Elizabeth Smart: Kidnapping Made Me 'Compassionate,' Motherhood Is the 'Best Thing Ever'
Years after Elizabeth Smart endured a nightmare — being held captive, raped, and tortured for nine months at age 14 — she made a lifelong dream come true. Smart became a mother: She had a daughter, Chloe, with her husband, Matthew Gilmour. Now, the 28-year-old is speaking out for the first time about how her horrific past has actually given her a gift that she shares with her 9-month-old baby, and the world.
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“I do believe it made me a much more compassionate person,” Smart said of her 2002 kidnapping, speaking at an event in Oklahoma City to benefit the child-advocate group Court Appointed Special Advocates of Oklahoma County on Wednesday.
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Elizabeth Smart’s kidnappers, Brian David Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee, are serving life and 15 years in prison, respectively. (Photo: Getty Images)
And while the My Story author and activist declared motherhood “the best thing ever,” according to the Oklahoman, she acknowledges that her history has an impact on how she raises her daughter. “It’s probably made me like the most paranoid, overprotective, annoying parent ever,” Smart admitted. “I’m definitely given a whole new depth of feeling about everything.”
Elizabeth Smart was just 14 when she was abducted from her bedroom at knifepoint. (Photo: Corbis Images)
With the Elizabeth Smart Foundation: Bringing Hope & Stopping Victimization, the new mother has been using that empathy to help others prevent sex crimes against children. Smart says her ordeal “did help me realize that, well, the world’s not black and white, and there’s a lot going on that we don’t see, that we just will never understand because we’re not necessarily the person it’s happening to or we’re not involved directly in the situation,” she revealed. “So, it definitely helped me, I think, become a much better person.”
Elizabeth Smart and her husband, Matthew Gilmour. (Photo: NBC/Getty Images)
And it was her own mother, Smart adds, who made all the difference in how she began to focus on the positive as soon as she returned home after her “nine months in hell.” Her mom, Lois, told her: “‘Elizabeth, what these people have done to you is terrible, and there aren’t words strong enough to describe how wicked and evil they are,” she recalled. “They’ve stolen nine months of your life from you that you will never get back. But the best punishment you could ever give them is to be happy, is to live your life, is to move forward and do all of the things that you want to do. Because by feeling sorry for yourself and holding onto the past and reliving it over and over and over again, that’s only allowing them to steal more of your life away from you, and they don’t deserve that. They don’t deserve another single second more of your life.”
So while the new mom insisted, “I will never forget how filthy and how crushed and how terrible I felt,” she said that today, “I’m happy. I’m really happy.” She even offered words of wisdom to the crowd in Oklahoma City last week.
“No one can ever take away your worth, no matter what they do to you,” Smart told the audience, noting that one in four girls are sexually abused before they turn 18. “You are always special. Nothing can change that. There’s only one of you in the entire history of the world, and there will only ever be one of you. Nothing can change that, and you don’t have to allow those events to control the rest of your life. It’s terrible and it’s miserable and nobody deserves it — but we can move on.”
(Top photo: Corbis Images)
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