Elizabeth Smart shares the story of her kidnapping and how she got her life back together after such a tormenting experience in the book 'My Story'. She has the sort of recognition no one would ever want in the worst of the dreams: In the summer of 2002, at the age of 14, she became one of the nation's most famous kidnap victims when she was abducted from her bedroom in Salt Lake City by ruthless abductors Mitchell and his wife Barzee .

Her kidnapper, Brian David Mitchell a self proclaimed religious prophet and took her to be his second wife in a polygamous forced marriage.

They stayed during the first stage of her nine-month captivity at his remote camp on a mountain near Salt Lake where ruthless abductor Mitchell took her with a knife at her throat.

"knew exactly how to get what he wanted. He was a master at manipulation," Smart tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that Mitchell. Smart was raped by him multiple times a day. Mitchell's wife Wanda Barzee treated Smart like her slave. Smart calls him a "manipulative, antisocial, and narcissistic pedophile".

Eight years after the police rescued her, Mitchell was sentenced to life in prison. Barzee was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

A decade after surviving a horrifying kidnapping, Smart now 25 years old is married, living in Park City, finishing a music degree at Brigham Young University finally leading a normal life.

She is travelling across the country giving speeches and doing advocacy work and she is head of the Elizabeth Smart Foundation to bring awareness to predatory crimes against children.

Her memoir 'My Story' has just been published and for her, the book was another way to help bring nine months of brutality in the limelight to spread awareness

Anderson Cooper talks to Elizabeth Smart which aired on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360." and here are interview highlights:

Her kidnappers used religion to justify their behaviour

"My parents have raised me to believe in a kind and a loving God, and someone who cares about me, who is always there for me, and who would never wish harm or illness or any kind of tragedy upon me. And then here this man and this woman are telling me that actually God has ordained them to do this, and that they have been called to kidnap young girls and that I should be grateful, I should be thankful for what's happening to me," said Elizabeth Smart in an interview with Anderson Cooper

The remote camp where Mitchell brought her

"It's not far from my home, but it is not an easy climb. ... It is extremely difficult to get there; there are so many trees and close-growing bushes, and you are climbing up a very, very steep incline. ... It's not a walk in the park. ...

I wasn't so much afraid of the mountains ... but I was afraid of him, and I felt the further I got away from my home and my family, the less chance I would have of escaping, the less chance I would have of getting away. Although it may seem for those people who have never been there, [it] may not seem like it's that far away, to me, it felt like an eternity just because it was such a long hike. ... And this man, he seemed to have planned for everything. When I got to the camp, I didn't come to just a tent thrown up in the middle of the woods. No, it was very well laid out; it was very well-stocked; it was very well-prepared. He had cables running from one end of the camp to the other, which he chained me up to," continued Smart.

Wanda Barzee's relationships with Smart and with Mitchell

"She felt jealous [of me]; I mean, that's what all of their fights were about, and they fought all the time. But at the same time, that's what she wanted. These weren't just his choices - they were her choices, too. I mean, she knew [that] what she was doing was wrong, but she was still OK with it. So, yes, she was mistreated, but she didn't have to be; that was her choice. For her to sit by and watch what happened to me and not do anything, not say anything, she had passed the point of feeling sympathy or feeling anything for anyone else but herself," said Smart.

People avoided them because of their dirty physical appearance

"That was right after 9/11 had happened. ... It was at a time when, even more so than now, that religion was a very hot topic, and there were so many people from different religions that were being mistreated because of how they looked or because some extremist group did something terrible. It was a hard time. And by looking a certain way, Mitchell found that people were a bit more standoffish, that they didn't want to get too close. It was really just another way of manipulating people around him, getting them to stay away, getting them to want to avoid us. It was not uncommon for us to walk down a street and there'd be people walking towards us, then they'd stop, cross the street, walk around us, and then cross the street again and come back to the same side they were on, because they didn't want to pass us that close on the street," added Smart.

Nine months of terror

"The next nine months, my days consisted of being hungry, of being bored to death because he talked nonstop always about himself," added Smart, adding, "I mean, talk about self-absorbed. And then my days consisted of being raped. I mean, not just once, multiple times a day."

"Every time I thought 'OK, this is rock bottom,' I mean, my pajamas have been taken away from me and I'm being forced to wear this nasty robe, the next thing I knew they'd say, 'We're going to have you go naked now,' or I had been forced to drink alcohol, which I had never done before," she told Cooper. "I would throw up and I would pass out and when I'd wake up I'd find that my face and my hair was just crusted to the ground in vomit. I mean, just every time I thought it couldn't get worse, something always happened," said Smart detailing the despair and torture.

Her rescue
On March 12, 2003 -- police officers confronted them outside a Walmart store in Sandy, Utah.

"I remembered all these cars pulled up and then the policemen jumped out of their cars and they came over and surrounded us and started asking questions," Smart said. "And my two captors, they kept giving the answers and the officers started to ask me questions," said Smart.

"I started giving those answers, because they were standing right next to me. I was scared. I was petrified."

"At first, I was still really scared," continued Smart, adding, "I kept giving the answers that I had been told to give, and then finally one of the officers said, 'Well, if you're Elizabeth Smart, your family misses you so much and they love you so much and they have never given up hope on you the entire nine months you're gone. Don't you want to go back home to your family?' And it was just at that point that I felt like, well, no matter what the consequences are, I don't care, I want to go home."

"So what did you say?" asked Cooper.
"I told them that I was Elizabeth Smart," answered Smart.
"What was that feeling like to say your name? You probably hadn't said your name for a long time," said Cooper.
"It was scary because I didn't know if they thought I had done something wrong or if they had thought I had run away," said Smart, adding, "I didn't know what they were thinking."

Smart gives credit of her survival to the best advice her mother gave

"The morning after I was rescued my mom gave me the best advice I've ever been given. ... My mom said to me, "Elizabeth, what this man has done to you, it's terrible, there aren't words strong enough to describe how wicked and evil he is. He has stolen nine months of your life from you that you will never get back. But the best punishment you could ever give him is to be happy, is to move forward with your life and to do exactly what you want to do. ... The best thing you can do is move forward because by feeling sorry for yourself and holding on to what's happened, that's only allowing him more power and more control over your life, and he doesn't deserve another second. So be happy." ... I'm not perfect at following her advice ... but I do try to follow it every day."

RAD (Resist Aggression Defensively) Kids program, which is supported by the Elizabeth Smart Foundation

"RADKids is based on three simple principles ... The first principle is that you're special and nobody has the right to hurt you. The second principle is because you're special, you don't have the right to hurt anybody else unless - and I say this with a big unless, unless someone is hurting you, and then you can do whatever it takes to get away, whatever it takes to be safe, to escape from whatever situation you're in. Then, by all means, do whatever it takes - bite, scream, kick, yell, whatever. The third principle, which is most important, in my opinion, is that if something happens, it's not your fault and that you can tell ... not only you can but you should tell," stated Smart.

lesson to be learned

"To have so many people speculate on what happened and what I must be going through, and just so many lies being told," "It was hard. I didn't like it. I don't think anybody likes having people guess at what they're going through. Privacy is so sacred and any time a victim is returned, a survivor is found and rescued, privacy is one of the greatest gifts we can give them because if they decide to share, that's up to them and they will come forward."

Never judge a victim

"You can never judge a child or a victim of any crime on what they should have done, because you weren't there and you don't know and you have no right just to sit in your armchair at home and say 'Well, why didn't you escape? Why didn't you do this?' I mean, they just don't know," she said. "That's wrong. And I was 14. I was a little girl. And I had seen this man successfully kidnap me, he successfully chained me up, he successfully raped me, he successfully did all of these things. What was to say that he wouldn't kill me when he'd make those threats to me? What was to say that he wouldn't kill my family?"

Hear the interview, or listen to a clip from the audiobook (which she reads herself) here.

Elizabeth Smart shares '100%' of her kidnapping terror in book

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