When Elizabeth Smart was picked up by her driver at Harry Reid International Airport, she was asked why she was in Las Vegas. She explained she was speaking at the Global Gaming Expo (G2E). Smart said that not so long ago, she was kidnapped, held captive, and survived.
Her driver replied, “You seem kind of young for that.”
Smart wanted to scream, “You seem kind of judgmental.”
“I feel like I’m lots of things,” Smart told Meghan Speranzo during “Identity Beyond the Headlines: Power, Voice, and Resilience at Work” during G2E at the Venetian Expo Center in Las Vegas. “I’m not just the survivor. I’m not just the advocate. I’m a mom. I’m a friend. I’m a sister. I’m a bodybuilder.”
When Smart was 14 in 2002, she was kidnapped and held hostage for almost nine months by Brian David Mitchell. After a grueling, yearslong, court case, she has become a voice for organizations combatting child abduction, sexual abuse, human trafficking, and recovery programs.
But Smart considers herself to be a normal person.
“There’s Elizabeth Smart and then there’s me, because Elizabeth Smart would never do this,” she told Speranzo. “She should always do the right thing. She should always take the high road. She should always be diplomatic and non-offensive.
“But then there’s the other side of me, with my inner voice that doesn’t agree with all of that. That sometimes is maybe a little bit mean. It doesn’t come out of my mouth, but I occasionally have those thoughts. I just think that when you see people in the headlines, you build them up so much in your mind, you have this perception of who they are, what they are, and all of a sudden the credibility they’ve built just disappears, or you have a sudden change of opinion.”
The court case against Smart’s captors (Mitchell and his family) was eventually moved to federal court to avoid the statute of limitation’s lapsing. She spent what seemed to an inordinate amount of time being questioned and cross-examined.
“I remember when I finished, sitting down back in the pews in the courtroom and thinking, anyone who wanted to know what happened could go look up the court transcripts. Anyone could read what happened,” Smart said. “But those are like bullet points. That’s not the whole story. That’s not everything. That’s doesn’t talk about what I felt going into this situation. How what happened after it.
“I didn’t talk about how it changed me, how it hurt me – it doesn’t cover any of that.”
Smart wrote about that missing narrative in her first book, My Story. She also penned Where There’s Hope, a glimpse into her healing process, and the just-published Detours: Hope & Growth After Life’s Hardest Turns, a book that empowers readers to navigate life’s detours, embrace resilience, and find healing and purpose after adversity.
When Smart was rescued, she thought she could go back to who she was before she was kidnapped.
“It took a while for me to realize that as much as you may want to, you can never go back,” Smart says. “You can only go forward, kind of like birth and delivery. You can’t shut the baby back up in you. It’s a one-way street. I literally had that thought with my first child.
“But I’ve come to realize that I just had to come to peace with this new normal. That was hard, and then trying to move forward with it and having people watching me, even waiting for me to not fail, but maybe fall apart.”
When Smart’s husband asked her father for permission to marry her, he replied, “Are you sure you can handle her? Because trauma has a way of sometimes creeping back in. … Are you willing to stick with her through thick and thin?”
“I was like, ‘Dad, really? Like you had to do that?’” Smart said. “Even my own parents, to some extent, had expectations, and maybe they still do.
“I don’t know, but I just think that for me, like my defining moments are kind of like what (Speranzo) said. They’re the little decisions along the way and recognizing that you’ve got one shot at life. You might as well live the life you want to live.”
