The man who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart when she was a teen frequently looked at “hardcore pornography” that drove him to repeatedly rape the captive girl, she said in a new video.
Smart, 28, spoke in detail for the first time about the role of pornography in her nine-month captivity in a video produced by Fight the New Drug, an anti-porn advocacy group.
“Pornography made my living hell worse,” she said. “It just led to him raping me more, more than he already did — which was a lot.”
Smart describes how her convicted abductor, Brian David Mitchell, would look at porn and show the graphic images to the then-teenage girl before abusing her.
“He would just sit and look at it and stare at it, and he would just talk about these women, and then when he was done, he would turn and look at me, and he would be like, ‘Now we’re going to do this,'” Smart said.
Mitchell kidnapped Smart in 2002 from her bedroom in Salt Lake City when she was 14 years old, and chained her to a crude campsite in the mountains a few miles from her family’s home.
Mitchell, whom Smart refers to as her “captor” without naming him in the video, repeatedly sexually assaulted the girl. Her family’s frantic quest to find her captured the country’s attention — up until she was found on a Sandy, Utah street in 2003.
Smart, a devout Mormon, is now an advocate for child safety as the director of the Elizabeth Smart Foundation, and has taken a stance against pornography.
Smart goes so far as to suggest that porn drove Mitchell to steal and violate her. “Looking at pornography wasn’t enough for him … He just always wanted more.”
“It led him to finally going out and kidnapping me,” she says. “I witnessed first-hand how damaging it is.”
