Elizabeth Smart appears on NBC News' Today show. Photo / Getty Images
Elizabeth Smart appears on NBC News' Today show. Photo / Getty Images
Kidnapping victim Elizabeth Smart says she contemplated killing herself after being raped and beaten by her abductor.
Smart was 14 years old when she was abducted from her bedroom in Salt Lake City and held in a remote spot in the woods in 2002 for nine months.
"For me, becauseI grew up in a very conservative Christian neighborhood, the first time I was raped I remember feeling devastated," Smart said in a Crime Watch Daily interview set to air Tuesday, the Daily Mail reports.
"I felt like it would be better to be dead than to continue living being a rape victim, being a rape survivor. I felt in that moment if there had been an easy way out, I probably would have taken it."
Smart, who is now 29 and a married mother of two, was raped up to four times a day by Brian David Mitchell after he broke into her parent's home and kidnapped her.
He was given a life sentence for the kidnapping and his wife Wanda Barzee is also serving jail time for helping to hold Smart captive.
Smart - who also recalled being tied to a tree, beaten and drugged - said she was confused when she was eventually rescued after nine months in captivity.
"One second I was being reunited with my parents, the next second I was being questioned. The next second they take me up to the hospital... then they're like, 'Oh, take off your clothes. Oh, let's do this kit on you'," Smart said.
"Nobody was really telling me anything and I remember when they were doing the rape kit, I just remember thinking, 'What's going on?'"
Brian David Mitchell, former homeless street preacher and kidnapper of Elizabeth Smart, enters the court room. Photo / Getty Images
She previously spoke of her suicidal thoughts in her 2013 memoir.
During a stop on the promotional tour she told the Today show, "It was the worst thing that possibly could have happened to me. I thought death would have been better then being raped every single day. That was the worst possible thing to happen to a 14-year-old.
"I'm 25 now, I can look back and I can overcome it, but not when I was 14."
During an hour-long interview with Meredith Vieira, also in 2013, Smart returned to the remote spot where she had been chained up and raped every day.
She said she tried to rationalise with Mitchell as he forced her up the remote path, saying: "If you're going to rape and kill me, will you please just do it here so that my parents can find my body?"
When they finally arrived at the campsite where Mitchell's wife was waiting, Smart said she begged and cried for him not to rape her.
"He raped me right there on the floor of the tent and then when he was finished I was left alone feeling absolutely broken absolutely shattered. I was broken beyond repair," she told Vieira.
"Every time I thought 'OK this cannot get worse', it always did."
Smart was finally rescued after she, Mitchell and his wife took a trip to a local Walmart. Someone in the store called police and said that she thought she saw the man whose picture she had seen on the news in connection to the Elizabeth Smart disappearance.
The officer took all three into the police station, and it was only when Smart's father Ed came into the interrogation room that she said she knew everything was going to be alright.
In the years after her kidnapping, Smart has become an author, philanthropist and motivational speaker. She is also a correspondent for the TV show 'Crime Watch Daily'.
Smart and her husband Matthew Gilmour have two children, Chloe, 2 1/2 and James, five months.
WHERE TO GET HELP:
If you are worried about your or someone else's mental health, the best place to get help is your GP or local mental health provider. However, if you or someone else is in danger or endangering others, call police immediately on 111.
