In a new Netflix documentary, Elizabeth Smart admitted that at one point she thought it would be “better” not to be discovered. She admitted that at one point she thought it would be “better” not to be found.
Elizabeth Smart detailed the horrific nine months she spent abducted by paedophile Brian David Mitchell in a new Netflix documentary – revealing that at one point, she thought it might be “better if nobody ever found” her. The child safety activist was kidnapped from her Salt Lake City bedroom at the age of 14 by Mitchell in June 2002.
Before being rescued by police in Sandy, Utah, she was repeatedly tied up, raped, and threatened by Mitchell and his wife Wanda Barzee over the course of nine months. Barzee received 15 years in prison for the latter charge and was released in 2018 while Mitchell received a life sentence for the abduction and transportation of a minor across state lines for sexual activity.
Elizabeth, who discusses her traumatizing experience in Netflix’s Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart, reveals that Mitchell led her into the woods where he was camping with his wife while taking her from her bedroom, which she shared with her younger sister Mary Katherine. Then, under his influence, she was forced to end their “marriage.”
She tells the cameras, “I had lived such an innocent life, and I believed he wouldn’t be able to rape me if I rolled onto my stomach.” It was irrelevant what I did, she said. In the end, he sexually assaulted me.
Elizabeth had been told not to have sex before getting married, but she had not discussed the differences between consensual sex and rape with her parents despite having grown up in a religious Mormon household. She claims, “I felt a lot of shame and like I was filthy.”
“I pondered whether my family would still want me back if they knew what had happened to me.” Perhaps finding me would be preferable if I had never been found.
Mitchell, who claimed she was the first of the seven, told her that God had commanded him to “kidnap seven young girls,” and that she was the first of them, chained her up and abuse her for nine months. She reveals in the heartbreaking interview that Mitchell frequently rapes her when she wakes up.
She claims that she had become raped “almost never even holding a boy’s hand,” going back to when she was only ever held for one. He cited God as the justification for his actions, but he also valued power above all else.
He would humiliate me every day. He was encouraged by [Barzee]. He would walk me like a dog when he took me down to the spring where we would collect the water. I was made to consume beer after beer until I woke up. And he just left me face down, in my own vomit. “
On the night Elizabeth was taken, Mary Katherine discovered Mitchell from his voice four months after the kidnapping, leading to the installation of police posters for the suspect. Two witnesses identified Mitchell and Barzee in Utah in March 2003, and she was then rescued by police.
Her father Ed says in the documentary that when we open this yellow door, there is a young woman on the sofa, and that she is being reunited with daughter Elizabeth after nine months. Not the young woman who abruptly ended my nine-month relationship.
“She was a young girl, but this young woman stood in front of me.” Her hair was pulled back in these braids, and her face had sunburned it. Elizabeth, did you really exist, I asked. And she says, “Yes, dad,” My miracle was in my arms when I saw it.
I took a moment to respond because I believed I was in trouble, but my father was finally present and ready to protect me. He wasn’t going to abandon me, no matter what happened.
Elizabeth is a TV commentator and advocate for child safety while she is married and has three children of her own. She has worked to advocate for child sexual abuse victims and has dedicated her career to fighting abstinence-only sex education.
If you’ve been the victim of sexual assault, you can access help and resources via www.rapecrisis.org.uk or calling the national telephone helpline on 0808 802 9999
Elizabeth Smart will be available on Netflix tomorrow.
Source: Mirror
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