In shocking courtroom testimony, kidnap victim Elizabeth Smart revealed a secret she’d kept hidden from her family for seven years – her captor turned her into a drug user!
Elizabeth testified that her abductor, religious fanatic Brian David Mitchell, forced her to take drugs and drink alcohol to lower her resistance to his sexual demands.
Her disturbing testimony stunned her father.
"I had no idea what she’d gone through out there," Ed Smart said, his voice shaking. "To hear what a predator [Mitchell] was – constantly – it was horrible to hear how he abused her."
Now 21 and strikingly beautiful, Elizabeth bravely revealed she once got physically ill after Mitchell made her drink too much alcohol. Then he made her lay face-down in her vomit for the entire night.
And in an almost unimaginable nightmare, the slender blonde calmly told how Mitchell raped her three or four times a day during the nine months she was held captive.
"Mitchell thought that turning Elizabeth into a druggie would make it easier for him to rape her," divulged a friend.
"It’s bad enough she has to deal with the mental anguish of being repeatedly raped, but she also had the after-effects of being exposed to drugs and liquor at age 14."
Mitchell wanted Elizabeth to become an addict so she would have to depend on him for drugs and alcohol, an expert tells The ENQUIRER.
"By plying Elizabeth with these potentially addictive substances at an extremely vulnerable time in her life, Mitchell would have made her come to depend on him as a way to numb the physical and emotional torture he inflicted," Dr. Norman S. Miller, professor of psychiatry and medicine at Michigan State University told The ENQUIRER.
"He was much like a pimp supplying his prostitutes with drugs in order to get them hooked on the substances, and consequently on him."
During the court hearing on Oct. 1, Elizabeth described in chilling detail how Mitchell, 56, abducted her from her bedroom in Federal Heights, Utah, at knifepoint on June 5, 2002. He led her to a remote campsite where his wife Wanda Eileen Barzee prepared her for a makeshift wedding ceremony. She was kept tethered to a tree by a cable, she testified. Mitchell and Barzee were arrested in March 2003 after they were spotted with Elizabeth in Sandy, Utah.
"Elizabeth has adjusted well in the past seven years, largely due to the support of her close-knit family. And despite all that she endured during her captivity, she’s refused to play the part of a victim," said the friend.
"She very much wants to settle down and raise a family of her own, and Elizabeth felt that she needed to publicly speak out against her abductor in order to get on with her life.
"Even her own family didn’t know the full extent of the horror she faced. Elizabeth and those close to her think that her courageous day in court will allow her to get past her ordeal and face the future."
