I Was a Child Bride: The Courtney Stodden Story (Amazon MGM Studios, Carmel Media Capital, JarCo Entertainment, MGM Television, Safier Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, January 17) I watched a couple of movies on Lifetime that were both at least ostensibly based on true stories: I Was a Child Bride: The Courtney Stodden Story and I Am Mary Jo Buttafuoco. I remember both of those stories as tabloid fodder (and, in the case of Courtney Stodden’s, Internet fodder as well) when they happened but didn’t go overboard on either of them. I had expected the movie about Courtney Stodden (Holly J. Barrett) – an aspiring singer, model, and actress who at 16 fell in love with and ultimately married a 51-year-old actor named Doug Hutchison (Doug Savant) – to be the more interesting of the two, but it was less so, despite good work from director D’Angela Proctor (a Black woman whom imdb.com describes as “a rare entertainment professional that can easily transition between both the creative and business sides of media”), writer Kim Barker, and a generally good cast of whom Maggie Lawson as Courtney’s mother Krista stood out. I also made the mistake of looking up both Courtney Stodden and Mary Jo Buttafuoco on Wikipedia and finding out details about both their stories, especially Courtney’s, that would have made more interesting movies than the ones we got. I was struck by the fact that Courtney Stodden was referred to as “they” and “them” on her Wikipedia page, which was explained thusly in a footnote: “Stodden uses both she/her and they/them pronouns. This article uses they/them for consistency.” Courtney Stodden identifies as Bisexual and also as gender non-binary, aspects of her life I wish had been depicted in the film. But with herself as narrator and her current husband, producer and director Jared Safier, listed as one of the producers, I could see why they didn’t go to those places in her life even if Lifetime would have been willing to take the plunge, which they probably weren’t. The film that actually did get made remodeled Courtney Stodden’s story into a cautionary tale addressed to teenage girls to be wary of predatory older men.

Courtney Stodden was born in Tacoma but when she was still a child the family moved to Ocean Shores, Washington. Courtney was bullied at school by fellow students jealous of her beauty – she matured early, at least physically – and her mom Krista got her into modeling and entered her in beauty pageants to the distaste of Alex Stodden (Drew Waters), her dad. At age 16 Courtney was tired of being dragged by her mother from one beauty pageant to another, and she was easy prey for Doug Hutchison, who lived in L.A. and offered acting classes. Doug zeroed in on Courtney and they e-mailed each other regularly, with Doug inviting Courtney to visit him in L.A. and Krista resisting letting her daughter go that far from home alone. The two differ on just who contacted whom first – Courtney insists that Doug e-mailed her first while Doug says Courtney reached out to him, with her mother’s advance approval – but eventually Courtney went to L.A. with Krista. Their first meeting was a jolt because he looked much older than he had online; Doug had played the old trick of using a decades-old head shot on his online profile to make himself look younger than he was. Doug also claimed to have a lot of contacts in both the music and movie businesses which he could use on behalf of Courtney to help her career, but instead of actually using them (if they even existed, which with scumbags like this is always a question), he got super-jealous, insisted that she be a stay-at-home wife, and go out only when he told her to. What’s more, the scandalous publicity surrounding the May-December marriage, the paparazzi that effectively assaulted them (one of the cleverest aspects of D’Angela Proctor’s direction is the way she depicts the paparazzi as swarms of human locusts descending on Our Heroine), and the hostility engendered by Doug wedding his “Star Girl,” as he rather creepily nicknamed her, kills what was left of his career stone dead. Doug also pressures Courtney to fire her mother Krista as her manager and let him do it instead – though Courtney’s entertainment career is nil at that point.

When Doug gets Courtney pregnant he’s sure this is a comeback ticket for them; he contracts with a “reality” TV producer to do a show about the impending pregnancy, the birth and the first years of the new child’s life. But when Courtney has a miscarriage, the deal is suddenly canceled. Courtney is shown over-indulging on both alcohol and pills to handle the strains of the marriage (there’s a great scene in which she drinks champagne out of the bottle to cope with the wedding night, and a grim post-mortem in which she’s glad to see blood on the sheets as proof she was a virgin until her first night with Doug – both Courtney and her parents were committed Christians who regarded premarital sex as a horrible sin). Doug and Courtney officially separate, but she keeps living in a guest house on his property until, bereft of any current income, they’re forced to give up the house and move to an apartment. Inexplicably (and Courtney admits as much in her voice-over narration, delivered by the real Courtney Stodden as she is today and depicted in cut-in scenes that give this movie the air of an audio-visual instruction film for high schools) they remarry on their fifth anniversary before finally breaking up for good in 2020. Stodden announced her engagement to entrepreneur Chris Sheng in 2021 but they broke up in 2023, and she married her current husband, Jared Safier, in 2024.

She’s also pursued her music career, both under her real name and as “Ember.” I was curious to hear her sing and see if she’s any good or not, so I found a YouTube post of “Pleasure” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4qdcdDzJEY&list=RDC4qdcdDzJEY&start_radio=1. The video presents her as a stereotypical “bad girl” with a lot of men around her, including a long-haired, bearded, scruffy biker type whom she chains to a gas-station pump in an engaging bit of BDSM fantasizing. Her voice? Oh, it’s the standard-issue dance-diva coo that’s become a major music template since Madonna hit it big in the 1980’s, not great but serviceable for that sort of song. Her biggest affection in the video is reserved for the animal she’s holding, reflecting her status as an animal-rights vegetarian, another counter-cultural aspect of her real life that wasn’t depicted in the Lifetime movie and should have been. I Was a Child Bride: The Courtney Stodden Story comes off as a standard-issue morality play – the lesson is, “Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be victims of sexual predators” – but it could have been so much more, and I for one would have liked to see it told from both Courtney’s and Doug’s points of view, Rashomon-style.