Elizabeth Smart is sharing her kidnapping story like never before in the new Netflix documentary Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart. Now 38, the kidnapping survivor was just 14 years old when she was abducted from her bedroom in her family’s Salt Lake City home by Brian David Mitchell in June 2002.
It took nine months for authorities to rescue Elizabeth, mostly due to her family’s insistence that the case be kept alive. It was Elizabeth’s younger sister, Mary Katherine Smart, who eventually realized the voice she heard in her room on the night of Elizabeth’s abduction was that of Brian David Mitchell, a man who had once helped her parents do some work on their home after Lois Smart, Elizabeth’s mother, came across him panhandling in town.
While the details of Elizabeth’s case have been public for years, she went into great detail in Netflix’s new look inside the kidnapping. Scroll down for the biggest bombshells she revealed.
Brian David Mitchell threatened Elizabeth Smart with a knife
“I remember a man’s voice, ‘I have a knife at your neck. Don’t make a sound. Get up and come with me,’” Elizabeth shared. “I was terrified. Was he going to hurt me? Was he going to kill me?”
She recalled hoping her parents would wake up, but when nobody came, Brian “let me up through my backyard. We started up this trail and I remember thinking, ‘Where is he taking me?’ I was so worried that I was missing my chance for escape.”
Elizabeth said she asked her abductor if he was going to “rape and kill [her],” and that she was hoping that, if he did, he would do it “as close as he could to my house so my parents could find me.” She added, “He just looked at me and said, ‘I’m not going to rape and kill you yet.’”
Wanda Barzee undressed Elizabeth in the middle of the woods
Elizabeth revealed that she and Brian eventually arrived at a “stand of trees” and a woman walked out of a tent. “She came up to me and hugged me,” Elizabeth said of the woman, who was later revealed to be Wanda Barzee.
“She looked different than anyone I’d seen before,” Elizabeth shared. “She had on this sort of tunic and headdress. She took my shoes off and started washing the dirt off my feet and she started trying to undo my pajamas. I remember holding onto the buttons and she said, ‘If I can’t change you, he’s going to come in here and rip the clothes off you.’”
Once Wanda finally had Elizabeth undressed, she gave her a robe “like the one she had on,” and left the tent with the teenager’s pajamas.
Brian David Mitchell considered Elizabeth to be his wife
The kidnapper said to Elizabeth, “I hereby seal you to me as my wife before God and my angels as my witnesses,” she revealed. “At that part, I screamed out, ‘No!’”
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Brian threatened Elizabeth that he would kill her if she ever screamed out again. “I tried to explain to him that this wasn’t OK,” she admitted. “He couldn’t just kidnap and marry me. It wasn’t legal. I was just 14 years old. He had the same response to everything, which is, ‘It’s now time to consummate our marriage.’”
Elizabeth ‘begged’ Brian David Mitchell not to rape her
Elizabeth remembered that she didn’t know much about sex when Brian raped her for the first time. “He pushed me onto the ground,” she said. “I thought that if I rolled onto my stomach that he wouldn’t be able to rape me. It didn’t matter what I did. Ultimately, he raped me.”
She was in “a lot of pain” afterwards. “I remember begging him to stop,” Elizabeth explained. “When he was finished, he got up, he kind of smiled like it wasn’t a big deal to him, and he walked out of the tent. I just remember hurting so much, like, physically.”
Brian David Mitchell chained Elizabeth’s ankles
The morning after she was kidnapped, Elizabeth woke up with chains around her ankles. “I remember begging him not to chain me up, that I wouldn’t run away,” she said. “He’s like, ‘I know you’re not going to run away, but I’m just taking temptation out of your reach.’”
Brian David Mitchell threatened to kidnap Elizabeth’s relatives
“He said God commanded them to kidnap seven young girls,” Elizabeth shared. “I was the first of the seven. He said my sister [Mary Katherine Smart] would probably end up one of his wives, and my cousin Olivia. I was terrified.”
Elizabeth could hear people searching for her in the woods
During one of the days she spent with Brian and Wanda in the woods, Elizabeth was able to “faintly” hear someone saying her name.
“It was faint, but I could still hear it,” she said, adding that Brian, who referred to himself as Emmanuel, “took me inside the tent, pulled out his knife, [and said], ‘If anyone comes in this camp, this is the knife I’m going to use to kill them and it’ll be all your fault.’”
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Unfortunately, she only heard her name a few more times before it “faded away” and she never heard the searchers again.
Elizabeth was raped ‘multiple times a day’
Perhaps the most difficult part of Elizabeth’s story to stomach is just how often Brian raped her. “It wouldn’t be uncommon to wake up to him raping me,” she revealed. “I’d gone from never holding a boy’s hand to being raped every day, multiple times a day. After, he would be praying for 45 minutes. He used God to justify what he did.”
Elizabeth remembered that Wanda “encouraged” Brian.
Elizabeth was forced to drink alcohol until she was sick
“I was forced to drink beer after beer until I finally threw up,” she confirmed. “He just left me there, facedown in my own vomit.”
She remembered being “threatened” by her kidnapper, who told her she would be “killed” if she didn’t do what he asked. “If he didn’t kill me, then he would kill my family,” she explained.
Elizabeth purposely didn’t call out for help when they crossed paths with other people
After a fight with Wanda, Brian eventually agreed that the trio would all go to Salt Lake City to get food. They passed a group of people while heading down the mountain, but Elizabeth opted not to cry out for help.
“I was 14. I had been extremely abused for months,” she explained. “When I disobeyed, I was raped. Food was withheld from me. So when I made my bid for freedom, I wanted it to be a sure thing.”
When the group went to the library to look at maps, they were approached by a homicide detective. The detective questioned whether Elizabeth, whose face was covered in a headdress, was the girl local authorities were looking for.
“Emmanuel (Brian) was like, ‘I’m sorry, but no. It would be against our faith [to remove the scarf]. It would be against our religion. The only people who will ever see her face are her future husband and myself, her father,’” Elizabeth said. “I wanted to yell out, but [Wanda] grasped my leg and finally the detective was convinced.”
Elizabeth convinced Brian to return to Salt Lake City after they left town
After they nearly got caught, Brian took Wanda and Elizabeth to a town outside of San Diego, and started talking about heading to bigger cities. It was a Elizabeth who was able to convince him to return to Utah.
She told Brian, “I have this feeling. I think we might be supposed to return to Salt Lake. And I know God wouldn’t really speak to me, but I know if you were to ask him, he would confirm to you whether or not that was the right path because you truly are his servant and you truly are his prophet.” At that point, he “just turned to me and was like, ‘God is finally starting to work with you. Now that you recognized your own nothingness, we are supposed to return to Salt Lake.’”
Elizabeth was rescued after uttering two words to police
When the trio returned to Salt Lake, Brian warned Elizabeth he would be taking her back up the mountain and said she would not be allowed to return down again. However, before they made the trek, they were spotted by three people on the street, and police approached them for questioning.
Elizabeth was separated from Brian and Wanda to speak to an officer. “My captors were right there,” she recalled. “I was terrified. I needed the safest answer I could probably give.”
When the officer asked her to “just tell me you’re Elizabeth,” she looked at him and said, “Thou sayeth.” The sergeant said, “I had never heard those words in my life, but I said, ‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ and we put her in the back of the police car.”
Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart, Streaming Now, Netflix
