‘All I knew about sex was what my friend told me’

YOU NEED TO KNOW

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

• Streaming on January 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 tied to a tree for long stretches.

• She is joined in the documentary by her family, witnesses and law enforcement, who provide their perspectives on Smart’s harrowing story.

Standing in a weather-worn tent in the Utah hills just after she was abducted from her bedroom in the middle of the night, Elizabeth Smart wasn’t sure what would happen next.

Shortly after 1 a.m. on June 5, 2002, Smart, then 14, woke up to a scary-looking man with a full beard standing over her bed and ordering her to come with him.

With a knife to her neck, the man, then 48-year-old Brian David Mitchell, a self-proclaimed prophet who went by the name of Immanuel, led the terrified teenager out the back door of her family’s Salt Lake City home, into the backyard and up the rugged hillside to a deserted campsite.

Inside the tent at the campsite, Mitchell’s wife, Wanda Barzee, then 56, whose name was Hephzibah, told Smart to take off her pajamas and put on a loose dress.

Otherwise, the elderly woman explained, she would have Mitchell come in there and “tear your clothes off,” Smart says in the new Netflix documentary, Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart, debuted on January 21st.

Happily married mother-of-three Smart, 38, has spoken out about her nightmarish ordeal before. She has written several best-selling books about her experience, started the Elizabeth Smart Foundation to help end sexual violence and has used her platform as one of the most well-known survivors of all time to advocate for others.

What is different this time is that she is telling her story together with her father, Ed Smart, 70 years old, her sister, Mary Katherine Smart, 33 years old, witnesses who saw Smart wearing a veil with her head covered but did not realize that she was the missing girl that the authorities and law enforcement members who worked on the case had been 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 well after their breakup.

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

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

Shortly before the abduction, she recalls, “My friend told me what sex really is and I was like, ‘What? Did my parents do this six times? This is terrible!’ And that was all I knew about sex.”

What she knew from the church is that sex before marriage was strictly taboo. “Otherwise, you are dirty, you are spoiled,” she says. “They used all sorts of analogies like having premarital sex, it’s like someone chewing a piece of gum — and nobody wants a chewed piece of gum.”

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

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

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

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The aggression caused her such pain that when he left the tent she remembers blood flowing from her thighs before it was over.

Then came a different kind of pain. When she woke up, all she could think about was “being that piece of chewed rubber, being damaged beyond repair, feeling like I’ve lost all my worth.”

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