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Apparently, the right thing isn’t the Smart thing
More articles on this topic: Elizabeth Smart“[The Smarts] have asked me to ask you, the media, to now have respect for the privacy of Elizabeth and the family.” — Salt Lake District Attorney David Yocom, March 12, 2003.
“Next, Elizabeth Smart’s trip back to the hidden camp where she was chained to a tree like an animal for months.”–Pre-commercial tease on “Oprah,” Oct. 27, 2003.
Well. I guess the Smarts changed their minds about that whole privacy thing.
Imagine if the nightmare endured by Elizabeth’s Smart family had happened to your family. Your 14-year-old daughter was snatched from your home in the middle of the night and was missing for nine excruciating months. Even as you prayed for her return, you knew the odds were against it.
For three-quarters of a year, your daughter was allegedly in the clutches of a 49-year-old sicko and his 57-year-old wife, who threatened to kill her and her family if she tried to escape.
She was hidden in a hole, chained to a tree and forced to go the entire time without bathing. Often wearing a veil, she was dragged from state to state.
She was brainwashed to the point where she believed her name was Augustine Mitchell.
According to prosecutors, she was sexually assaulted by the man, who called her his “wife.”
In short, her life had been turned into a living hell.
And then, a miracle. When your daughter was found by police, she was wearing sunglasses and a wig beneath a T-shirt wrapped around her head, and after being repeated ly asked, “Are you Elizabeth?” she finally said, “Thou sayest.”
What an ordeal. What an unimaginable hell your daughter has been through.
So what do you do next?
A public ‘private’ healing
Your child has been deeply traumatized, and the healing process could take years. Even if she appears to be rebounding in spectacularly normal fashion, it would be beyond naive to believe the girl could just go back to playing the harp and saying her prayers at night and sleeping in the same house from which she was kidnapped, and that would be the happy ending to the story.
So would you close ranks around your daughter — or would you do what the Smarts have done in recent months and weeks?
Would you think it would be in the best interests of your daughter and your family to:
A. Write a deeply personal book about the experience, with a photo of Mom and Dad and Elizabeth on the cover. (Your other kids weren’t kidnapped; they can go on the back cover.)
B. Sell the rights to your daughter’s story for a quickie TV movie that will re-create the nightmare, with a look-alike actress playing Elizabeth, white veil and all.
C. Grant an interview with Katie Couric, timed to coincide with the release of the book.
D. Invite Oprah Winfrey into your home to take a tour of the bedroom from which your daughter was snatched, with Oprah telling her audience, “I’m sure, like me, you’ve tried to visualize how Elizabeth Smart was taken from her own bed and what kind of torture she must have endured during her horrifying nine-month captivity,” not to mention exchanges such as this:
Oprah: “Did he come in through this window?”
Dad: “He came in through this window.”
Mom: “Yes.”
Oprah: “A chilling tour …”
E. Sell excerpts from the book to People magazine, so they can use that jacket shot for a cover photo to run with a big headline: “THEIR UNTOLD STORY.”
F. None of the above.
Maybe I’m naive. Maybe I’m misreading the average American family. But I’d like to believe that 99 percent of us would tell the book publishers and the magazines and the TV superstars — tell all of them — to take a walk.
Two-way exploitation
The competition for a piece of the Elizabeth Smart story was so intense that after Katie Couric landed an “exclusive” interview with the Smart family, “Good Morning America” countered by running excerpts from Oprah’s interview with the family before Katie’s piece could run.
Couric began her story on the Smarts by asking, “Were you surprised at how competitive it was to basically secure an interview with you, and then how people didn’t honor agreements and tried to one-up the other? I mean, it really turned into a bit of a mess.”
Ed Smart’s response was that the “whole situation has been bigger than we ever, ever guessed it would be.”
That’ll happen when you score book and TV movie deals and invite Oprah into your house, pal.
At the conclusion of Couric’s interview, Ed Smart said, “Cruiser’s always going to be there for you, Katie,” and Couric quickly explained that the Smarts wanted to give her a horse but she “refused for obvious reasons.”
A horse! Your daughter is kidnapped, tortured and assaulted — and somehow that leads to you offering Katie Couric a horse.
Gee, I don’t think they offered Oprah so much as a pony.
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