He Can't Hurt Me Ever Again

Held captive and raped for nine months in 2002, Elizabeth Smart has become an inspiring role model for victims of sexual abuse

- Nici De Wet

HER ordeal would be enough to make anyone retreat from the world and hope to be forgotten forever. Instead she’s emerged from her nightmare strong and proud to become an inspiration to millions of people.

Elizabeth Smart made headlines the world over in 2002 when, aged just 14, she was snatched from her home, held captive and raped repeatedly for nine months before eventually being rescued.

Now 29, Elizabeth has devoted her life to helping rape survivors – much of which she does in her new role as a special correspondent for Crime Watch Daily, America’s No 1 crime show which focuses on in-depth investigations and real-life mysteries.

Elizabeth was also a guest on the show recently, reliving her hellish nine months and revealing how she contemplated suicide the first time she was violated.

“I felt like it would be better to be dead than to continue living being a rape victim,” she told host Chris Dansen.

She was snatched in the middle of the night from her bedroom in her family home in Salt Lake City, Utah, by religious zealot Brian David Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee.

They held the teen captive in a remote mountain camp for nine months, during which she was chained to a tree, starved, drugged and repeatedly raped.

Having been raised in the Mormon faith, Elizabeth says she believed Mitchell, who claimed he was a prophet chosen by God, had robbed her of her “virtue” – or virginity – and she had therefore become worthless.

“Because I grew up in a conservative Christian neighbourhood, the first time I was raped I remember feeling devastated. I felt in that moment that if there had been an easy way out I probably would’ve taken it,” she told Dansen.

But she showed remarkable strength of spirit to survive what she’s called “a living hell”.