by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After that mediocre piece of Lifetime cheese they aired one
of the best movies they’ve done in quite a while: You Can’t Take My Daughter, one of Lifetime’s “Ripped from the Headlines!”
movies (the slogan was originated by the Warner Bros. publicity department in
the 1930’s to indicate films that were based on notorious then-current news
stories even though usually they changed the names of the real people involved
— as Lifetime and their co-producers, Bad Dreams Entertainment, did here) that,
like a lot of the films in this series, has gained a lot from its real-life origins and forced the filmmakers
(here writer Karen Lee Hopkins and director Tori Garrett, who makes a far better case for women directors than Lisa France did
for Her Secret Family Killer) to
play the story for far more moral and psychological ambiguity than usual for
Lifetime (or most movies these days, come to think of it). You Can’t
Take My Daughter was based on the real-life
case of Florida woman and law-school graduate Analyn Megison, who was raped in
2003. The rape resulted in a pregnancy and Megison decided to give birth and
raise her daughter as a single mother — until, in 2010, her rapist filed a
lawsuit demanding parental rights and at least partial custody on the ground
that he had never been convicted of raping her and he had a right to see and be
part of the life of the child he’d fathered. Megison fought back and ultimately
lobbied for laws to protect women who became mothers through rape from having
to share their children with their rapists. (It did occur to me that Megison was at least fortunate that
she wasn’t a Muslim living under a country governed by Sharia law, under which
she could have been forced to marry
her rapist.)
In the movie the central character is called “Amy Thompson” and is
played with real power and authority by Lyndsy Fonseca, who’s been ghettoized
into Lifetime movies but is a quite talented and capable performer in roles
like this as a woman who goes through a really traumatic experience and fights
back. The story begins at a graduation party for Amy and others in her
law-school class in Charlotte, North Carolina — including the traditional
African-American best friend, Letty (Tia Hendricks), who perhaps because this
is a true story does not meet the
untimely end typical of Lifetime heroines’ African-American best friends — when
most of the other women there at the bar where the party is taking place are
doing shots but Amy confines herself to wine. The rapist is someone Amy knows:
Demetri Hogan (Hunter Burke), who runs a physical training center near the law-school
campus where some of the women worked out; as she’s leaving the party Demetri
asks Amy if she’ll go out with him, but he’s not the sort of guy who’ll take no
for an answer. He gets into her home because one of the other women has booked
a taxi and the three of them are going home in the same car — only he goes in
with her, assaults her, slams her head against her kitchen wall and takes her
over her kitchen counter. Then he keeps stalking her, driving by her place,
“accidentally” catching up with her on the streets, and in one chilling scene
breaking into her place, holding a gun on her and telling her, “Last time was a
romantic evening compared to what I’m going to do to you next time.” (The scene
with the gun was so outré at
first I thought it would turn out to be a nightmare Amy was having about him
until it became clear this was a real event in the story.)
Meanwhile Amy ends
up in a nightmarish situation with law enforcement that’s sort of Franz Kafka’s
The Trial in reverse; instead of
a man being prosecuted in a mysterious process on charges he has no idea about,
Amy runs smack into the legal system’s indifference to rape cases in general
and rape cases involving attractive women who go to bars in particular. The
cops who show up — a Black man and his partner, a white woman — couldn’t be
less interested in investigating the rape charge and even talk her out of doing
a rape kit at the hospital, whose examining camera is broken and so she and
Letty would have to drive to another one 300 miles away. So there’s no physical
evidence connecting Demetri to her rape until her child is born — and Amy also
has to deal with a monumentally anti-supportive mother, Suzanne (played by
former Cheers star Kirstie Alley,
to whom the years have not been
kind), who appears to make her living judging children’s beauty pageants
(yuck!) and is more concerned about making Amy up to cover her bruises and
countering the bad “reputation” both Amy and Suzanne will supposedly develop
from Amy’s having a child out of wedlock (never mind that getting pregnant was
decidedly not her idea!). Amy
also landed a dream job with a local law firm, only to have to give it up again
when her doctor warned her that her cervix was shrinking and therefore she had
to stay home under bed rest until her child was born. Between a rapist who’s
still stalking her, a mother who couldn’t be less helpful if she tried and a
law-enforcement system that moves at a glacial pace (that would actually be an
insult to glaciers) — she spends over a year hoping for hearings on both her
rape and the restraining order she asked for to keep Demetri away from her —
she gives up and, on the night Hurricane Andrew hits North Carolina, decides to
take herself and her daughter, whom she’s named Maddie (Noah and Preston Willbourn
— I’m not surprised that the producers used the familiar gimmick of casting
identical twins as a very young character to avoid breaking the laws on how
long in a day children are permitted to work, but I’m really surprised they cast her Transgender!), out of town
and relocate to Atlanta, Georgia.
Then there’s a cut to several years later,
when Amy has established a career in Atlanta (though doing what we’re not sure: for someone with a law degree she
seems awfully naïve at times about how the legal system works) and Maddie (now
played by Madison Johnson) is a cute, precocious little kid doing little-kid
things and blissfully unaware of how she came to exist in the first place. Amy
has just placed Maddie in pre-school (even though Madison Johnson looks about
7) and has anxiously asked about the school’s level of security. The rather
unctuous young man in charge of admission assures her that they’ve never had a
problem, but Amy worries anyway — and her worries are confirmed when one day a
Black process server comes to her door and serves her with a complaint from
Demetri Hogan demanding custody of Maddie. At first she tries to represent
herself — she is a lawyer, after
all — only that raises the ire of the quirky judge assigned to the case, Judge
Bonner (David Raizor). She finds a lawyer when an old guy with a white beard,
Jim Pike (Michael Woods), agrees to take her case pro bono because he feels she’s right. Demetri himself has a
high-powered woman lawyer who represented him back in Charlotte as well, but
Amy has a secret weapon up her sleeve: a karate teacher who used to be a cop
and helps her not only by teaching her self-defense but also using his old
law-enforcement contacts to obtain a record that Demetri lost his job with the
Wilmington, North Carolina police after being charged with sexual assault.
Demetri shows up at Maddie’s school on the night of their big school play (in
which Maddie is playing a sunflower) and confronts Amy in the parking lot,
attempting to assault her again and also boasting of raping her — Amy fights
back with her newly acquired self-defense skills and also records his salacious
conversation on her cell phone, then gets permission from the judge to play it
in court.
Demetri has refused to take part in the proceedings himself — he’s
listening in and occasionally contributing by speakerphone — because he claims
he can’t leave his job in North Carolina even though Jim Pike’s investigator
has learned he’s unemployed. Eventually Judge Bonner rules that Amy should be
able to keep Maddie — though the decision is not based on her having been raped (since there was no
trial and no plea, legally speaking Demetri is not a rapist even though we know he is) but on his
record of lies, including saying he was in North Carolina when he was actually
in Georgia (proved not only by Amy’s recording but surveillance photos taken by
the cameras at Maddie’s school when Demetri parked his car outside it and
lurked), and his lack of employment and other factors. (This is something of a
divergence from the real story; Analyn Megison said in a USA Today op-ed in 2019 that her rapist eventually simply gave up his case against
her for her daughter.) You Can’t Take My Daughter is powerful drama, well written, staged and acted:
Lyndsy Fonseca is superb in the lead (even though, as noted above, it’s the
kind of part she’s played before) and Kirstie Alley is a real piece of work,
vividly bringing Suzanne to life even though the part is so much a construction
of cornpone clichés one could have well imagined Leslie Jordan playing it in
drag. If Her Secret Family Killer
was an example of Lifetime at its lazy, clichéd worst, You Can’t Take
My Daughter was an example of Lifetime at
its best: a tough, no-nonsense tale featuring multidimensional characters in a
(roughly) true story that keeps us interested, involved, aware of Amy’s plight
and rooting for her all the way.
