Twenty Years Later, Elizabeth Smart Talks About How She Was Abducted And Abused For Nine Months

Everyone knows who Elizabeth Smart is. About 20 years ago, she was abducted and abused by a couple. She was only 14 years old when she was taken from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah, and sexually abused over the course of nine months before she was rescued.

She was abducted by street preacher Brian David Mitchell and his wife Wanda Barzee in early June 2002, just days before she was about to graduate from middle school.

Now twenty years later, she sat down with CBS News to discuss her traumatic experience and how she remembers how it happened two decades later.

Smart remembers that night she was taken from her home. She was woken up at knifepoint and had no choice but to follow her kidnapper. She said, “At first, I don’t even remember having thoughts of what it was in my mind. I was just in complete shock.”

She said that she remembers the constant sexual abuse that she had to endure day after day. She shared, “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.”

Smart was chained to a tree in a remote camp and made to drink beer and watch pornographic videos while she was raped and starved. There are times that her kidnappers would bring her to town to buy supplies. She would wear a veil to hide her face from the public so that no one would recognize her. There was a time when her worried relatives and volunteers were so close to finding her.

She explains that her plan was to be pleasant to her captors and do exactly what they told her to do. She felt that by doing so, it would be hard for them to kill her.

On March 12, 2003, Smart and her two captors were found wandering the streets of Sandy, Utah, a few miles outside of Salt Lake City. The teenager is happy to see her family again at the police station in her hometown.

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

On December 10, 2010, the insanity argument for Mitchell was rejected. The jury finds Mitchell guilty of kidnapping and unlawful transportation of a minor across state lines for sexual activity. Then on September 19, 2018, Barzee is granted her freedom under the conditions that she registers as a sex offender and must participate in a mental health treatment program.

Elizabeth Smart is currently a mother of three and employed at ABC News. On October 7, 2017, Smart published the first memoir of her haunting experience – “My Story.” She then followed with a second book in March 2018, “Where There’s Hope: Healing, Moving Forward, and Never Giving Up.”

She is also an advocate for the protection of children. Smart established the Elizabeth Smart Foundation and later partnered with the Malouf Foundation at the beginning of 2022 with the goal of ending the victimization of sexual assault victims via the promotion of prevention, recovery, and advocacy initiatives.