Smart was the featured speaker at Linda Vista’s 5th Annual Window of Opportunity luncheon. The non-profit organization, celebrating its 10th anniversary, provides housing and programming to homeless women and children. Founder and Executive Director Carmen Gooden said the group has served more than 300 since its inception. “Our mission is to help them heal,” said Gooden. “Ninety-eight percent of those who come to Linda Vista were victims of childhood abuse like I was.”
The crowd of 400 gave Smart a standing ovation both before and after her presentation. “I have come to realize it’s not so much what happens to us, but how we react and the choices we make after that define us,” she said.
Smart was taken from her bedroom in her family’s mountainside Salt Lake City home in 2002 at the age of 14 and rescued nine months later. Her experiences became a made-for-TV movie, and she has written a New York Times best-seller entitled “My Story.” She is president of the Elizabeth Smart Foundation, which advocates for laws to protect children.
Smart, who related the night of her kidnapping in detail, said the worst sentence she has ever heard was spoken by one of her abductors, Brian David Mitchell, after she’d been taken to a tent, forced to undress by his wife, and chained. “I hear-by seal you to me as my wife before God, his angels and his witnesses,” he told her. In her book, Smart writes that over the next nine months Mitchell raped her every day, sometimes multiple times a day.
Smart said she is often asked why she didn’t try to run or scream when she and her captors were out in public and approached by the police. “Everything he said he was going to do, he did do. So I believed him,” she explained. “I was so threatened every single day that I would be killed and my family would be killed if I tried to escape or tell anyone.”
Smart, who is now married and has an infant, said the best advice came from her mother.“What this couple has done to you is wicked and evil, they have stolen nine months of your life,” she said. “The best punishment you could give them is to move forward. You be happy.”
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