Elizabeth Smart Testimony Transcript: I Was Raped "Three or Four" Times a Day
NEW YORK (CBS/AP) Elizabeth Smart was held at the mercy of a sex-crazed man and his jealous wife, and was raped many times a day, according to a transcript of her testimony in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City published by the Salt Lake City Tribune
Smart, now 21, was kidnapped at knife-point when she was 14 in 2003, and held captive in the Salt Lake City, UT., mountains and San Diego for nine months.
Her alleged captor was Brian David Mitchell.
When she was first brought to the Utah settlement, she was kept tied to trees by a series of cables that were "bolted" to her leg, according to the Tribune transcript.
Mitchell raped Smart "three or four times" a day, she said, according to the paper.
The rapes stopped for a moment when Wanda Barzee, Mitchell's wife who is also under arrest for related crimes, would get angry at Mitchell and demand attention. "She said, 'All you do is lust after her,'" Smart said in the Tribune's report.
Despite these pauses, "There wasn't an actual 24-hour period he wasn't able to rape" Smart, she said in the paper's transcript.
Smart tried to deny Mitchell's urges and persuade him to let her go, but she was unable to stop her attacker.
"One time … I bit him. He said that if I did that he would never have sex with me again and I would be the most miserable woman in the world. He said that, but it didn't stop him," she testified, according to the Tribune.
Mitchell also gave Smart drugs and alcohol to subdue her, according to the paper's transcript.
"There was a time when he gave me too much to drink, which I ended up vomiting all over myself. He let me lie face down in my vomit for the entire night until I woke up the next day," the paper reports she said.
Mitchell's response to Smart's condition was "He said that I was showing my true state," she said, according to the Tribune's transcript.
Mitchell is charged in state court with kidnapping and sexual assault. Last year, he was indicted on federal charges of kidnapping and transporting a minor across state lines. In both the state and federal cases, experts have split over Mitchell's competency.
Mitchell's lawyers maintain he is incompetent and suggested that evidence of his delusions can be found in his religious rambling and writings, including a 27-page manifesto he called "The Book of Emmanuel David Isaiah."
Smart said he read from the book repeatedly during her captivity, often sang hymns and laced his conversations with religious language. Throughout her captivity, Smart was forced to wear a white, ankle-length robe, a head scarf and two veils across her face.