Joan Swirsky
Monday, March 11, 2004

Her first reaction was to deny that the police had identified her correctly, asserting that they must think that she’s “the girl who ran away” and asking first, not about her parents or siblings but about what would happen to the people with whom she had spent the better part of a year – apparently none the worse for her experience, as evidenced by her significant weight gain and calm composure.

After urging Elizabeth to perform a harp recital upon her return and posing for smiley pictures with her in front of hundreds of cameras, Ed and Lois Smart apparently decided that spending time with their long lost daughter and their other children was not as important as embarking immediately on weeks of 24/7 media interviews and signing pricey contracts for “the book” and “the movie.”

But money was never the issue, Ed Smart reassured the American public. It was just that he and Lois “felt” ready to talk about their own and Elizabeth’s “trauma” to the likes of objective TV personalities like Katie Couric et al.

Couric was piercing, suggesting to the Smarts that their ordeal “really must have been frustrating.” Ed Smart seemed to turn the question over and over in his mind, searching perhaps for the right words.

His response: “Yes, frustrating.”

Not agonizing, a test of faith, devastating, terrifying or depressing, but frustrating, the same term most of us apply to being stuck in traffic or trying to fix a computer glitch. Nevertheless, when his beautiful daughter vanished into thin air and he heard nothing from her for the better part of a year, it was “frustrating” to Ed Smart.

Then Smart told Couric that his own and his wife’s faith in God proved that God was watching out for them – an amazingly egocentric, insensitive and ignorant statement, given that parents who have lost babies to eye cancer, women and children who have lost husbands and fathers to war and families who lost heroes and victims to the September 11th terrorist attack on our nation certainly believed and continue to believe in God as fervently as the Smarts do. Was Mr. Smart suggesting that God loves his family more than He loves other families?

Couric then strolled through the woods with Elizabeth herself. “And how did this experience change you?” she asked. “I’m still the same person,” said Elizabeth, appearing vibrant, serene and the very definition of intact.

Um. What about The Stockholm Syndrome and the lifelong aftereffects that psychobabble experts predicted she would experience forever? If you asked them today, they’d say the same things! After all, that’s what their bogus educations taught them and what their livelihoods depend on – no matter the accuracy!

Then we learned that Elizabeth couldn’t understand why the producer of the made-for-TV movie didn’t choose her to play herself! To re-enact the supposedly traumatic event, in graphic detail, that the entire world was led to believe would render her psyche irrevocably maimed for life.

An article from the Associated Press this month quoted Ed Smart as saying that Elizabeth – now a high school sophomore – is a “normal, independent 16-year-old with boyfriends, a curfew, a messy room and an overused cell phone.” The abduction, he said, is “the farthest thing from her mind.”

So much for sob sisters like Couric and dozens if not hundreds of her ilk who specialize in the culture of victimization and refuse to consider alternatives to their poor-me theories or to focus instead on the immense capacity of the human spirit to triumph over adversity.

But adversity, in Elizabeth’s case, is still a question. Will the “normal, independent 16-year-old” Ed Smart described a few days ago testify that her “abductors” did her harm? Or will she reveal, as she did when she was found, that she cares very much about the welfare of her fellow wanderers, that in fact she in some way – religiously, spiritually, in terms of adventure – benefited by her odyssey?

In January, Elizabeth’s female “abductor,” Wanda Barzee, was found incompetent to stand trial. A competency hearing of her male “abductor,” David Mitchell, has been delayed until May. They are charged with aggravated kidnapping, aggravated sexual assault and aggravated burglary.

Their trials are unlikely to occur for two years or more. Prosecutors will, as they should, punish Mitchell for either abducting or luring Elizabeth away from her home. In either case, she was still a minor and his acts were still criminal.

I say luring, however, because we’ll probably never know if she left voluntarily and found her experience meaningful or exciting unless the future finds her a writer of true-life revelations.

Maybe then we’ll also learn why, given numerous opportunities, this confident, clear-eyed girl didn’t fly or flee into the arms of any number of people, including the police, who would have offered her protection and return home. Or how her sister, Mary Katherine, underwent a near-miraculous transition from total amnesia about the night of the abduction to an exquisitely detailed description of Mitchell nine months later.

Clearly, the last chapter in the Elizabeth Smart story has not been written.

Joan Swirsky is a New York-based journalist and author who can be e-mailed at joansharon@aol.com.

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