A decade after Elizabeth Smart's kidnapping, she is sharing "100 percent" of the intimate details of her 9-month-long nightmare in a new book, My Story.
"I didn't just want to go 10% and sugarcoat the rest," Smart, 25, told CNN.
"I wanted it to be really what happened and what it was like every single day I was there, because I don't think I'm doing anyone any favors by sugarcoating it."
Her motivation for opening up? To acknowledge the "just staggering" fact that one in four girls and one in six boys are sexually abused before age 18.
"I want to reach out to those survivors and those victims," Smart said.
"I want them to know that these things do happen, but that doesn't mean that we have to be defined by it for life. You can move forward and you can be happy."
Case in point? The story that for so long defined her in the eyes of many.
The night of June 5, 2002, sociopathic kidnapper Brian David Mitchell dragged the 14-year-old from her bedroom in her family's Salt Lake City home.
"To me, in my bedroom is the ultimate place in safety," she said.
"I mean, I felt like that was the safest place in the world for me, so waking up in the middle of the night in my own bedroom having this strange man standing over me."
"I was terrified. I had grown up in a very happy home and I really didn't know what the definition of fear was until that moment. That brought whole new meaning."
"He said 'I have a knife at your neck, don't make a sound, get up and come with me,'" Smart recalled. "And then I remember getting up and going with him."
"He said 'If you make any sound, if you do anything that causes any attention or causes someone to come, I not only will kill you, but I will kill anyone who tries to stop me.'"
Smart was "praying so hard for an escape" at the onset.
"I kept looking, I kept waiting for something to happen, for some way for me to get away," she said of those first hours. "I kept looking and it didn't happen."
"When I didn't see an escape route, I thought 'Oh, my goodness, I'm going to be raped and then I'm going to be murdered, because that's what happens."
Mitchell forced her to hike with him for hours that morning.
"I remember stopping him and asking him 'Well, if you're going to rape and kill me, could you please do it here?' because, in my mind, I wanted my parents to know what had happened to me."
"I wanted them to know that I hadn't run away, that this wasn't my choosing, I wasn't upset with them. I wanted them to know what had happened to me."
Mitchell's response was chilling.
"I remember he just looked back at me and said, 'Oh, I'm not going to rape and kill you yet.' And then we kept going and I remember we got a little further."
"I stopped him again and I said 'Well, don't you realize what you're doing, I mean, if you get caught you'll spend the rest of your life in prison?'"
"And he looked at me again and he said, 'Well, I know exactly what I'm doing and I know what the consequences are. The only difference is I'm not going to get caught.'"
After several hours, they arrived in a mountainside camp where Mitchell's wife, Wanda Barzee, was waiting - another terrifying moment for Elizabeth.
"I was terrified when I got to the camp, but the scariest thing about the camp was this woman," she said. "I remember she came out and she had on robes."
"She had on a headdress and she hugged me. But this hug was not comforting. If hugs could speak this hug would have said, 'You're mine, you will do exactly what I tell you to do.'"
The constant sexual abuse by Mitchell began that day.
"The next nine months, my days consisted of being hungry, of being bored to death because he talked nonstop always about himself," she said.
"I mean, talk about self-absorbed. And then my days consisted of being raped. I mean, not just once, multiple times a day. Every time I thought 'OK, this is rock bottom.'"
"I mean, my pajamas have been taken away from me and I'm being forced to wear this nasty robe, the next thing I knew they'd say, 'We're going to have you go naked now.'"
"Or I had been forced to drink alcohol, which I had never done before. I would throw up and pass out and wake up to find my face and hair crusted to the ground in vomit."
"Every time I thought it couldn't get worse, something always happened."
The Hollywood Gossip
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