ELIZABETH SMART KIDNAP: INSIDE HER MIRACLE SURVIVAL

Twenty years after being freed, the world's most famous survivor is living the life she dreamed of

- Emma Babbington

It's been two decades since one of the world's most famous child abductees was found and set free. And while the spotlight has remained on Elizabeth Smart ever since, the now 35-year-old wants the world to know that despite all the trauma she endured during her nine-month abduction, she's doing well and lives a normal life.

"I'm a mum, I have three kids and I hate laundry," she joked in a recent interview on Good Morning America, adding that it's "a miracle" she's alive.

TAKEN AT KNIFEPOINT 
But unsurprisingly, the June 2002 abduction still affects Elizabeth and her family and she admits it's a "daily struggle" not to worry about her own children's safety.

"I was asleep at home in my bed when I was taken. I thought I was in the safest place in the world," the child safety advocate said last year. "If I can't see or hear my children, the panic creeps in."

Elizabeth was 14 years old when self-proclaimed street pastor Brian David Mitchell entered her family's Salt Lake City home and woke her at knifepoint. Sharing the bedroom was Elizabeth's nine-year-old sister Mary Katherine, pretended to sleep as her sister was taken away. In the hours that followed, Elizabeth was taken up into the mountains that overlooked the Utah city, begging her kidnapper to quickly do to her whatever it was he had planned, as closely as possible to her house.