Elizabeth Smart: Pornography made my living hell worse
Published at | Updated at
SALT LAKE CITY — Fourteen years after she was kidnapped from her Utah home, Elizabeth Smart is speaking about what her captor did to make her “living hell worse”.
Smart never spoke Brian David Mitchell’s name in the video produced by Fight the New Drug, an anti-pornography organization. She referred to him as “my captor”. She said the night she was kidnapped, still in her pajamas, “was the beginning of what turned into the longest nine months of my life.”
“Every time, when I thought I had hit rock bottom, my captor would find something new to make it worse,” Smart said.
Smart said one of those things was pornography.
“He pulled out this magazine full of hard core pornography, and I remember he would just sit and look at it,” she said. After spending hours looking at the pornography, Smart said he insist they mimic the photographs.
“It just led to him raping me more, more than he already did, which was a lot,” she said.
She stops short of blaming her kidnapping on pornography: “All I know, is pornography made my living hell worse.”
Smart said that’s what has made her an advocate for abused children and an advocate against pornography.
“I witnessed first hand just how damaging it is,” she said.