NEED TO KNOW
- Elizabeth Smart opens up about the horrors she endured for nine months in the new Netflix documentary, Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart
- Streaming Jan. 21, the documentary has Smart giving brutal details about being raped by Brian David Mitchell up to four times a day, being walked like a dog with a cable around her neck and tethered to a tree for long stretches
- She is joined in the documentary by her family, witnesses and law enforcement, who provide their perspectives to Smart’s harrowing story
Standing in a weather-worn tent in the foothills of Utah just after being kidnapped from her bedroom in the middle of the night, Elizabeth Smart wasn’t sure what was going to happen next.
Sometime after 1 a.m., on June 5, 2002, Smart, then 14, awoke to a scary-looking man with a full beard standing over her bed and ordering her to come with him.
Holding a knife to her neck, the man, Brian David Mitchell, then 48, a self-styled prophet who went by the name Immanuel, marched the terrified teenager out of the backdoor of her family’s Salt Lake City home, into the backyard and up into the rugged foothills to a desolate campsite.
Inside the tent at the campsite, Mitchell’s wife, Wanda Barzee, then 56, who went by the name Hephzibah, told Smart to take off her pajamas and put on a loose-fitting robe.
Otherwise, the older woman explained, she was going to have Mitchell come in there and “rip the clothes off of you,” Smart says in the new Netflix documentary, Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart, debuting Jan. 21.
A happily married mother of three, Smart, 38, has spoken out about her nightmarish ordeal before. She’s authored several bestselling books about her experience, started the Elizabeth Smart Foundation to help end sexual violence and used her platform as one of the most well-known survivors of all time to advocate for others.
What’s different this time is that she is telling her story alongside her father, Ed Smart, 70, her sister, Mary Katherine Smart, 33, witnesses who saw Smart wearing a veil with her head covered but didn’t realize she was the missing girl authorities had been searching for and members of law enforcement who worked the case.
Having so many voices in the documentary “gives the story so much more perspective,” Smart tells PEOPLE.
She hopes being so honest about the brutal treatment she endured, including being raped up to four times a day, being kept in a dark hole, and being chained up for hours, will help others better understand the realities victims face during and well after they are violated.
“I want other survivors to know they’re not alone, that actually there’s so many of us,” she says.
That surreal night, Smart waited for Mitchell to come into the tent. As a self-professed “late bloomer,” the thought of what might come next was unthinkable, and still shrouded a bit in mystery.
Shortly before the abduction, she remembers, “My friend told me kind of what sex really was and I was like, ‘What? My parents have done that six times? That is terrible!’ And that was all I knew about sex.”
What she knew from church is that sex before marriage was strictly taboo. “Otherwise, you’re dirty, you’re ruined,” she says. “They used all sorts of analogies like when you have sex before marriage, it’s like someone chewed a piece of gum — and nobody wants a chewed-up piece of gum.”
Moments later, Mitchell strode into the tent and declared that he was going to make Smart his wife, right there and then. She screamed, “No!” she recalls, prompting him to levy the first of many threats. “If you ever scream out like that again, I will kill you,” he told her.
Then it came time for them to “consummate our marriage,” she recalls him telling her. She tried to stop him, but could not.
“I was sobbing,” she says. “I begged him to stop. I remember it just being so painful.”
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The assault caused her so much pain that when he left the tent she remembers blood running down her thighs before passing out.
Then came a different type of pain. When she awoke, all she could think about was “being that chewed up piece of gum, being ruined beyond repair, feeling like I’d lost all my worth.”
That common misconception, she notes, “took years to get over. It took years to be like, any guy who wouldn’t want to be with me because of what’s happened is not worthy of me.”
Convicted in 2010 of kidnapping Smart, Mitchell was sentenced to life in prison. Convicted of her role in the crimes, Barzee was released from prison in 2018. She was arrested in May 2025 after allegedly visiting two Utah parks, which violated her status as a registered sex offender.
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