Elizabeth Smart is urging women to put personal safety ahead of politeness.
The kidnapping survivor, 38, delivered the warning across multiple interviews tied to the launch of her new podcast, “The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart,” where she sits down with fellow survivors to discuss their ordeals and paths toward healing. Smart said that she finds these conversations deeply moving on a personal level.
“I actually find these stories incredibly inspiring and help me to continue to just try to reach for the life that I want to live,” she said.
Smart continued: “These people, they are trusting me with their stories. They are sharing the worst moments of their life. They’re making themselves vulnerable. And that can be a really scary thing.”
The Utah mother of three added that knowing each guest survived provides its own power: “But right off the bat, you know they survived what happened to them. You know they got away, which I think is just a testament to their strength, to their resiliency.”
Her advocacy work now extends directly to her own household. Smart said she has made it her mission to teach her daughters how to spot potentially dangerous situations and trust their instincts, drawing from hard-won knowledge about what she called “pretty terrible people in the world.”
The core message she wants women to absorb is blunt and unapologetic.
“Prioritize your safety over other people’s emotions,” Smart said.
She leaned on a stark animal analogy to make her point: “There’s this saying, you will never see a gazelle getting into an elevator with a lion. But as women, we typically stifle our intuitions.”
Smart traced the problem to social conditioning that starts early. Women frequently override warning signs, she noted, out of fear of causing offense.
“And even if there is someone questionable or that makes you feel uncomfortable, we think, ‘Oh, I don’t wanna offend them,'” she explained.
But Smart dismissed that impulse as misplaced.
“I think definitely for me, I was raised to be polite and respectful and courteous, and I think that’s great, but I would say that the idea that it was more important to be nice than it was to listen to my gut feeling was wrong,” the 38-year-old said.
She offered concrete words she hopes her daughters would use: “In reality, I would hope that my daughters, if they felt something was wrong, would just say, nope, I’m waiting for the next elevator.”
Smart’s authority on the subject comes from one of the most notorious abductions in modern American history. In June 2002, Brian David Mitchell broke into her family home in Utah and took her at knifepoint; Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee, held the then-14-year-old captive for nine months. A member of the public spotted Smart in Sandy, Utah, recognized her, and alerted authorities. She was rescued at age 15, and both Mitchell and Barzee were arrested.
In the years since, Smart has built a public platform as an advocate for survivors of sexual violence and abuse. Her story was revisited earlier this year in the Netflix documentary “Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart,” which detailed both her kidnapping and rescue.
The podcast represents her latest effort to channel that experience into broader conversation.