Elizabeth Smart thinks Nancy Guthrie could “absolutely” still be alive.
Smart — who was famously abducted from her Utah home as a teen and held captive for nine months back in 2002 — shared her thoughts about the apparent abduction of Savannah Guthrie’s mother from her Arizona home earlier this year.
“I want to ask you about one thing, separate from all of this,” CNN’s Erin Burnett asked Smart during a recent interview centering on her newly revealed bodybuilding career — adding that she “was just thinking about it with Nancy Guthrie and being missing.”
“When you were missing and the reason everyone knows your face, everyone wondered,” Burnett continued. “And then it was, well, it’s been months, and maybe the worst has happened. And you came back, and here you are.”
Burnett then asked Smart — who was found in 2003 after undergoing a terrible ordeal with her captors — if she thinks “there’s any chance” that the missing 84-year-old Guthrie matriarch “still could have gotten through it” despite not being found in nearly 100 days.
“Absolutely. Absolutely,” Smart, now 38, exclaimed. “She could absolutely still be alive. There are cases that span many more years than mine does and they came back alive. And we’re talking years and years. So she could absolutely still be alive.”
She added, “Of course there is the alternative, but until we know, we have to keep looking.”
Smart noted that Nancy “deserves, either way, to be brought home.”
The bodybuilding enthusiast was taken from her bed at knifepoint at the age of 14 and subjected to extensive abuse before being rescued nine months later.
In the ensuing years, she became an outspoken child safety advocate. In April, she revealed in a heartfelt Instagram post that she’d turned to bodybuilding as a means of “celebrating” her body.
Smart shared in the upload that though she was worried she might “be judged, not taken seriously, somehow perceived as less than or now unworthy to continue work as an advocate for all survivors,” she ultimately emerged from competition “so proud of my body.”
“I only hope that we all find the courage to chase new experiences, goals, bettering ourselves, and most importantly happiness,” she wrote in part.
The mother of “Today” anchor Savannah Guthrie was reported missing from her Tucson home on Feb. 1 after not attending church services following a family outing the previous evening.
Nancy’s home was declared a crime scene as investigators said they believed she’d been taken against her will.
The FBI and local authorities have continued an ongoing investigation, which yielded DNA evidence and video footage of a masked potential suspect outside her home on the night of her disappearance.
Meanwhile, the “Today” show anchor — who returned to her post at the show on April 6 after a leave of absence — abruptly left the show on Wednesday amid the search, with a source telling Page Six that she had “some sort of appointment, and her exit had nothing to do with her mom.”
Savannah again returned to her job on Thursday without explaining her brief absence.