Elizabeth Smart knew she would have to face the tough questions one day.

What she hadn’t expected was that they would begin when her eldest daughter Chloé was just three years old.

It was a day when she was preparing to give a victim impact statement to try to stop one of her abusers from walking free from prison.

‘She was asking where I was going and why I was dressed up,’ Smart tells the Daily Mail.

‘It led to me telling her: ‘Not everybody in the world is a good person. There are bad people that exist, and so I’m going to try to make sure some bad people stay in prison.’ That kind of started it – and it’s just grown since then.’

Now, despite their young ages, all three of Smart’s children – Chloé, now 10, James, eight, and Olivia, six – know their mom’s story.

‘To some degree, they all know I was kidnapped,’ she says. ‘I have yet to get into the nitty-gritty details with any of them, but my oldest knows the most and my youngest knows the least.’

It’s a story that made Smart a household name all across the country at the age of 14 when she was kidnapped from her home in the dead of the night by pedophile and religious fanatic Brian David Mitchell in the summer of 2002.

While Smart’s face was plastered across missing posters and TV screens, Mitchell and his wife Wanda Barzee held her captive – first in the mountains around Salt Lake City, Utah, and then in California.

They physically and mentally tortured her, raped her daily and held her starving and dehydrated while pushing their twisted claims that Mitchell was a prophet destined to take several young girls as his wives.

After nine horrific months, Smart was finally rescued and reunited with her family in a moment that drew a collective sigh of relief from families and parents nationwide.

Now, as a parent herself, Smart is candid about how her experience has left her wrestling with how to balance protecting her children and giving them the independence to explore the world.

‘I’m always thinking: Are they safe? Who are they with? Who knows where they’re at? Those kinds of things go through my mind regularly… My kids probably don’t always appreciate it, even though I feel like saying: ‘I’ve let you leave the house. Do you know how hard that is for me?’ she says.

‘I try really hard not to be too overboard or crazy but it’s not easy. I’m still looking for the right balance.

‘I have a lot of conversations with them about safety. And no, I will not let any of them have sleepovers. That is just something my family does not do.’

Inviting cameras inside the family’s home in Park City, Utah, is also off-limits.

Instead, Smart meets the Daily Mail in a hotel in downtown Salt Lake City, four miles from the quiet Federal Heights neighborhood where she grew up and where – aged just four years older than her eldest daughter is now – the nightmare began back in the summer of 2002.

Composed and articulate, Smart smiles as she thinks back on her happy childhood up until that point.  

As one of six children to Ed and Lois, the Mormon household was tight-knit and there was always something going on.

June 4, 2002, was no different with school assemblies, family dinner, cross-country running and nighttime prayers.

When she clambered into the bed she shared with her nine-year-old sister Mary Katherine that night, Smart read a book until they both fell asleep.

‘The next thing I remember, I was waking up to a man holding a knife to my neck, telling me to get up and go with him,’ she says.

At knifepoint, Mitchell forced the 14-year-old from her home and led her up the nearby mountains to a makeshift, hidden camp where his accomplice was waiting.

While they climbed, Smart realized she had met her kidnapper before.

Eight months earlier, Smart’s family had seen Mitchell panhandling in downtown Salt Lake City. Lois had given him $5 and some work at their home.

At that moment, Smart says she had felt sorry for this man who seemed down on his luck.

Mitchell later told her that, at the very same moment she and her family helped him, he had picked her as his chosen victim and began plotting her abduction.

‘You have to be a monster to do that,’ Smart says of this realization. ‘I don’t know when or where he lost his humanity, but he clearly did.’

When they got to the campsite, Barzee led Smart inside a tent and forced her to take off her pajamas and put on a robe.

Mitchell then told her she was now his wife.

That was the first time he raped her.

Two decades later, Smart can still remember the physical and emotional pain of that moment.

‘I felt like my life was ruined, like I was ruined and had become undeserving, unwanted, unlovable,’ she says.

After that first day, rape and torture was a daily reality.

There was no let-up from the abuse as the weeks and months passed and Christmas, Thanksgiving and Smart’s 15th birthday came and went.

‘Every day was terrible. There was never a fun or easy day. Every day was another day where I just focused on survival and my birthday wasn’t any different,’ she says.

‘My 15th birthday is definitely not my best birthday… He brought me back a pack of gum.’

Throughout her nine-month ordeal, there were many missed opportunities – close encounters with law enforcement and sliding door moments with concerned strangers – to rescue Smart from her abusers.

There was the moment a police car drove past Mitchell and Smart in her neighborhood moments after he snatched her from her bed and began leading her up the mountainside.

There was the moment she heard a man shouting her name close to the campsite during a search. There was the moment a rescue helicopter hovered right above the tent.

There was the time Mitchell spent several days in jail down in the city while Smart was left chained to a tree.

There were times when Smart was taken out in public hidden under a veil.

And there was the time a police officer approached the trio inside Salt Lake City’s public library – before Mitchell convinced him she wasn’t the missing girl and the officer let them go.

To this day, Smart reveals she is constantly asked why she didn’t scream or run away in those moments.

But such questions show a lack of understanding for the power abusers hold over their victims, she feels.

‘People from the outside looking in might think it doesn’t make sense. But on the inside, you’re doing whatever you have to do to survive,’ she says.

‘We see it all the time in domestic abuse and human-trafficking cases where people say: ‘Why didn’t you just get in your car and leave?’ It is never that simple.’

Smart hesitates and considers her answer when asked if she feels she was failed by the adults who didn’t intervene and save her during those close encounters.

‘That’s a good question… No, I don’t. I don’t think people failed me,’ she says, adding: ‘I think there were people who acted.’

Whether or not she could have been saved earlier and spared from months of abuse is something she refuses to dwell on.

‘It’s so hard to say looking back because you just never know what the outcome would have been. Do I wish I had been rescued sooner? Of course, without a question… But I don’t know if that’s an answerable question,’ she says.

In the end it was a teenage Smart who orchestrated her own rescue.

During the winter months, Mitchell and Barzee had taken her more than 750 miles away to California to escape the harsh Utah weather.

When Mitchell decided they needed to move on again, Smart saw an opportunity to return to Utah – bringing her closer to her family and the city where she believed she had the greatest chance of being recognized and saved from the clutches of her abusers.

She convinced Mitchell God wanted them to hitchhike to Salt Lake City.

Her plan worked. On March 12, 2003 – the day they arrived in Utah – people spotted Smart, Barzee and Mitchell and called the police.

This time, she was finally rescued.

Mitchell was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping and transporting a minor for sex in a 2010 trial where a calm, collected Smart testified about his abuse.

Barzee pleaded guilty to kidnapping and unlawful transportation of a minor in exchange for a 15-year sentence.

She was released five years early in September 2018 after a parole board said it miscalculated the time she should serve.

On her release, Smart warned that Barzee still posed a danger to society.

So it came as no surprise to her when Barzee was arrested this May and charged with violating her sex offender status.

‘I think, if anything, I was surprised it took this long,’ Smart says of Barzee’s arrest.

The 79-year-old was caught visiting two public parks in Utah – something she is banned from doing as a sex offender.

In a disturbing parallel to her abuse of Smart, Barzee told police she had been ‘commanded to by the Lord’.

Using religion to justify actions is ‘the biggest red flag’ to Smart.

‘If you tell me God commanded you to do something, you will always stay at arm’s length with me,’ she says.

During our in-depth sit-down, Smart’s calm, collected composure wavers only once – when asked if she has a message for her abusers now.

‘I have nothing to say to them,’ she says abruptly. ‘They have no part in my life anymore.’

Instead, she has found her own version of forgiveness.

‘I think everybody has a different definition of forgiveness. For me, forgiveness is self-love,’ she says.

‘It’s loving myself enough to not carry the weight of the past around with me in my everyday life.’

It’s a place that Smart admits has taken her time to get to.

When she was first rescued, Smart says she believed she had no lasting trauma.

But, as an adult, she now sees a teenager who was terrified of being left alone with men and who would eat any food given to her because she knew what it had meant to starve.

Smart says she has now learned there is ‘no one-size-fits-all’ to healing.

To this day, she has never undergone professional counseling and doesn’t think she has any triggers that take her back to her nine-month hell.

For her, returning to the campsite where she was held captive was a positive experience. ‘It felt like I was exposing a dirty secret, like nobody would ever be hurt there again,’ she says.

But, despite her stoic strength, Smart admits she does have bad days.

‘I’m human,’ she says. ‘There comes a time where I just don’t have the emotional bandwidth to keep going on that specific day. For me, I have to know my limits.’

On days where she has shared her story or worked with survivors, this means ‘turning on something light and fluffy on TV before bed’.

‘It’s got to the point where I don’t watch true crime,’ she says, adding that she also questions the growing interest in the subject.

‘I understand it’s fascinating and I think there’s an ethical way of doing true crime. But also there’s another side of me that thinks: what does it say about our world when people go to sleep on other people’s trauma?’

For Smart, her abduction pushed her to try ‘to experience life more and be the person I want to be’.

She went to college at Brigham Young University and studied abroad in Paris, where she met her husband Matthew Gilmour during a Latter-Day Saints mission.

In 2011, she launched her nonprofit the Elizabeth Smart Foundation, which fights to end sexual violence and supports survivors.

Part of the foundation’s work includes Smart Defense – a trauma-informed self-defense program for female students on college campuses. The nonprofit also offers consent courses, educating people about the differences between sexual violence and consensual intimacy.

‘But at the end of the day, the only way we will ever 100 per cent stop sexual violence from happening is for perpetrators to stop perpetrating,’ she says.

A lot has changed in the 23 years since her abduction.

When it comes to the dangers facing children and women, Smart feels some change has been for the better, but also some for the worse.

‘We’ve made progress on the awareness front. But I think social media and technology has skyrocketed who can access our children,’ she says.

It has also made online sexual abuse and pornography more prevalent, she says.

‘I feel it would have made my experience worse if [Mitchell] recorded it and put it online,’ she says.

‘[I would be] going out into the world, never knowing if people were smiling at me because they were being friendly or because they knew what I looked like while being raped.’

Smart says it’s going to take ‘everybody’ to fight to end sexual violence.

‘Abduction, trafficking, sexual violence, abuse is such a massive problem all around the world,’ she says.

‘Nobody is going to single-handedly take it down. We need everybody.’

Now, 23 years since her abduction and nine-month hell, life is good for Elizabeth Smart.

‘I’m happily married. I have children. And I feel so passionate about advocacy, educating, trying to raise awareness and making a difference in this area,’ she says.

‘Life is great.’