Elizabeth Smart Tells Her Story Like Never Before

Elizabeth Smart is revisiting the ordeal that once made her a national headline, this time in a documentary she says strips away the distance she's long kept between herself and the public version of her story. In Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart, debuting Wednesday on Netflix, the now-38-year-old advocate and mother of three recounts in stark detail her 2002 abduction from her Salt Lake City bedroom at age 14 and the nine months of abuse that followed at the hands of Brian David Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee. "I want people who have never experienced this to get a taste of what it's really like—the depth of fear—to be forced to do things you would never do," she tells People. "There's a purpose to sharing my story."

Smart says the film not only traces the physical violence and control she endured—repeated rapes, being tethered with a cable, forced drinking—but also the lasting shame she felt afterward, despite logically knowing she was not to blame. Smart, raised in a devout Mormon home that prohibited sex outside marriage, recalls believing she was "ruined beyond repair" and even questioning whether life was worth living as she worried about pregnancy and ostracism. Smart, who works with survivors of sexual assault and families of missing children through the Elizabeth Smart Foundation, says those encounters helped her see how common that shame is.

Her rescue in March 2003 came after a tipster recognized her from a TV segment and alerted police in Sandy, Utah. Smart remembers the moment an officer pulled her aside and asked if she was Elizabeth Smart, leading to what she calls one of the happiest days of her life. She leaned on faith and family, returned to school, later attended Brigham Young University, and met her future husband while serving as a missionary in Paris. Now a parent herself, Smart says watching her parents' anguish in the film has changed her understanding of their suffering—and strengthened her conviction that sharing her story will remind survivors that they are not alone, and give others a clearer view of what trauma really looks like.