Kidnapping My Own Daughter (Fireside Pictures, Champlain Media, Lifetime, 2026)

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

Last night (Sunday, April 5), with Turner Classic Movies occupying itself with the special Easter presentation of the 1961 Jesus biopic King of Kings, which I watched around Eastertime in 2022 and wrote about at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/04/king-of-kings-samuel-bronston.html. Instead I went to Lifetime for a really quirky movie called Kidnapping My Own Daughter, directed by Max McGuire (whom I’d never heard of before) and written by Shawn Riopelle (whom I had). It’s about a child protective services worker named Fay Walden (Kathryn Kohut) who’s alone in bed with her not particularly attractive husband Paul (Chris Violette) – though, this being Lifetime, his very homeliness marks him as a good guy. Suddenly they hear the sounds of their house being broken into, and the intruders turn out to be Tess Donnelly (Catherine Saindon) and her boyfriend de jour Harlow (Nate Colitto). Three years earlier Tess, a single mother at age 19 after her baby’s father died on her, lost her child to the local “protective” agency, and now she’s come to the Waldens’ home with a knife (later revealed to be a prop knife made of rubber, but of course the Waldens don’t know that!) to demand to learn the whereabouts of her daughter Amelia. Tess lost custody of Amelia after an incident at a Fourth of July fireworks show in which the girl was burned by an ember from one of the fireworks, but the social worker assigned to her case, Margaret (Debra Hale), insisted that Tess had burned Amelia with a cigarette and took the child away from her. The local police arrive in response to Fay’s 911 call and Paul subdues Harlow, so he’s arrested, but Tess escapes. Later on Fay investigates the case of Amelia on her own and learns that just about all the documents in her file were heavily redacted.

Just then we see by far the hottest, hunkiest guy in the cast, Jacob Ashford (Jesse Collin), frantically calling Margaret to set up a meeting with her. This being Lifetime, we immediately know that Jacob is a villain and there was something untoward about the way Tess’s case went down that Jacob is worried Fay’s investigation will expose. Margaret had retired two years earlier after having mentored Fay and just about everyone else currently working in the department, but she had a dark side. She retired in the first place because her husband George had got terminal cancer and she wanted to be with him in his last months. Jacob is a super-rich man who’s been through various fertility treatments with his wife Clara (Esther Viessing) to have a child, including IVF and even surrogacy. Since nothing worked to get them a kid au naturel, Jacob cut a deal with Margaret to obtain a child he could adopt in exchange for him providing round-the-clock home care for her dying husband George. So Margaret framed Tess as an unfit parent and filed away the paperwork, redacting most of the details (when we were first shown the files with all the heavy black cross-outs I joked, “Who’s running this office, anyway? Pam Bondi? I guess she needed a new job after Trump fired her”), though she let one document slip through with only hand redactions that enabled Fay to figure out most of its hidden contents. Jacob proves to be a typically ruthless Lifetime villain, grabbing hold of the flash drive that could have proven Tess innocent of the charge of deliberately burning her daughter and also murdering Margaret by grabbing her desperately needed heart medication and spilling it on her floor. (Both Charles and I caught the reference to The Little Foxes and Bette Davis’s similar murder of her now-inconvenient husband, Herbert Marshall, by denying him his badly needed heart medication and letting him expire on their staircase.) Ultimately Jacob decides to take himself, his wife Clara and their adoptive daughter “Mindy” (who of course is really Tess’s daughter Amelia) out of the country and hide out in the Maldives, an independent island nation off the coast of Sri Lanka which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S. (This is why a lot of Russian yacht owners berthed their vessels in the Maldives after Russia invaded Ukraine and the Biden administration in the U.S. announced a program of seizing Russian yachts, selling them, and using the proceeds to fund military aid to Ukraine.)

Clara, who seems unaware that Mindy isn’t her biological child, resents being made to pull up stakes right when Mindy is looking forward to starting school, but Jacob insists. Jacob deliberately crashes into Fay’s car to steal the flash drive she and Tess got from Margaret that would prove Tess innocent of burning her daughter. He also breaks into the Weldons’ home (they must have the worst security system in their neighborhood!) and stabs Fay’s husband Paul (ya remember Fay’s husband Paul?) in the chest, and it’s touch and go as to whether he’s going to live. In fact, Fay keeps missing text alerts from the hospital about Paul’s condition because she’s traveling with Tess to try to undo the wrong that was done her. The climax occurs when Fay learns Jacob’s and Clara’s address and goes out there with Tess, who has an uncertain reunion with a girl who has no idea Tess is her biological mother. Of course Jacob is out to kill Fay, Tess, or both, but the police intervene in time, arrest Jacob, and there’s an interesting tag scene in which Tess and Clara, whose husband is out of the picture due to all the criminal things he’s done, guardedly agree to co-parent Amelia a.k.a. Mindy. Meanwhile Fay shows up visibly pregnant – though there was an interesting scene earlier in which she was shown rejecting Paul’s entreaties that they have a child of their own on the understandable ground that in her work she sees every day how even the most well-meaning parents can go off the rails, and she’s not all that enthusiastic about becoming a parent herself. Kidnapping My Own Daughter is a pretty good Lifetime movie; I give Shawn Riopelle credit for trying to make his characters multidimensional, but they still come off as stereotypes and Charles questioned how easily Tess avoided legal jeopardy for her crimes. He pointed out that kidnapping is a federal offense, but my understanding is it isn’t and becomes one only if the kidnappers transport their victim across a state line. One thing I’m hoping for as a result of this movie is to get a chance to see drop-dead gorgeous Jesse Collin in a sympathetic role instead of as a Lifetime villain, just as the day after my husband Charles and I watched the 1997 Titanic I bought a used VHS copy of the film The Phantom so I could see Billy Zane, who’d done a lot more for me as a personality than Leonardo Di Caprio even though he was playing the villain, in a superhero role!