Warning: This article contains discussion of sexual assault and child abuse which some readers may find distressing.
Elizabeth Smart has long faced bizarre critiques aimed at her for not ‘trying to escape’ during her nine-month kidnapping aged 14, something she has come out to debunk.
Smart’s capture at the hands of Wanda Barzee and Brian David Mitchell has become the subject of the latest Netflix true crime documentary, as well as her subsequent nine months of sexual abuse.
Though she would eventually be found, in part due to her sister reading the Guinness Book of World Records, before this occurred, she was subjected to rape and sexual violence, but also mental and physical torture.
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Elizabeth was kept in a remote campsite in Utah, though Mitchell and Barzee would often take her into town with a veil covering her face.
She stayed quiet even when approached by a police officer who asked if she was Elizabeth, but eventually she was rescued after an officer spotted her and separated her from Mitchell and Barzee.
There were accusations that this was because she had ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, which she has denied in a new interview.
Speaking on Jesse Webber Live, she said: “Over the years, I’ve been accused of having Stockholm Syndrome; I never had Stockholm Syndrome.
“From day one, actually, I remember realising that I could die, these monsters could kill me at any point in time, and my mind immediately went to 'what can I do that will help me survive?'
“'What will give me my best chance at survival?' I remember thinking, 'well, if I can get them to like me, then maybe they won't want to kill me'.
“'How am I going to get them to like me?' Well, it's probably by doing what they want me to do.
“From that time forward, that's really how I made all my decisions. If I do this, will I survive? If I don't do this, will I survive?
“So, from the outside looking in, it's easy to sit there and judge people.”
Benedict Sanderson, director of Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart, said in an exclusive interview with LADbible that Elizabeth was ‘particularly keen to go into the psychological aspects of the abuse as well as the physical.’
He added: “She felt when she was first rescued and, in the years afterwards, there were what feel now quite inappropriate but difficult questions from journalists saying ‘well, why didn't you cry out when you were brought down in the city?’.”
“She was not only abused every day but demeaned, around like a dog, her family were threatened, she was threatened. He threatened to kill her.
“If she did cry out when she brought down the city, he threatened to withhold food.
“So I think because she did go deeper and further into talking about that kind of thing, I think it gives the audience a better understanding of her experience of the different kinds of abuse and coercive control generally as well.”
Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart is available to stream on Netflix now.
Topics: Netflix, True Crime, Film, TV and Film, Documentaries
Michael Slavin