Seven years after being abducted by a sex-obsessed, religious zealot in Utah, a poised and beautiful Elizabeth Smart calmly testified for the first time yesterday — laying out in harrowing detail her nine-month ordeal of rape and abuse.
Now 21, the angelic Mormon harpist described how in 2002 she went from an innocent 14-year-old girl asleep in her bed to being subjected to daily sexual assaults and religious brainwashings by Brian David Mitchell, who kept her bound to a tree and plied her with drugs and alcohol.
All the while, the creepy, wild-bearded, self-proclaimed prophet claimed that raping her up to four times a day was for the greater glory of God.
“Anything I showed resistance or hesitation to, he would turn to me and say, ‘The Lord has commanded you to do this, you have to experience the lowest form of humanity to experience the highest,” Smart testified in Salt Lake City federal court.
“He was religious, but not spiritual, not Christ-like,” she said. “He used religion to get what he wanted.”
Speaking calmly, Smart began her testimony by recalling the night of June 5, 2002, when she woke up in her family’s Salt Lake City home with something cold pressed to her neck and a bearded man standing above her.
“He came into my room and held a knife to my throat and threatened me with my life and my family’s life to come with him,” she said.
“He placed his hand on my chest. He then put the knife up to my neck and he told me to get up quietly and if I didn’t then he would kill me and my family,” she said.
Smart said Mitchell — dressed in sweat pants, a ski hat and tennis shoes — ordered her to dress and said he was taking her hostage for ransom.
Still holding the knife to her neck, Mitchell forced her to march three miles through a canyon behind her house to a campsite where his wife, Wanda Eileen Barzee, waited for them. There, Barzee prepared Smart for a “marriage ceremony.”
“He took me inside where Wanda then tried to force me to bathe. After arguing with her, she eventually just proceeded to wash my feet and told me to change out of my pajamas into a robe-type of garment,” Smart said. “When I refused, she said if I didn’t she would have Brian Mitchell come rip my pajamas off. I put the robe on and he came and performed a ceremony which was to marry me to him.”
“After that, he proceeded to rape me,” Smart said.
She said Mitchell forced her to drink alcohol and take drugs to make her less resistant to his sleazy sexual advances and would make her look at pornography and insisted she “be humble” to him.
Mitchell often bombarded her with extremely sexual language before forcing himself upon her several times a day during he nine-month ordeal, she said.
“He would come off the mountain and say, ‘I’m going to f- – – your eyes out,’ ” Smart testified. “There wasn’t an actual 24-hour time period he wasn’t able to rape me.”
At first, following the abduction, Smart said Mitchell kept her bound to two trees using a heavy cable.
Once, she said, he forced her to drink so much that she threw up and he made her lie face-down in her own vomit all night so she would understand the “true state” to which she was being subjected.
She testified she fought Mitchell off once, biting his hand as he assaulted her, and that he said he would never have sex with her again and that she would be “miserable” because of it. Like much of what Mitchell said, it was a lie, and he continued to rape her, she said.
As the daily rapes continued, Smart said Barzee grew jealous of all the attention Mitchell was lavishing on his new “wife” and demanded that he agree to rotate between them. Smart said this was the only time when she was spared from the sexual assaults
But it didn’t last. Soon, Mitchell was finding ways to rape Smart even on days he was “scheduled” to be with Barzee. The whole idea was tossed aside when the three decamped to San Diego for the wintertime.
Smart described how Mitchell excelled at manipulating people — including a clerk at a grocery store called Wild Oats who gave them free food, and a Mormon family that Mitchell befriended.
Even more frightening, Smart said Mitchell had planned to extend his sick family by kidnapping a girl he met at a Mormon Church in San Diego. She said he even went to her house to snatch her, but the plan fell through when he saw a man inside the home.
Smart’s road to salvation came when she turned Mitchell’s religious ravings around on him. Knowing that it was unlikely anyone in California would recognize her — news of her abduction having waned in the months following — she convinced him God wanted them to return to Utah, where she felt someone might recognize her.
“[I] had a very strong feeling about going to Salt Lake,” she told him.
He agreed because he wanted to take his religious struggle to former Mormon Church head Gordon Hinckley, whom Mitchell called the anti-Christ.
Smart was finally rescued in March 2003 when she was spotted walking down a street with Mitchell and Barzee near Salt Lake City.
Smart’s testimony was part of a mental-competency hearing for Mitchell, who has avoided trial since being arrested with his wife in 2003 because he has been deemed a stark-raving lunatic.
A judge had ruled Monday that Smart — who graduated from Brigham Young University last spring with a degree in music composition — would have to testify. She asked to come in immediately because she is going to Paris soon to do missionary work for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Mitchell was not present for Smart’s testimony yesterday. He is usually removed from the courtroom for singing religious hymns nonstop and was made to watch the proceedings via closed-circuit television, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
When asked by prosecutors how she would describe him, Smart — who remained calm and composed throughout — could barely restrain her disgust.
“[He’s] evil, wicked, manipulative, sneaky, slimy, selfish, greedy, not spiritual, not religious, not close to God at all!” she said.
The case against Mitchell has long been stalled because of questions about his mental capacity to understand the charges against him. A state court in Utah ruled last year he could not be forcibly medicated to make him more lucid — and therefore able to stand trial.
That prompted the US Attorney’s Office to take the case into the federal-court system. Mitchell was indicted late last year and the judge is now trying to determine if Mitchell is able to stand trial. Barzee has been medicated, and is awaiting trial. With Post Wire Services