“All I knew about sex was what my boyfriend told me”

HE NEEDS TO KNOW

• Elizabeth Smart talks about the horrors she endured for nine months in the new Netflix documentary, Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart

• Filmed on January 21, the documentary features Smart giving brutal details of being raped by Brian David Mitchell up to four times a day, being walked like a dog with a cable around its neck and tied to a tree for long periods of time.

• They are joined in the documentary by her family, witnesses and law enforcement, who offer their perspectives on Smart’s harrowing story.

Sitting in a weather-worn tent in the Utah foothills just after she was abducted 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 his throat, the man, Brian David Mitchell, then 48, a self-proclaimed prophet who called himself Immanuel, led the terrified teenager out the back door of her family’s Salt Lake City home, into the backyard and up the rugged foothills to a deserted 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 his pajamas and put on a loose robe.

Otherwise, the older woman explained, she was going to have Mitchell come in there and “rip your clothes off you,” Smart says in the new Netflix documentary, Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart, debuts on January 21st.

A happily married mother of three, Smart, 38, has previously spoken about her nightmarish ordeal. She wrote several best-selling books about her experience, founded the Elizabeth Smart Foundation to help end sexual violence, and used her platform as one of the most famous survivors of all time to advocate for others.

What’s different this time is that she’s telling her story alongside her father, Ed Smart, 70, and her sister, Mary Katherine Smart, 33, witnesses who saw Smart wearing a veil over her head but didn’t realize she was the missing girl authorities and law enforcement officers were looking for.

Having so many voices in the documentary “gives the story a lot more perspective,” Smart tells PEOPLE.

She hopes that 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 for hours, will help others better understand the realities victims face during and after they are violated.

“I want other survivors to know that they are not alone, that there are actually so many of us,” she says.

That surreal night, Smart waited for Mitchell to enter the tent. As a self-proclaimed “late bloomer,” the thought of what might come next was inconceivable and still shrouded in a bit of mystery.

Shortly before the abduction, she recalls: “My boyfriend told me what sex was really like and I was like, ‘What? My parents did this six times? That’s terrible!’ And that was all I knew about sex.”

What he knew from the church was that sex before marriage was strictly taboo. “Otherwise, you’re dirty, you’re ruined,” she says. “They used all kinds of analogies, like when you have sex before marriage, it’s like someone has chewed a piece of gum – and nobody wants a piece of chewed gum.”

Moments later, Mitchell strode into the tent and declared that he was going to make Smart his wife, right then and there. She screamed, “No!” she recalls, prompting him to issue the first of many threats. “If you scream like that again, I’ll kill you,” he told her.

Then it was time for them to “consummate our marriage,” she remembers him telling her. She tried to stop him but couldn’t.

“I was crying,” she says. “I begged him to stop. I remember it was so painful.”

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The attack caused him so much pain that when he left the tent, he remembers blood running down his thighs before he passed out.

Then came a different kind of pain. When he woke up, all he could think about was “to be that piece of chewing gum, to be ruined beyond repair, to feel like I’ve lost all my worth.”

This common misconception, she notes, “took years to get over. It took years to be like, any guy who doesn’t want to be with me because of what happened isn’t worthy of me.”

Convicted in 2010 of Smart’s kidnapping, Mitchell was sentenced to life in prison. Convicted for 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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