No One Believed Me (Storyteller Studios, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Girl Who Survived: The Alina Thompson Story on September 21 Lifetime ran a movie so wretchedly inept The Girl Who Survived looked like a deathless masterpiece by comparison! It was called No One Believed Me and was directed by Dave Thomas. No writer is credited on imdb.com, though the film is ostensibly based on a novel by Claire Smith whose publicity blurbs said she grew up in a small town and drew on some of her own experiences. She didn’t say if she’d actually been kidnapped by a romantically obsessed weirdo the way the film’s central character, Amy Welsh (Megan Carrasquillo), is, but if I’d come up with this farrago of nonsense I’m not sure I’d want people to know who I was, either! The first act shows Amy being kidnapped by a mysterious, hooded, masked figure dressed in black (black hoodies have become de rigueur wear for Lifetime attackers so you can’t tell at first what gender they are). Like Alina Thompson, Amy has been lured to Kentucky by the promise of a photo shoot that might help her have a career as a model; the message of the two films taken together is, to paraphrase the old Willie Nelson song, “Mamas, don’t let your daughters grow up to be models.” She’s taken to an old cabin in the middle of the woods in a Kentucky town identified in the script as “Alving Crossing” (there is no such town, though a Google search turned up a genuine Alvin Crossing, Kentucky), where she’s held until she manages to escape. With her kidnapper chasing her, she flees by throwing herself down a waterfall and ultimately she returns to her home town of Sonne, Georgia (at least “Sonne” is what it says on the decal of the local police force), where she lives with her older sister Jane Walsh Ingre (Jessica Morris), her husband Dan Ingre (John Castle), and their daughter Sophie (Ellie Rose Sawyer). Just what a 25-year-old woman who owns her own business (a beauty shop with the improbable name “Deja Du”) is doing living with her older sister and the sister’s family is never explained, nor is what happened to Amy’s and Jane’s parents.

When Amy returns home from her ordeal in Kentucky, no one believes her (got that?). Apparently she had a history in her childhood of making up stories about herself, though we’re never given examples of what they were. She calls the local paper, the Sun-Times, and asks them to send a reporter to interview her. The guy who shows up is Tim Cook (Daniel Di Amante), who finds her story as unbelievable as her sister, brother-in-law, and everyone else does. Amy calls the Sun-Times to complain about how Tim Cook treated her, and she’s told that no one by that name works there. (Later Tim admits that he was never formally employed by the Sun-Times, but he said he worked for them because he was a free-lancer hoping to sell the Sun-Times a story about Amy.) The next time Amy sees Tim Cook, she accosts him on the street and he attacks her, only an apparent stranger named Paul Riggs (William McKinney) comes along and rescues her. Then Tim ends up after hours inside Amy’s salon, and she complains to Paul, who walks into the salon and, after a few minutes, walks out again and says, “He’ll never bother you anymore.” We don’t know whether that means Paul merely roughed up Tim so badly or he actually killed him, but we’ve figured out within about a nanosecond that it’s really Paul who was her mystery kidnapper. Amy is sufficiently naïve that she buys Paul’s knight-in-shining armor act and starts dating him, but ultimately Paul kidnaps her again and takes her to that same cabin in Kentucky where he held her the first time. This time he reveals his true identity, but he gives her a story that her real kidnapper is a mystery man named Adam who kidnapped Paul’s son Spencer (he shows Amy a photo of the alleged “Spencer” on his phone, but Amy guesses that he could have just got a stock shot of a young boy from anywhere) and who ordered Paul to kidnap Amy or he would kill Spencer.

His cabin is equipped with a sound system that plays a loud thumping bass beat all night so his captive can’t get any sleep, though Paul says the mysterious “Adam” is making him use it on Amy. Gradually Amy either bargains her way into relative freedom or starts having the Stockholm syndrome, because Paul eventually not only releases her from the handcuffs he’s had on her that chained her to a stair railing but the two of them have sex in a surprisingly lovely soft-core porn scene, especially considering the circumstances that brought them together. Meanwhile, her sister Jane and brother-in-law Dan have figured out where she’s been taken, and Jane insists on driving to Kentucky to rescue her. Tim Cook, who complains that since his recent arrival in town he’s been arrested, held in jail on suspicion of kidnapping Amy, and beaten up by Paul, comes with Jane while Dan stays behind, takes his daughter Sophie (ya remember Sophie?) to her school dance recital. Through much of the later three-fifths of the movie I was thinking that “Tim,” whose name was already suspicious because the real-life Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple and it didn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility that a no-good schemer in Georgia might have appropriated his name, was the mysterious “Adam” and Amy’s first kidnapper. In the end, though, it’s Paul who turns out to be the bad guy after all – the story about “Adam” and “Spencer” was just more B.S. to lure Amy into his trap – and the film ends with Paul pleading with Amy to join him down that one last jump over the waterfall fountain. Naturally she refuses (though we’ve seen her make the jump before when it was her life at stake, not his!), and the film ends with an ambiguous shot of the river below. Maybe he died as a result of the fall or drowned at the base, maybe he got away and producers Luis Peraza, Ken Sanders, and John J. Tierney are saving him for a sequel. (I hope not!) No One Believed Me was decently directed by Dave Thomas, but as so often happens with Lifetime movies the script defeated his best efforts and turned into a farrago of sensationalist nonsense.