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

need to know

• Elizabeth Smart opens up about the ordeal she endured for nine months in a new Netflix documentary, Abduction: Elizabeth Smart

• In the documentary, streaming January 21, Smart gives a brutal account of being raped by Brian David Mitchell up to four times a day, being walked around like a dog with a cable around his neck and tied to a tree for long periods of time.

• He is joined in the documentary by his family, witnesses and law enforcement, who offer their perspectives on Smart’s harrowing story.

Standing in a weather-beaten tent in the Utah foothills after being abducted from her bedroom in the middle of the night, Elizabeth Smart wasn’t sure what to expect.

Just after 1 a.m. on June 5, 2002, Smart, then 14, ordered a frightened-looking man to come with her while standing by her bed.

Holding a knife to her throat, Brian David Mitchell, 48, a self-styled prophet who goes by the name Emmanuel, dragged the terrified teenager out the back door of her family’s Salt Lake City home, into the backyard and upstairs to a deserted camp.

Inside a tent at the camp, Mitchell’s wife, Wanda Barzi, then 56, who went by the name Hephzibah, told Smart to take off his pajamas and change into loose clothing.

Otherwise, the older woman explained, she’d have Mitchell come over there and “rip your clothes off,” Smart says in a new Netflix documentary. Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart, Debuts January 21.

Smart, 38, a happily married mother of three, has previously spoken about her nightmare ordeal. She has written best-selling books about her experiences, launched the Elizabeth Smart Foundation to help end sexual violence, and used her platform as the most famous survivor 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, her sister, Mary Catherine Smart, 33, witnesses who saw Smart wearing a veil covering her head but didn’t know she was the missing girl authorities were looking for, and members of law enforcement who worked on the case.

Having multiple voices in the documentary “gives a lot of perspective to the story,” Smart tells PEOPLE.

He hopes that being honest about the brutal treatment he endured, including being raped up to four times a day, kept in a dark hole, and chained for hours on end, will help others better understand the reality that victims face when violated and well.

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

That actual night, Smart was waiting for Mitchell to come to the tent. Self-professed as a “late bloomer,” the thought of what might happen next was unimaginable, and still shrouded in a bit of mystery.

Shortly before the kidnapping, she recalls, “my friend told me what sex was really like and I was like, ‘What? My parents have done this six times? That’s terrible!’ And I knew all about sex.”

What she knew from the church was that premarital sex was strictly forbidden. “Otherwise, you’re dirty, you’re wasted,” she says. “They use all kinds of analogies like when you have sex before marriage, it’s like someone chewing a piece of gum – and nobody wants a piece of gum.”

Moments later, Mitchell entered the tent and announced that he was going to make Smart his wife, there and then. She screamed, “No!” she recalls, prompting him to make 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 recalls. She tried to stop but could not.

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

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The attack caused her so much pain that when she came out of the tent she remembers her thigh bleeding before she got out.

Then came a different kind of pain. When she woke up, she could only think, “To feel like I’ve lost all my worth after chewing a piece of gum, broken beyond repair.”

That common misconception, she notes, “took years to shake off. It took years to be like, ‘No guy deserves me who doesn’t want to be with me because of what happened.’

Mitchell was sentenced to life in prison for Smart’s kidnapping in 2010. Convicted for her role in the crime, Barzi was released from prison in 2018. He was arrested in May 2025 after visiting two Utah parks, which violated his status as a registered sex offender.

For more on Elizabeth Smart and her new Netflix documentary, subscribe to PEOPLE now or pick up this week’s issue on newsstands Friday.

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