Though it happened 14 years ago, the horrifying case of Elizabeth Smart’s kidnapping is still pretty vivid in most of our minds—especially Elizabeth’s.
More than a decade after, she can still recall in living color the play-by-play of that fateful night and the chilling words spoken by her captor: “I have a knife against your neck. Don’t make a sound. Get up and come with me.”
The nine months of torture are what Elizabeth can only describe as “living hell.”
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“Every time when I thought I had hit rock bottom, my captor would find something new to make it worse,” she remarked. Elizabeth recalled one time when she was forced to drink alcohol until she puked and passed out, and she thought to herself, “How can you get any lower than this?”
Though the haunting events of those nine months have replayed like a broken record thousands of time in her mind, there’s a profound truth that she never realized about her kidnapping until her own daughter Chloe was born last year. Perhaps there were people affected worse by her abduction than her: her parents.
“When I go back to my own situation, I almost think it was worse for my parents than for me because I knew that I was alive, but they didn’t know,” Smart tells PEOPLE. “I always knew how much they loved me, but until I had my own daughter I didn’t realize how all-consuming that is. The worst thing in the world would be if something happened to my little girl.”
Along with her faith, Elizabeth says her mom, Lois, was her rock while she persevered through the sexual assault:
“As I sat on this mountainside remembering my mom telling me that, I realized that she was right… She would still love me… And when I realized that, I realized that I had something that my captors couldn’t take away from me. They could never change my mother’s love for me.
When I realized that I had this love that they couldn’t take away or change, I realized that I did have something worth living—worth surviving—for.”
Though the situation was scarring for her, Elizabeth has only recently captured the weight of how these situations heavily impact the parents of child victims. Her mother’s heart for her baby girl, Chloe, has opened her eyes to the pain of a worried parent like never before. Her heart for this matter has particularly grown as she recently started to work as a correspondent for Crime Watch Daily.
She’s used to being on the receiving end of these interviews, but now Smart helps report stories of sexual assault victims to “keep their cases in the spotlight”…like these two young ladies posted on her Instagram account this week for instance:
“The power of the media is so strong,” says Smart. “I know that in my own experience, if my parents hadn’t kept my story alive in the press, it might have been just another sad story that came and went. So the opportunity to talk to other victims and survivors means a lot to me and to them. Nobody should have to go through the aftermath of a terrible crime alone.”
“Being on the other side is a shift, but I like it,” she tells PEOPLE.
“I’ve told my own story over and over and over again,” she added. “I’m enjoying helping somebody else to get their story out there.”
Source: Faithit
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Elizabeth Smart’s Daughter Reveals Heartbreaking Revelation About Her Kidnapping 13 Yrs Later
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