The Preacher's Mistress, a.k.a. A Woman Betrayed (Reel One Entertainment, Triple Cross Productions. Urban Cowgirl Productions, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Starving for Salvation Lifetime showed first a half-hour “Behind the Headlines” mini-documentary on the real Gwen Shamblin (though it did not include any footage of her actually preaching; maybe the Remnant Fellowship still owns that footage and probably refused to license it to Lifetime. especially since HBO already did a five-part docu-series on Remnant in 2021 – though it’s unclear whether this aired before or after the plane crash – that the church considered such a hatchet job their official response to it is still on the Remnant Fellowship Web site, https://www.remnantfellowship.org/official-response-from-gwen-shamblin-church-to-hbo-documentary/). Then they showed another TV-movie about a minister with dubious morals, The Preacher’s Mistress a.k.a. A Woman Betrayed. This film starts out with single mother Gwen Griffith (Sarah Lancaster), who’s being threatened with foreclosure on the house she shares with her six-year-old son Alec (Logan Lindhiom). She begs her mother Ellen (Eleese Lester) for the $3,000 she needs to keep the house, and Ellen instead tells her daughter to sell it and move in with her instead.

Gwen is in financial trouble because she lives in Houston, Texas and she recently had to pay $2,000 to have the air conditioner in her home fixed (and I’ve known people who lived in Houston who have told me it’s not a place you’d want to live in during summer without air conditioning). Gwen is also working for an insurance office owned by Dwight Tomkins (David Born), and she’s taking an expensive course to become a licensed insurance agent so she can make some real money in the business. She also lost the transmission in her car, and just as she’s leaving work to go home she notices her left front tire is flat. Along comes the man who at first seems like a white knight but turns out to be one of the piece’s villains, Ed Baker (Drew Waters), who offers to put on her spare tire (one of those really tiny things that’s only for emergency use) and also invites her to a dinner date. She protests that she’ll need a baby sitter for Alec, Ed says she can bring him along, but in the end she gets her best friend from work, Sidney Marshall (Natalia Cigliuti), to be Alec’s baby sitter. Our first suspicions about Sidney (aside from the fact that she’s a woman with a man’s first name) get aroused when she takes out her phone and takes photos of a carving knife in Gwen’s kitchen and the soles of Gwen’s white tennis shoes.

Within half an hour of this unusually short (90 minutes less commercials, which Lifetime obviously picked to show right after Starving for Salvation to fit in the half-hour “Behind the Headlines” mini-documentary first) movie we learn [spoiler alert!] that Sidney is herself having an affair with Ed Baker; that he’s not a pharmaceutical salesman but a minister; and that he has a rich wife, Kelly Baker (Julia Barnett). She essentially bought him his ownn church, called “Faith Neighborhood,” and Ed is getting restive living under his wife’s purse strings in more ways than one. Ed and Sidney have worked out a plan to kill Kelly and set Gwen up for the fall, and part of the scheme involves Ed seducing Gwen and making the affair seem public enough that everyone will know about it. Kelly unwittingly helps in her own demise when she hires a hot, hunky private detective named David Wyatt (Bryan Mitchell) to follow Ed around and get photos of him having sex with another woman. Then she goes to Gwen’s workplace and demands that she stop seeing Ed. Gwen tells Ed that their affair is over, but he tries to talk her back into it and says he’s going to leave his wife for Gwen, whereupon Gwen says ominously, “I won’t wait forever.”

Then Sidney actually carries out Kelly’s murder, wearing the same sorts of shoes Gwen has and stabbing her with the same sort of knife Gwen has in her kitchen. The police, represented by detectives Rita Alvarez (Angela Rawna) and Quince (Kevin Dean), immediately leap to the conclusion Ed and Sidney wanted them to and ultimately arrest Gwen for murdering Kelly. Only the scheme unravels when Gwen, bailed out and staying at Sidney’s home because she didn’t want to go back to her own place and have to deal with the media, spies a photo of Sidney with a man she immediately recognizes. It turns out [double spoiler alert!] to be Jake. Gwen’s former boyfriend and Alec’s father, who died in a car crash seven years earlier while Gwen was sitll pregnant with Alec. Apparently Gwen demanded that Jake choose between his wife – that’s right, Alec was conceived via extra-relational activity, something Gwen had acknowledged earlier when she explained, “Alec’s father wasn’t married, at least not to me” – and the night he died he had got drunk over his anxieties about the situation. It turns out Sidney was Jake’s sister and she’s never forgiven Gwen because she holds her responsible for Jake’s death, so she hatched this elaborate plot that involved her seducing Ed, killing his wife, setting u p Gwen for the fall and then presumably eliminating Ed as well.

Only because Gwen discovered the photo of Sidney and Jake together, her plan changes and instead she drugs Gwen’s wine glass, throws her in the trunk of Sidney’s car and drives her to a riverbed, intending to throw Gwen off into the river and making it look like she committed suicide out of guilt. David Wyatt (ya remember David Wyatt?) follows them and interrupts the proceedings before Sidney can throw Gwen into the river. Ed is upset that Sidley has unilaterally changed their plan, and Sidney actually shoots and wounds David before the police, alerted by David, arrive. It’s not clear whether Ed and Sidney are merely arrested or killed, but the final scene shows Gwen and Alec visiting David in the hospital with the clear intimation ghat Davis id going to be Gwen’s next boyfriend and the three of them are somehow going to be able to scrape the money together to visit Walt Disney World. The Preacher’s Mistress is an O.K. Lifetime movie with some familiar plot tropes – I’m pretty sure I’ve seen at least one other Lifetime movie in which a philandering minister posed as a pharmaceutical salesman to carry on an affair – and director Michelle Mower (who also co-wrote the script with Kevin Dean, who played Detective Quince) and the leads all turn in acceptable work, The Preacher’s Mistress is nothing special and certainly doesn’t live up to the salacious promises of its title!