Elizabeth Smart’s kidnapping was headline news across the United States in 2002, and now her harrowing story is the focus of Netflix’s newest hit true crime documentary.
Smart was just 14 when Brian David Mitchell kidnapped her from her home at knifepoint, with her nine-year-old sister Mary Katherine helping find Mitchell as she was a witness to the kidnapping.
Today (21 January), Netflix have released Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart, a new true crime film about her kidnapping.
The film ends on a very hopeful note, showing Elizabeth happy with her sister, Mary Katherine, and her father, Ed Smart, but many will wonder what happened next for Elizabeth after her nine-month torment by Mitchell.
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Elizabeth has spoken openly about the fact that she was repeatedly assaulted by him, forced to drink alcohol until she vomited, and was made to ‘marry’ him in a bizarre ceremony.
The Utah-born woman has recovered from this to have her own family; however, she has also become an advocate for sexual assault survivors in the US.
Elizabeth Smart works as an advocate for sexual violence survivors and has written multiple books
The now 38-year-old woman started the Elizabeth Smart Foundation, a group which ‘exists to drive social change in the fight against sexual violence’.
She wrote a book about her experiences called My Story, followed by Where There’s Hope, and in late 2025, she published Detours: Hope & Growth After Life’s Hardest Turns.
Elizabeth was a vital voice behind the introduction of the AMBER Alert System, a public notification system in America which helps find abducted children.
It is activated when lives are in danger and sees an alert go out over the radio, TV, highway signs, and even cell phones to alert people of descriptions of children and suspects if a child goes missing.
In addition to all this, though, Smart has spoken about how her newfound family has given her a new perspective on life.
Elizabeth met her husband on a mission trip in Paris and he hadn’t heard of her at the time
In 2009, she met her now-husband, Matthew Gilmour, a Scottish man who had never heard of her, while in Paris.
She told Skip Intro: “Because he didn’t know anything [about] my past, he wasn’t afraid to tell me what he really thought… I appreciate that I’m not my past [with him].”
Elizabeth now has three children with Matthew: Chloe, Olivia, and James, and has spoken in a recent podcast appearance about how their children's birth had changed her perspective on her life.
The Utah native discussed in an appearance on Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard how, when she was first rescued, she could not understand why her family were so distraught when she was first taken because ‘the bad things aren’t happening to you’.
She added, though: “Now as a parent I would gladly go through it all again to make sure it didn’t happen to my kids.”
Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart is now available to stream on Netflix.
Topics: Netflix, Crime, True Crime, US News
Michael Slavin