After her headline-grabbing rescue in March 2003, Elizabeth Smart became known as the brave girl who survived a nightmare of kidnapping.

Nine months earlier, on June 5, 2002, Smart, then 14, was taken from her bedroom in her Salt Lake City home in the middle of the night. Smart, the second of six children in a devout Mormon family, was held against his will by 48-year-old pedophile Brian David Mitchell, a self-proclaimed prophet known as Immanuel, and his wife, 56-year-old Wanda Barzee, also known as Hepzibah.

While Smart was incarcerated, Mitchell raped her up to four times a day, sometimes causing her to bleed, walking her like a dog with a cable around her neck, and forcing her to drink alcohol to weaken her defenses. She never knew that steely courage kept her alive.

author of Two bestselling books, Smart, 38 years old, now sexual assault victim advocate and families of missing childrenthe story of her terrifying ordeal has been told before and depicted in a television movie.

But in a new Netflix documentary, Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart, In the January 21st premiere, she and her family reveal in lavish detail the trauma she endured and the guilt and shame she carried as a result.

“After I was rescued, I felt so ashamed of what had happened to me,” she says. people. “Even though I completely knew in my head that it wasn’t my fault, I couldn’t feel the same way in my heart. I felt like I was going to be judged for it. I ended up feeling very alone and isolated.”

Over time, as Smart began working with survivors of sexual assault through her nonprofit organization, the Elizabeth Smart Foundation, she met countless others who shared her sense of shame.

“I want survivors to know they are not alone. There are many of us. And I want those who have never experienced this to experience the depths of fear of what it is like to be forced to do something you would never do. There is a purpose in sharing my story.”

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On the night of June 5, 2002, Smart couldn’t wait to go to bed. It was an exhausting day for the eighth-grader, who lives in Salt Lake City’s Federal Heights neighborhood, with year-end activities at her middle school and preparations for the next day’s graduation ceremony. Shortly before midnight, after reading the following page: Ella Enchanted Mr. Smart fell asleep in the bed he shared with his sister, Mary Katherine, who was 9 years old at the time.

The next thing she remembered was a bearded stranger standing over her, holding a knife to her neck. Threatening to kill her if she screamed, he led Smart out the back door and down a steep path into the mountains.

Terrified, Smart asked if he intended to rape and kill her. He answered, “Not yet.”

A few hours later, they arrived at a desolate camp, where she met Virgie. After washing Smart’s feet, Virgie removed Smart’s pajamas and tried to put him in a loose-fitting robe. “She said, ‘If I can’t change it, [Mitchell] I’m going to come in here and rip my clothes off,’” Smart recalled.

Mitchell then entered the tent and raped her for the first time in his countless assaults. “I yelled, ‘No!’ and he said, ‘If you scream like that again, I’ll kill you,'” she said.

In trying to hold him back, “I thought if I rolled onto my stomach he wouldn’t be able to rape me. And of course that wasn’t true.” During the assault, “I begged him to stop.”

Raised in a religion that forbade sex outside of marriage, she couldn’t think of anything but how worthless she was and how painful it was. “I could see blood running down my thigh,” she says. “Then I passed out.”

Over the next few months, Mitchell raped Smart regularly. For Smart, who had heard about the sexual activity from friends but had never discussed it with her parents or teachers, the repeated assaults left her feeling “irreparably ruined” and unworthy of love. “I thought, ‘Would I rather die than be an outcast?'” ”

She was also worried about pregnancy. “My period started while I was in captivity, so it was definitely scary.”

Mitchell found ways to humiliate Smart every day, and Virgie, who was angry at him for having too much sex with Smart, encouraged him. “When he took me to the water fountain, he held the cable and basically walked me around like a dog,” Smart says. “I was forced to drink many beers until I finally threw up, and he left me face down in my own vomit.”

Outwardly, Smart acted obediently, following the instructions of his captors while always looking for a way to escape. “It was the best way to survive,” she says.

Finally, a concerned citizen emerges who has seen the missing girl and her captor. America’s most wanted criminal-On March 12, 2003, the group was discovered on the streets of Sandy, Utah.

The officer pulled her aside and asked if she was Elizabeth Smart. Her response, “I told you so,” ended months of torture and led to her being reunited with her family.

“It was a very happy day,” she says. “I knew it was because of my family that I wanted to survive.”

After his release, Smart sought healing through his faith and time with his family. Her parents, Ed, 70, and Lois Smart, 68, threw a party to celebrate her 15th birthday, which passed while she was incarcerated.

She entered high school the following fall and graduated from Brigham Young University.

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It was while working as a Mormon missionary in Paris that she met her future husband, fellow Scottish missionary Matthew Gilmore.

After Smart and Gilmore, 36, became parents in 2015, she gained a new perspective on what her mother and father went through during the abduction.

“I remember coming home for the first time and thinking, ‘What I went through was the worst thing that ever happened. No one hurt you. No one took food or water from you or chained you up. You all had each other, and I had no one,'” she says.

“Right now, watching their pain and emotions unfold, [in the new documentary]I know that if they could have gone through it themselves to protect me, they would have. That’s exactly what parents do. ”