically grabbed me and forced me down onto the ground."
Smart believed if she could turn herself on her stomach, he wouldn't be able to rape her.
"I crossed my legs, and I remember holding my arms up, just right under my chest so he couldn't touch me, crossing my legs as hard as I could, rolling on my stomach," Smart thought "'He wouldn't be able to rape me'...well I was terribly mistaken."
"He just pulled up the robe and raped me. I was devastated. and I remember just thinking how on earth did this happen to me, why did this happen to me."
"I just remembered lying on the ground feeling so shattered, I truly was broken, feeling like there was no coming back from this, that it would be better if I were dead. If someone can rape, then I feel like they can murder."
Mitchell would rape her repeatedly everyday for nine months, strapping a metal chain around her ankles so she wouldn't escape. A few weeks into her captivity, Mitchell would force he to drink alcohol.
"I kept refusing, kept refusing and he said 'well i'm not going to let you sleep either, I'm not going to let you have water, you can't have any of this food until you drink this wine.' And I remember I had this tiny little sip. And he said 'no you have to drink the whole cup.' and then he poured another cup, and said 'now you have to drink this one as well.' And that's what he'd do, he'd have me drink and then he'd rape me. I was there for him to do whatever he wanted me to do"
Smart would starve for days at a time, and she believed that she would die.
"I don't think there ever was a day that I didn't think about, 'when am I going to eat next, when am I going to drink next,'" Smart said. "It would usually be a day or two we'd go without food before he'd head down to Salt Lake to look for food. And sometimes it was longer. I was always relieved whenever he left camp because it meant that I'd have at least 12 hours where I wouldn't be raped."
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I cried for a long time afterwards. Even though I had been raped, I was still very protective over my body. I remember just begging him to leave me alone and to not touch me ever again and he'd say things like, 'well we're man and wife, that's what man and wife do, they have sex.'"
"There was nothing I could do about it. I mean couldn't run away, I couldn't fight him off, I had already tried — he was bigger, he was stronger, there was nothing that I could do until it was done. He was the master and i was the slave, that was the real lesson of the day."
On March 12, 2003, nine months after she was kidnapped, police were able to spot Smart with two other people on the side of the road as they were walking in Salt Lake City.
Barzee was sentenced to 15 years in prison for assisted kidnapping.
Mitchell was found guilty on kidnapping and sexual assault charges and is currently serving a life sentence in prison.
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