ATLANTA -- The only thing that helped Ashley Smith get through an over-seven-hour ordeal where quadruple murder suspect Brian Nichols held her hostage was her faith in God, Smith told FOX News on Monday.

"I believe that's the only person that helped me through that," she said in an interview with "FOX & Friends." ...

--Fox News, 3/15/05

But maybe God wasn't her only helper....

Ashley Smith, the woman who says she persuaded suspected courthouse gunman Brian Nichols to release her by talking about her faith, discloses in a new book that she gave him methamphetamine during the hostage ordeal.

Smith did not share that detail with authorities at the time. But investigators said she came clean about the drugs when they interviewed her months later. They said they have no plans to charge her with drug possession.

In her book, "Unlikely Angel," released Tuesday, Smith says Nichols had her bound on her bed with masking tape and an extension cord. She says he asked for marijuana, but she did not have any, and she dug into her illegal stash of crystal meth instead....

--AP today

You think folks such as Michele Malkin and Peggy Noonan ("You know she told the truth. It's funny how we all know this") would have lavished praise on Smith if they'd known this?

Smith says the ordeal led her to quit using, which makes it easy for conservative moral simplifiers to define her as a "good" person rather than a "bad" person. But she was "bad" when she became a hero -- which is how it goes sometimes.