Elizabeth Smart the brave survivor

Elizabeth Smart is an American child safety activist and contributor for ABC News. She first gained national attention at the age of 14 when she was abducted from her home in Salt Lake City and rescued nine months later. She is also a musician who has played harp on national television in the United States.

    On June 5, 2002, Smart was abducted at knifepoint from her bedroom in her family's Salt Lake City home. She was rescued by police officers nine months later on March 12, 2003, on a public street in Sandy, Utah, 18 miles from her home. She had been in the captivity of Brian David Mitchell who once worked for her house and his wife Wanda Ileen Barzee. Her abduction and rescue were widely reported and made to a movie, titled The Elizabeth Smart Story, and non-fiction books.

    "A man broke into my house and held me at knife point and kidnapped me," Smart said.

 Elizabeth Smart said how she was daily repeatedly three to four times raped and tied up to a tree being treated as less than human and threatened to death if she attempted to escape.

"I was begging and crying and just so scared. I remember thinking, I know what comes after a wedding. And that cannot happen to me. That cannot happen.., He raped me right there on the floor of the tent and then when he was finished I was left alone feeling absolutely broken absolutely shattered. I was broken beyond repair,... 'Everytime I thought "OK this cannot get worse," it always did.' 

     

           In the months following Smart's disappearance, her parents made multiple television appearances, pleading for their daughter's return. Hundreds of people scoured the region hunting for her.

       Smart was found nine months later in March 2003 with Barzee and Mitchell, a self-proclaimed prophet who called himself "Emmanuel" and once had done work at Smart's home. Mitchell and his wife had been living in the wooded area close to where Elizabeth and her family lived. That was almost just as bad as being kidnapped as being raped as being chained up,' Smart said of the moment when the officer went away.

      Since her kidnapping, Smart has tried to keep herself focused on her future as opposed to the past, but her most vivid testimony came when she spoke at the hearing for her captor. Mitchell, a religious fanatic, he repeatedly sang to himself in the courtroom but Smart was poised and in her direct verbal confrontations with him.

"That was almost just as bad as being kidnapped as being raped as being chained up,' Smart said of the moment when the officer went away.

But today we are so glad to hear that she found the love of her life Matthew Gilmour.

    I just said very simply, ‘Elizabeth Ann Smart, will you marry me?’ ” Gilmour remembered in 2012. “And then I wasn’t nervous.”

“The thing that attracted me the most to her  at the beginning and now is how confident she is, especially considering everything she has been through,” Gilmour said.
In January 2012, along with a sapphire engagement ring, he popped the question on a hillside near her home.

   Mathew Gilmour and Elizabeth Smart.

THANK YOU !