Elizabeth Smart Takes The Stand To Tell About Her Kidnapping Ordeal
Posted by: Kate Torgovnick
Filed in:
news
10:40AM, Friday October 2nd 2009
Elizabeth Smart was found more than six years ago, but her kidnapper, Brian Mitchell, has still not gone to trial. His lawyers claim that he’s a complete looney, and it’s been an uphill battle to prove that he’s fit to stand trial. Makes you oh so proud of our legal system, right? Yesterday, at Mitchell’s official competency hearing, Elizabeth took the stand for the first time to tell what exactly happened to her in the nine months she was missing. The details are horrifying: After Mitchell took her at knife-point from her house, he made her hike three miles into the mountains to a campsite he’d set up. There, he performed a “marriage ceremony” and raped her. She was 14 at the time. He raped her every day for the next nine months. She said, “Anytime I showed resistance or hesitance, he would turn to me and say, ‘The Lord has commanded you to do this. You have to experience the lowest form of humanity to experience the highest.’” Mitchell forced her to drink alcohol, to take drugs, and to watch porn. At one point, Mitchell chained her to a tree. Elizabeth says that Mitchell planned to kidnap a second girl to “marry,” though luckily the plot didn’t work out.
Smart was scheduled to face Mitchell at the hearing, but as soon as he entered the court room, he began singing, and was moved to a private room where he watched her testimony on a screen. (He obviously watched some episodes of “Law & Order” for tips on looking nuts.) Elizabeth’s dad said she was not happy about this. “She actually wanted to face him and, in fact, I think she asked if he could be muzzled and have to sit there to watch it,” he said.
Elizabeth is now a student at Brigham Young University, studying music. In September, she did several interviews giving advice to Jaycee Lee Dugard, telling her to do her best to move on with her life and enjoy the friends and family she now has back in her life. We seriously applaud her for being so brave and articulate in sharing a terrifying story.
(And on a totally superficial side note, her trial outfit was super cute.)
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QTKT
wrote on October 2 2009 @ 09:46 am: [report]
Amazing strength! ... and I had the same thought about her clothes when I saw the news this morning.
skywalk
wrote on October 2 2009 @ 09:55 am: [report]
I agree I wish her all the best!
jhaake
wrote on October 2 2009 @ 10:04 am: [report]
Poor Elizabeth Smart—kidnapped 9 months by a “religious” man (Mitchell) with a sex drive for 14 yr old girls. Very poor Elizabeth Smart raised in a church for 21 yrs which was founded by a “religious” man (Joseph Smith) with a sex drive for 14 yr old girls and other men’s wives.
In November Elizabeth will become a missionary for the Mormons, she will teach the people of Paris France to sing the same songs that Mitchell sings in court. She will teach the French to honor and revere a man (Joseph Smith) who also used religious emotion as a tool to get 14 yr-old girls in bed. Elizabeth’s tale is a sad one indeed.
I sympathize with all the trauma that Elizabeth has gone through, yet much of that trauma is still unrecognized by herself.
saramarie
wrote on October 2 2009 @ 10:05 am: [report]
I understand the legal definition of ‘insanity’ when it comes to cases like these, but don’t you have to be FREAKING NUTS to do anything like this in the first place?? I’m pretty sure that anyone who is NOT off their rocker wouldn’t do anything this hideous.
joyy
wrote on October 2 2009 @ 10:10 am: [report]
@saramarie - read “Under the Banner of Heaven” for some backstory on how this nightmare unfolded.
Perceptible
wrote on October 2 2009 @ 10:12 am: [report]
I have to hope that there is a very special place in hell for that man.
bogart4017
wrote on October 2 2009 @ 12:22 pm: [report]
It takes a very courageous woman to get on the stand and relive such horrors. We’ll never know the number of people who simply cannot face their attackers so they don’t press charges.
tmmkitten
wrote on October 2 2009 @ 01:14 pm: [report]
as one who is a member of the LDS church, i find it upsetting that people choose to have such a negative view of Elizabeth because she remains strong in her faith.
we don’t practice polygamy. those who do are excommunicated. the religion was not set up to get 14 year olds into bed. whatever claims people make about a hypocritical role and situation she is apart of, makes me sad that people continue to believe and promote lies.
Terpgirl31
wrote on October 2 2009 @ 01:25 pm: [report]
Good for her. This guy has to be faking it…there’s no way he could actually be insane to the point of singing and disrupting a trial when he was able to kidnap her and hide for so long. I hope he gets punished to the fullest extent.
jhaake
wrote on October 2 2009 @ 02:18 pm: [report]
tmmkitten, I have no negative view of Elizabeth.
I do, however, find it VERY ironic that the religion she was raised in proved to be the inspiration for her abductor Mitchell.
The Mormon (LDS) founder was Joseph Smith, a self proclaimed prophet, at age 38 Joseph “adopted” two orphan girls and took possession of their $5000 inheritance and took them into his home (local mormon paper praised his action in “adopting” them). If you consult current LDS records you will find that Joseph added these two orphans as “spirit wives” just WEEKS after they were supposedly “adopted”. Both girls were younger than 17. From the letter Joseph Smith wrote to many of these girls one can see that Michell used the very same techniques of “religion” to convince the girls of the correctness of his actions.
Sound familiar? Ironic Elizabeth will be “spreading the word” of this former sexual predator to the people of France. What will she do as she eventually learns such truths about her own religion?
joyy
wrote on October 2 2009 @ 02:31 pm: [report]
@jhaake - she was raised in/brainwashed by the LDS church her whole life (minus the horrific abduction period), so she probably just believes everything the church tells her and won’t ever look at her own religion from a critical, let alone rational, viewpoint.
mmkw
wrote on October 2 2009 @ 03:07 pm: [report]
You know, I’m actually agnostic but I really think that people need to chill out on the LDS trash talk. You may not agree with their religion, but it’s really not your place to speak poorly about it or make somebody feel bad for defending their belief system. One of the founding ideals of this country was religious freedom, and not just for the religions that we’re comfortable with.
I grew up in an area where a lot of mormon people live and I found them to be some of the nicest, most genuine people I’ve ever met. Comparing all mormons to the extreme polygamist sects is like comparing all christians to the people who bomb planned parenthoods. They’re extremists.
Maybe ask yourself why you feel the need to speak so cruelly to someone because of what church she goes to. Is it possible that some of your preconceptions of the church could be wrong? How does this prejudice differ from any other and how much of your prejudice is based on assumptions?
tmmkitten
wrote on October 2 2009 @ 05:58 pm: [report]
jhaake-
i very much dislike people saying that we have been brainwashed. each member makes a critical decision to follow or to chose a different path. i have yet to meet someone who hasn’t. and it is promoted to seek what you really believe. (The true LDS church doesn’t practice polygamy. those who say they are mormon use the name to gain legitimacy in the public eye.)
i was actually raised in an extremely feminist environment, both my father, father-in law and husband are feminists.
i believe in promoting science and evolution, but have a spiritual side.
all religions have “dark secrets”, or situations that could and are exploited and twisted to convey a negative view. Joseph Smith did those things, yes. but if you decide not to look at the age of marriage at that time, the situation in why they were spiritually wed, and what the people believed in when that was done, you are missing the biggest part of the story.
secretstevie
wrote on October 2 2009 @ 06:56 pm: [report]
i have to (sort of) agree with tmmkitten.
i am an athiest, so i can’t really relate but i do believe that EVERY single religious organization out there has some major f-ing skeletons in their closets.
i don’t find it ironic Elizabeth Smart is a mormon, i find it ironic that she is religious at all. and if she is going to use religion to get through her pain, it is probably pretty arbitrary which religion she picks considering they all basically have something in their history or doctrine that has encouraged the repression/exploitation of women. if she had been a catholic, a muslim, hindi, or virtually any other religion on the planet the same point could be made. so if being mormon is what helps her keep it together, then i guess that mormonism is as good as any.
secretstevie
wrote on October 2 2009 @ 06:58 pm: [report]
oops i mean’t to put hindu, not hindi. i was talking about the religion not the language. apologies.
jhaake
wrote on October 3 2009 @ 07:42 am: [report]
tmmkitten, I never said the word “brainwashed”—take the “persecution” chip off your shoulder. tmmkitten does or does not the LDS church have a scripture that God’s words says polygamy is the HIGHER law? Is that still not a part of scripture your church still believes? (Rhetorical Ans: YES).
tmmkitten, I’d also suggest you actually look at historical statistics that prove beyond a doubt that people in Joseph Smith’s day did NOT merry younger women—indeed the average age of marriage is higher than it is today.
Joseph Smith at age 38 took in two young orphan girls (along with $5000 inheritance) and much ado was made over Joseph’s kindness in “adopting” them. Check church records (at familysearch.org) and you’ll see just a few short WEEKS after “adopting” them Joseph married them (just two of his harem of 36 wives).
Now tell me tmmkitten, does that sound more like the “normal” way things were back then, or instead, does it sound an awful lot like Mitchell.
Mitchell’s religious reasonings for taking Elizabeth for a wife are almost direct quotes Joseph Smith wrote in private letters to the young women of his time.
@secretsteve—the irony isn’t that she is mormon, the irony is she escapes from one sexual deviant to go preach to the people of Paris about another sexual deviant.
*sam*
wrote on October 3 2009 @ 08:16 am: [report]
regarding the insanity issue: Kate, you’re not being very objective here. Just because it’s taken 6yrs to get an official competency hearing doesn’t mean our justice system is crap. It means that this guy is severely disturbed. Moreover, your assumption that he’s merely malingering is highly doubtful considering the individual has to be interviewed by trained psychologists/psychiatrists and id given a battery of evaluations, all of which have their own ways of detecting malingering. I’m certainly not defending this guy, but, before you go off bashing the courts on the insanity clause, you should at least take the time to get a base understanding of it first. Also, based on your views as you have portrayed them here, it seems pretty obvious that you’ve never been to a state-run mental facility. The places that these people are sent to when they’re deemed incompetent or legally insane is NOT a resort. I used to volunteer at one while I was in college, and, I can tell you, it’s not pretty. They tend to be ran like a high-security prison considering they’re harboring the criminally insane.