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"  I&amp;#039;ve been in courtrooms before, during three trials of the poly\u00ADgamous radicals led by the infamous Ervil LeBaron who \u00ADmurdered my father, Rulon Allred. They saw him as an obstruction to LeBaron&amp;#039;s ambition of establishing himself as &amp;quot;the One Mighty and Strong,&amp;quot; who, according to early Mormon prophecy, will come to set God&amp;#039;s house in order. One of those trials took place in the same Salt Lake City federal courthouse where I now sit. LeBaron died 30 years ago in Utah&amp;#039;s state prison, but for the past two weeks, I&amp;#039;ve come to watch another tormentor, Brian David Mitchell, cross the courtroom in a gray cloud of piety. Mitchell keeps his eyes closed as he passes his victim, the elegant and courageous Elizabeth Smart, whom he abducted when she was 14 from the bedroom of her family&amp;#039;s upscale Salt Lake City home in the wee hours of the morning on June 5, 2002, &amp;quot;married&amp;quot; in a ceremony witnessed only by his actual wife, Wanda Barzee, and then abused in every imaginable way. The trio led an itinerant life until Mitchell and Barzee were apprehended in Sandy, Utah, in March 2003, and Smart was returned to her family. On this day in mid-November 2010, after years of justice denied, the prosecution has rested, and Smart, who has just turned 23, \u00ADarrives dressed in a red jacket, black jeans, and red heels\u2014Paris chic, though I&amp;#039;m sure she wears a skirt of demure length when she steps out to do her Mormon missionary work in the City of Light. I study Smart&amp;#039;s ferociously secured chignon, wondering if those jabbed-in hairpins add to or distract from the agonies of revisiting her nine-month ordeal under Mitchell&amp;#039;s thumb. I know something about being controlled by polygamous patriarchs. As the twenty-eighth of my father&amp;#039;s 48 children, my birth was a well-kept secret. To protect my family, I learned to lie about our way of life as soon as I learned to talk. My father had seven wives, but unlike Mitchell, he didn&amp;#039;t need to kidnap his women; they asked to come into the family. The leader of a polygamous Mormon sect of about 10,000 members (later known as the Apos\u00ADtolic United Brethren), my father served as a physician for most of the polygamous community in Utah. In our plural-marriage way of life, where community solidarity mattered much more than any individual&amp;#039;s happiness, it was easy to be overlooked and tempting to sacrifice identity for approval. An obedient child was highly \u00ADvalued, but I was sassy and outspoken and fairly sure my father would continue to love me anyway. Later, my voice would be \u00ADcrucial in calling to account those who killed my father. I also know about speaking out against a conspiracy of silence, about reliving horror in the service of truth. Like Smart, I&amp;#039;ve chosen to reveal sensitive and closely held secrets for the sake of justice and understanding. When my first memoir was \u00ADpublished, as when I testified against my father&amp;#039;s murderer, the exposure \u00ADnearly did me in. But when those who assassinated my father were tried\u2014some convicted, some acquitted\u2014I leaned across the bar from the front row of the gallery, as Elizabeth has been \u00ADdoing here, whispering suggestions to prosecutors and attending to \u00ADevery word as though my life depended on it. Rebecca Woodridge, Mitchell&amp;#039;s former stepdaughter, sits behind the defendant&amp;#039;s table. She has said Mitchell molested her from age 7 to 11 yet claims to have forgiven him. I believe I can see his marks on her in the form of her heavily kohled eyes, long platinum extensions, and tiny skirt. She makes angry scrawls on her notepad in reaction to the prosecution&amp;#039;s case (&amp;quot;Lois lied!&amp;quot;). Mitchell&amp;#039;s father is called to the witness stand. He inches past me, wrestling his walker forward, jaw clenched, and struggles into the witness chair, but his frailty vanishes as his stentorian voice fills the courtroom. It&amp;#039;s a voice I&amp;#039;m familiar with: that of a man who believes he&amp;#039;s right about everything. I grew up among this kind of man, who would rather die than be wrong. Shirl Mitchell&amp;#039;s body is bent with age, but his attitude bears the iron will of a younger self, a man who once punished Brian by dropping him off at the far reaches of Salt Lake City to find his way home. He&amp;#039;s Peck&amp;#039;s bad boy, the older Mitchell says of his son on trial, making onlookers wonder why the defense called him to testify. &amp;quot;I was deer-hunting when he was born. I believe [my wife] may have resented me for that.... [My son] would act out.&amp;quot; Then the old man drops a bomb on me: &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know why they were so angry. He had an excellent obstetrician, Dr. Rulon Allred.&amp;quot; Shock rivets me to the bench. A bitter taste fills my mouth at the thought of the kind, God-fearing man who raised me delivering this kidnapper, rapist, pedophile, creep into the world, just as he&amp;#039;d delivered me. I flush with a sense of complicity. I&amp;#039;m aware that my presence at this trial makes people on both sides of the poly\u00ADgamy issue squirm, because my life spans a cultural schism: Some fundamentalists think I betrayed them by writing my 1984 book, In My Father&amp;#039;s House, the first major insider account of modern polygamy. And many mainstream Mormons wish I&amp;#039;d just hush up and let bygones be bygones; after all, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) repudiated poly\u00ADgamy in 1890. Whether I speak up or not, the skeletons in our closets clatter every time the national news gets a whiff of Utah&amp;#039;s peculiar recurrent crime\u2014poly\u00ADgamy underscored by violence. Joseph Smith, who founded the Mormon faith in April 1830, introduced the principle of plural marriage when the church was fledgling. For more than a year, the second LDS Church President, Brigham Young, led our people across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, settling in 1847 in the barren Salt Lake desert, which they made &amp;quot;blossom as a rose&amp;quot; through hard work and the huge families created by polygamy. Decades later, in response to legal and political pressure, the LDS Church abolished the practice of plural marriage. My grandfathers hid from U.S. marshals and Pinkerton detectives, moving to Idaho, then Wyoming, then Mexico to live out their belief in the Principle. After much soul-searching, my father decided to continue the practice, and in doing so lost his membership in the LDS Church. He hid us in the basements and attics of friends&amp;#039; homes. He fled in my uncle&amp;#039;s manure truck to avoid arrest. We crossed state lines and national borders to stay together.  The need to run and hide lives in my blood, so it&amp;#039;s hard to stay here on this bench. To keep myself grounded, I look at Smart&amp;#039;s blond hair\u2014the same shade as mine when I was younger. Until Shirl&amp;#039;s disclosure, I hadn&amp;#039;t realized how related were the forces that shaped our lives. Not that I hadn&amp;#039;t felt an affinity to her: \u00ADDuring her disappearance, when her likeness dominated TV screens and community bulletin boards, she \u00ADbecame the lost little sister, the vanished friend, the stolen daughter my heart ached for in the \u00ADmiddle of the night. When she was found, her return felt like a \u00ADpersonal reclamation. I wonder when the odds turned in Smart&amp;#039;s favor. Which decision kept her alive and brought her home? How did she survive near-daily rape, exposure to the elements, the scourging of her personality? In listening to Smart&amp;#039;s testimony, I realize that, at some point, she simply made the decision to survive. Early in her captivity, Smart told the jury, she reflected in a thrall of despondency that prostitutes were better off than she\u2014perhaps because they, at least, had hours off. Her future seemed a hollow quest to please a man she loathed. After what Mitchell forced her to do, she felt unclean and unworthy. But despite his repeated warnings that he&amp;#039;d kill her and her family if she tried to escape, she made plans. She knew her parents would always love her, regardless of the degradation she&amp;#039;d suffered. She cherished her family; she cherished her own life. These realizations helped her become stalwart rather than desperate: &amp;quot;No matter what it took, I would live. I would survive and do everything he told me to do to keep my life and my family&amp;#039;s life intact,&amp;quot; Smart testified. I too had set my sights on survival. When I was six years old, we moved to Nevada to avoid FBI and state police raids on our family, and I learned that there were good people in the world who were not members of our religious group\u2014or even of the LDS Church. The blessed anonymity of living where \u00ADpeople didn&amp;#039;t call us &amp;quot;plygie kids&amp;quot; allowed me to practice being a \u00ADregular citizen. My older brother\u2014who was breaking away from our \u00ADfundamentalist life\u2014talked to me about my right to get an education even though I was a girl. When I was 14, we returned to Utah, and my father ordered me to give up my public-school friends, my mascara, and my miniskirts. He also ordered me to attend fundamentalist meetings, but I had already decided not to follow in my parents&amp;#039; footsteps. I refused to be part of something that would divide me against myself. I had watched my mother&amp;#039;s struggle to be heard and felt her desperation as her dreams slipped away. The night I accused my father of failing to fulfill my mother&amp;#039;s needs, he slapped my face and called me a hussy. I wanted to run away, but I knew that being picked up by the authorities would bring down the law on my family. I tucked away my rage and stayed. I didn&amp;#039;t attend meetings, but I did participate in family life. I tried to be loving and respectful even as I was being judged. I held my tongue but kept my inner voice alive by writing down my version of the truth. I worked hard in school, became a student leader, and got a job so I could buy my own books and clothing. A scholarship to the University of Utah offered salvation, as did my high school sweetheart. He had grown up in an LDS home in which his thrice-married mother (widowed, divorced, remarried) governed the family. What a relief it was to tell him the truth about my clan! As I&amp;#039;d hoped, his circumstances made him tolerant of our peculiarity. I married him before he left to serve in Vietnam, and when he returned to the cultural confusion of the 1970s, I reaffirmed that I didn&amp;#039;t want to live in polygamy. &amp;quot;One wife is more than enough,&amp;quot; he agreed. &amp;quot;What would I do with two of you?&amp;quot; Although my father was disappointed, he continued to love me and respected my husband. Later, when my first story was about to be published, I confessed to my father that I was writing about family secrets and was surprised to receive his blessing. A few months later, my father was murdered in his \u00ADmedical \u00ADoffice, and I became a reluctant servant of justice\u2014despite har\u00ADbor\u00AD\u00ADing profound doubts about my citizenship, given that I have no birth certificate and my parents had no marriage license. I overcame my fear of being ostracized and suffered through nightmares about being mutilated by cults in the desert. Ervil LeBaron tracked me with his &amp;quot;evil eye&amp;quot; every day as I entered the courtroom, but I showed up for court, even after one of my husband&amp;#039;s former employees told him that I&amp;#039;d been put on LeBaron&amp;#039;s hit list. The night he was convicted, I didn&amp;#039;t run when some of his wives followed me all the way to my car. When Ervil&amp;#039;s thirteenth wife, Rena Chynoweth, lied on the \u00ADwitness stand and was acquitted of murder in criminal court, I refused to give up. In her 1990 book, released 13 years after my father&amp;#039;s death, Chynoweth confessed to killing my father, but no legal \u00ADauthority came forward to charge her with the crime. I realized that it fell to me to hold her accountable. I called her out of hiding and confronted her on Sally Jessy Raphael, where a constable served her with a \u00ADsummons to appear in civil court. I admit to feeling a thrill of vindication when the sight of it caused her knees to buckle en route to the green room. After months of sleepless nights, I slept like a baby. I wonder how Smart has been sleeping, as serving justice has required her to face her tormentor every day. When Mitchell took Smart, she was finishing eighth grade, an innocent in every sense of the word. In his 48 years, according to trial testimony, \u00ADMitchell had committed outrageous deeds: theft; death threats against his mother; indecent exposure to an eight-year-old girl; \u00ADsexual, verbal, emotional, and spiritual abuse of his wives and \u00ADstepchildren; and now kidnapping and rape\u2014all with little or no reckoning. Given Mitchell&amp;#039;s many transgressions, the wheels of justice should not have turned so slowly, but they did\u2014month in, month out, year in, year out. From the time of his capture in March 2003 until Smart testified at a federal competency hearing in October 2009, Mitchell evaded trial. After many evaluations, officials had declared him incompetent to stand trial and remanded him to the Utah State Hospital. Testimony subsequently revealed that Mitchell tried to manipulate hospital personnel and other patients; he also refused to take medication, and the judge wouldn&amp;#039;t sign an order forcing him to do so. In 2009, Mitchell&amp;#039;s wife and cohort, Wanda Barzee, rendered competent by antipsychotic drugs and therapy, pled guilty. But Mitchell kept up his act. His method of trying to thwart prosecution\u2014singing hymns every time he entered the courtroom\u2014was an \u00ADingenious strategy. As one well-paid psychiatrist mused on the witness stand, &amp;quot;You are not going to get aggressive with someone who is singing hymns at you.&amp;quot; When Smart testified at Mitchell&amp;#039;s federal competency \u00ADtrial, just before she left to serve her year-and-a-half-long LDS \u00ADmission, she provided clear examples of how he manipulated people by \u00ADusing his religious persona\u2014which he donned and dropped at will\u2014and how he clearly knew he was doing wrong, as \u00ADevidenced by the elaborate measures he took to avoid \u00ADdetection. Thus did the public and the Smart family hear for the first time the \u00ADgrittiest details of Elizabeth&amp;#039;s ordeal. A year later, she interrupted her \u00ADmission to return to Utah, where she \u00ADrevisited her nightmare so a federal jury could determine whether Mitchell was guilty of kidnapping and of violating the Mann Act, which \u00ADprohibits \u00ADtransporting underage girls across state lines for \u00AD&amp;quot;immoral \u00ADpurposes,&amp;quot; or was not guilty by reason of insanity. Like many polygamous patriarchs, my father was charged under the Mann Act, as well as with illegal cohabitation and mailing lewd and obscene literature (he contributed to a religious newsletter promoting plural marriage called The Star of Truth). My father must have been tried in this very courthouse. The Mann Act and mail charges didn&amp;#039;t stick, but my father was sentenced to five years in prison for illegal cohabitation and served eight months before signing the paper that got him paroled, a promise that he wouldn&amp;#039;t practice or promote polygamy in the United States. My father found a way around his word. Responding to a \u00ADwritten invitation from a sympathizer, he returned to Mexico, the place of his birth, where he met Alma Dayer LeBaron and his son Ervil, who was desperately ill with malaria. My father treated Ervil, who recovered and began to call himself &amp;quot;the One Mighty and Strong.&amp;quot; He repaid my father&amp;#039;s kindness some 30 years later by instigating his murder. In Mexico, my father kept his families in a vast tent where rattlesnakes and scorpions commingled with babies and \u00ADtoddlers. Behind a white sheet strung up at one end of the tent, he took turns sleeping with each of his wives, including my mother. Twelve years earlier, when my father had decided to follow his forefathers in living the principle of plural \u00ADmarriage, he told his first wife, Katherine, that he&amp;#039;d been commanded to &amp;quot;raise a \u00ADrighteous seed unto the Lord.&amp;quot; She prayed for a corroborating revelation but ultimately packed up their three children and left for Boise, Idaho. My father said losing them felt as though limbs were being torn from his body. Thereafter, he celebrated the birth of each child born into the Principle; they validated his decision and became his main reason for living. The hardest thing I had to do in leaving polygamy was to break away from my father&amp;#039;s love, putting an unavoidable distance between us. Mitchell didn&amp;#039;t seem interested in &amp;quot;raising a righteous seed unto the Lord.&amp;quot; After he and his first wife called it quits, he abducted his children so their mother couldn&amp;#039;t have them. Rebecca Woodridge, the kohl-eyed woman with the platinum extensions, has described how Mitchell molested her \u00ADduring the five years that he was married to her mother, and an older sister has said that he photographed her as she bathed. As Mitchell forced Smart to march up the mountain behind her family&amp;#039;s house, he told her that Barzee was waiting for them. Smart initially thought that Mitchell merely wanted a daughter. If she&amp;#039;d known that he&amp;#039;d given up his own children for adoption to keep them from his mother, or that he&amp;#039;d forced Barzee&amp;#039;s \u00ADdaughter to view pornography during long prayers, Smart might have turned and run\u2014knife to the neck be damned. Many people have speculated about Smart&amp;#039;s apparent \u00ADpassivity during her captivity, wondering why she didn&amp;#039;t run away when Mitchell and Barzee took her. Why didn&amp;#039;t she reveal herself to someone at the rave they attended? Why didn&amp;#039;t she speak up when a homicide detective questioned the peculiar, robed trio in Salt Lake City&amp;#039;s public library? Why did she deny being Elizabeth Smart even at the moment of her rescue? I understand the dilemma she faced. I&amp;#039;m convinced she took the only course she thought would be safe for her family. In the struggle to stay put when you want to run, to stay silent when you want to scream for help, you simply weigh out what will serve the highest good for all concerned, which is relatively easy to do when, like so many Mormon women, you are taught to place your individual well-being second to that of family and \u00ADcommunity. Although I was taught the Ten Commandments&amp;#039; &amp;quot;Thou shalt not bear false witness,&amp;quot; I learned to whip up fictions, knowing that my parents could end up in \u00ADprison if I didn&amp;#039;t. Even when I was raped at age 16, I didn&amp;#039;t dare go to the police for fear I would get my family in trouble with the law. A high-wire act involving truth and law is integral to cultures of fundamentalism, and this informs one of the major points made in the Mitchell trial. A clinical psychologist who examined him at a federal facility in Missouri believed \u00ADMitchell to be a paranoid schizophrenic, citing his &amp;quot;bizarre&amp;quot; religious \u00ADbeliefs, while a Utah State Hospital forensic psychiatrist diagnosed him with a delusional disorder. These evaluations might have resulted in a \u00ADverdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. But two other forensic psychiatrists diagnosed Mitchell with severe personality disorders rather than full-blown mental illness, and an expert from Brigham Young University testified for the prosecution that many of Mitchell&amp;#039;s \u00ADbeliefs were &amp;quot;derivative&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;completely mainstream&amp;quot; among splinter groups in fundamentalist Mormonism. Numerous people\u2014some of whom have written declarative manifestos\u2014have dubbed themselves &amp;quot;the One Mighty and Strong,&amp;quot; including Mitchell and LeBaron, who justified their crimes with &amp;quot;religious revelations.&amp;quot; The doctrine of revelation\u2014the conviction that prophets receive messages from God to guide their congregations, that husbands receive direction for their wives and children, and that individuals receive holy guidance for themselves\u2014has been a central element of Mormon culture from its beginning and is said to have attended the translation of LDS scriptures. Revelations precipitated my father&amp;#039;s decision to live according to the principle of plural marriage, warned us about &amp;quot;polygamist roundups&amp;quot; that we averted by leaving home in the nick of time, and revealed potential sources of aid. Revelations helped us recover from illnesses and do well in school. My father even had a revelation about his own death, writing in his journal on May 10, 1975, &amp;quot;I have two years to get my affairs in order.&amp;quot; Two years later, to the day, he was dead, with seven bullets in him. On the other hand, I&amp;#039;ve seen people produce revelations to \u00ADsatisfy their immediate desires and lust for power\u2014such as \u00ADMitchell&amp;#039;s claim that God \u00ADwanted him to kidnap malleable girls aged 10 to 14 and take them as wives. Following this pedophiliac &amp;quot;revelation,&amp;quot; Mitchell encountered Lois Smart and her children on a street in downtown Salt Lake City. Lois offered him work and gave him her husband&amp;#039;s contact information. Mitchell, who was going by the name of &amp;quot;Immanuel,&amp;quot; soon had another &amp;quot;revelation&amp;quot;\u2014this one specifically about Elizabeth. Revelation became Mitchell&amp;#039;s preferred method of wielding power. It had carved Barzee into a compliant little minion, so he tried to control Elizabeth with blessings and revelations. As in the cases of other LDS adherents, revelation had always been influen\u00ADtial in Smart&amp;#039;s life. She would have received blessings \u00ADinspired by revelation as a source of comfort and direction, but as she testified in court, she&amp;#039;d never seen revelation used to perpetrate selfish schemes or to rob people of free agency. The &amp;quot;revelations&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;blessings&amp;quot; Mitchell gave Smart were veiled orders to stop crying, to clean up the camp, and to have sex with him. In court, Smart describes how, immediately upon her kidnapping at knife-point, she came to be caught up in an atavistic cere\u00ADmony in a tent in the mountains. While Mitchell waited outside, Barzee ordered Smart to take off her clothes in preparation for a \u00ADbathing, invoking an old Mormon ritual that I had once seen my mother \u00ADperform. Smart said she&amp;#039;d already showered. &amp;quot;Yeah, that&amp;#039;s okay,&amp;quot; Mitchell said. So much for sanctity. Barzee again told her to take off her pajamas and put on a robe. When Smart refused, she said she&amp;#039;d have Immanuel come inside and rip them off. Smart put on the robe and reluctantly removed the safety pin she&amp;#039;d used to secure the collar of her pajama top for the sake of modesty. Slowly, regretfully, from beneath the robe she removed the red, silky pajamas\u2014identical to her mother&amp;#039;s, a gift from a friend who brought them back from Vietnam\u2014and Barzee made her burn them. (Later, before Mitchell threw her running shoes in the trash, she rescued the safety pin from the ashes and used it to affix a piece of the shoes to a three-ring binder in which she kept this emblem of herself hidden.) Barzee asked whether Smart had taken off her underwear, and when Smart shook her head no, Barzee told her to do so. No. Smart was firm, but Barzee again threatened that Immanuel would rip them off. What kind of woman would require this of a child? I \u00ADwondered, listening to Smart. I thought of the mothers in my family. They would never force a young woman to do anything she didn&amp;#039;t want to do. The worst thing one of them ever did to another was steal my father&amp;#039;s shirts from the other&amp;#039;s closet so he&amp;#039;d have to bathe and breakfast at her house. Mitchell entered the tent dressed in a light robe. Unlike the carefully orchestrated plural-marriage weddings I&amp;#039;ve witnessed, in which the sister-wives stand side by side, the hand of one woman covering the hand of the other in unity as the wife &amp;quot;gives&amp;quot; the bride to her husband, Mitchell performed a hasty marriage, &amp;quot;sealing&amp;quot; Smart to himself as his plural wife. No! Smart screamed. Mitchell threatened to duct-tape her mouth. The travesty jerked along like a bad play in which people keep \u00ADforgetting their lines and motivations, a poorly rehearsed choreo\u00ADgraphy between real and \u00ADpretend. In the courtroom, a young woman on the jury is quietly weeping. Tears pool in the eyes of an older woman. The men are flushed, staring dully ahead or looking at their hands. The only person who is not visibly repulsed\u2014Mitchell himself\u2014has sung his way out of court and into a private room to watch the proceedings on a closed-circuit TV as if it were merely a movie. The most damning evidence, the detail that most thoroughly suggests that Mitchell consciously \u00ADcreated the persona of Immanuel \u00ADrather than suffering delusions, comes from a letter he wrote to his mother when he first grew out his hair: &amp;quot;As you know, I like acting. My hair and beard is part of a new act.&amp;quot; Eight and a half years after Smart&amp;#039;s abduction, the trial at last reaches its final stages: Prosecutor Diana Hagen stands at an easel for the summation. With her long blond hair and pink dress, she could be a beautiful fairy godmother telling 14 children a bedtime story about a wicked dwarf who badgers a young princess into believing she must do the unthinkable in order to protect her family. The jury deliberates for about five hours. When they reconvene, Mitchell refuses to \u00ADunveil the wicked dwarf. He stays in character as a martyred prophet and sings LDS poet Eliza R. Snow&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Behold the Great Redeemer Die&amp;quot; while the jury foreman stands and reads each count and its \u00ADverdict: of kidnapping, &amp;quot;guilty&amp;quot;; of violating the Mann Act, &amp;quot;guilty.&amp;quot; As the court \u00ADofficers set a date for sentencing of May 25, 2011, to \u00ADallow Smart to complete her Paris mission and be present to make her statement, Mitchell moves on to Snow&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;How Great the Wisdom and the Love.&amp;quot; Judge Dale Kimball bangs his gavel, and the court erupts with congratulations. After all the shuffling of papers and shaking of hands, \u00ADmarshals move the shackled Mitchell from behind the table. The Smart family pauses its \u00ADcelebration. He has stolen time and dreams and an innocence they can never reclaim. As one, they fix him with a hard stare, but Mitchell just sings his way out of the courtroom. A crowd waits a long time for the Smart family to emerge from the federal building and \u00ADcomment on the verdict. They float down \u00ADMarket Street, beaming. Elizabeth steps to a micro\u00ADphone and declares, &amp;quot;Today is a \u00ADwonderful day, and I am so thrilled...with the verdict. But not only that, I am so thrilled to stand before the \u00ADpeople of America today and give hope to other victims who have not spoken out about...what&amp;#039;s happened to them. I hope that not only is this an example that justice can be served in America but that it is possible to move on after something terrible has happened.&amp;quot; Five months later, at \u00ADMitchell&amp;#039;s \u00ADsentencing, Smart has completed her Paris mission. In March, she had received a DVF Courage Award at the United Nations&amp;#039; International Women&amp;#039;s Day. Now, giving her victim&amp;#039;s statement, Elizabeth again proves herself worthy of such recognition. Her voice is steady and clear, her gaze direct as she \u00ADdeclares to \u00ADMitchell, &amp;quot;I know you know what you did was wrong. You did it with full knowledge. I also want you to know that I have a wonderful life now, that no matter what you do, you will never affect me again.&amp;quot; Mitchell sings &amp;quot;O Come, O Come Emmanuel,&amp;quot; as if the hymn&amp;#039;s words can keep hers at bay. But her voice remains modulated and dignified as she tells Mitchell, &amp;quot;You took away nine months of my life that can never be replaced. In this life or the next, you&amp;#039;ll be held responsible for your actions.&amp;quot; Mitchell is sentenced to life in prison. With this victory and her mission under her belt, Smart seems more comfortable in the eye of the \u00ADcamera, more settled into her role as spokes\u00ADperson for \u00ADvictims. Once again, with her \u00ADmessage, &amp;quot;We can speak out, and we will be heard,&amp;quot; she declares her commitment to help those who have suffered degradation and exploitation to stand up for themselves and to hold victimizers accountable. This past July, Smart was made an ABC News commentator on missing persons and child abduction cases, completing her transformation into a public authority on experiences like her own. When some of my father&amp;#039;s assassins were acquitted, I too yearned for justice. After LeBaron was convicted and died in prison, I felt a little peace. But Rena Chynoweth, who actually pulled the \u00ADtrigger, continued to roam free. When my family was eventually \u00ADawarded about $52 million at court, largely on the evidence of Chynoweth&amp;#039;s memoir-confession, we didn&amp;#039;t press to collect the judgment. Some saw any profit from my father&amp;#039;s death as blood money; others disagreed about the dispersal of funds. I didn&amp;#039;t want a power struggle; the real prize was the exercise of our rights of citizenship in seeking redress in the courts. By \u00ADtaking Chynoweth to civil court, we, disenfranchised members of the polygamous underground, had \u00ADasserted the worth of our father&amp;#039;s life. We also helped establish a precedent that would be used a few years later by the Goldman family&amp;#039;s attorneys to keep O.J. Simpson from exploiting the murder of \u00ADNicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Citizenship: In Utah, we do our best to lay claim to it, but some still contend with our poly\u00ADgamous history and its imbalance of truth and law. The subculture \u00ADprovides a wilder\u00ADness for dark creatures to roam, with but a few shelters for those in need offered by nonprofit and state programs. But most fundamentalist polygamists distrust main\u00ADstream organizations, \u00ADhaving been born and bred outside the law. Consequently, it&amp;#039;s only a matter of time before another horror like Mitchell will exploit this space, a wolf wrapped in a cloak of peace and love. He&amp;#039;ll use a belief in plural marriage or &amp;quot;the One Mighty and Strong&amp;quot; to commit pedo\u00ADphilia, abuse, fraud, murder. He&amp;#039;ll find the crack in the past and cast his spell, arrogating to himself the practice of polygamy or the tool of &amp;quot;revelation.&amp;quot; And the underground will shift and make room without even realizing it has created the opportunity once again for Caliban to kidnap innocence and conduct his bizarre ceremony. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a11803/my-father-was-a-polygamist-609556/?click=smart&kw=ist&src=smart&mag=ELM&link=-SMT-ELM>