Thirteen years after being rescued from captivity, Elizabeth Smart opened up about how her childhood abductor Brian David Mitchell’s addiction to pornography made her “living hell worse.”
“He would just sit and look at it and stare at it, and he would just talk about these women, and then when he was done, he would turn and look at me, and he would be like, ‘Now we’re going to do this,’” Smart, now 28, recalled in a new video shared by Fight the New Drug, an antiporn nonprofit group, on Friday, August 19.
“Looking at pornography wasn’t enough for him. Having sex with his wife after looking at pornography wasn’t enough for him,” she continued. “He just always wanted more.”
Smart was kidnapped from her Salt Lake City home in 2002, when she was 14 years old. She was held in captivity for nine months by Mitchell, now 62, and his wife, Wanda Barzee, only miles away from her family’s house. During that time, Mitchell raped Smart multiple times a day and often threatened to kill her if she tried to escape. In March 2003, the teen abductee was finally rescued after months of nationwide searches.
In Friday’s video, the child safety activist also recounted a time when Mitchell, who she only refers to as her “captor,” showed her a “magazine full of hard-core pornography,” just days after he forced her to drink so much alcohol that she passed out.
“It just led to him raping me more, more than he already did — which was a lot,” Smart explained. “I can’t say that he would not have gone out and kidnapped me had he not looked at pornography. All I know is that pornography made my living hell worse.”
Now, Smart works as a contributor for ABC News and continues to advocate for child sexual abuse prevention. She married Matthew Gilmour in February 2012, and welcomed her first child, daughter Chloe, in February 2015.
