r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night (March 11) at 8 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a particularly grim LIfetime movie called Girl in the Closet that was “inspired by a true story,” albeit only very loosely. The real story happened between 1995 and 2001 in Hutchins, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, and involved two-year-old girl Lauren Kavanaugh. Her birth mother was a woman named Barbara “Barbie” Calhoun, who from the moment she learned she was pregnant had decided to put her child up for adoption. She made contact with a local couple, Bill and Sabrina Kavanaugh, and arranged for them to adopt her baby girl when she was born. Then, eight months later, the Kavanaughs golt a letter from Barbara demanding that they give Lauren back. The Kavanaughs later learned that their attorney had never filed the paperwork terminating Barbara’s parental rights, so Barbara had every legal right to demand Lauren back. The case worked its way through the Texas courts for the next 16 months until a judge finally ruled in favor of Barbara and her new husband, Kenneth Atkinson. The moment the Atkinsons got legal custody of Lauren, they began a campaign of systematically abusing her pysically, psychologically and sexually. The abuse included locking her in the basement closet, refusing to feed her any but the bare minimum, leaving her lying in her own soiled diapers so she was constantly in contact with her own urine and shit, and raping her so regularly that by the time she was finally found and rescued in 2001 her vagina and anus had become just one hole. In addition to molesting her themselves,the Atkinsons also rented out Lauren to other local pedophiles.
The Atkinsons were finally turned in by a neighbor who heard Lauren’s screams and became convinced she was being abused – by then the Atkinsons had five children of their own and they were also being abused, though not at the level of Lauren – and when the police finally arrived at the Atkinsons’ home, at first they thought Lauren was just a toddler because the Atkinsons’ treatment had so stunted her growth she weighed just 15.6 pounds. The Kavanaughs finally legally adopted Lauren at age eight and had the formidable task of training her to live a normal life – she’d never been potty-trained or allowed to use a normal fork and spoon/ After years of patient work with doctors and therapists, Lauren became well enough that she graduated from high school at age 20 and then began classes at a local community college. But she still struggled with depression and bipolar disorder, she attempted suicide twice, and in 2018 she was arrested for sexual abuse of a child, a 14-year-old she’d met online and with whose parents she was living. Lauren was arrested in 2018 but declared too mentally unfit to stand trial, so she spent the next three years in a mental institution before the state of Texas finally dropped all charges against her and released her in 2021.
From these basic facts, best told on https://allthatsinteresting.com/lauren-kavanaugh, Lifetime, the Johnson Production Group, director Jaira Thomas and writer Sa’Rah Jones (she’s the only writer listed on imdb.com, though the film’s credits list another writer who helped her turn her original story into a script) concocted a work of fiction that had little in common with the true story besides the basic situation of a girl kept locked in a closet. The actual people in the story had been white; Lifetime and Jones made them Black. Jones and her oo-writer also moved the story’s locale from Texas to Atlanta,Georgia (where it starts and ends) and Nashville, Tennessee (where most of her victim’s abuse takes place; the Smiths got wind that their activities had been noticed by the police and so Mia moved her whole entourage from Atlanta to Nashville and then back). The real Lauren Kavanaugh was taken at two and rescued at eight; the fictional “Cameron Smith” (Daijah Peters) was taken as a tenager and rescued as a young adult. The abductor is not the victim’s mother Patricia (Romy Ma) but her aunt, Mia Smith (Tami Roman, top-billed), who takes custody of Cameron when her mother suffers an aneurysm and is hospitalized long-term. Cameron’s mother expects Mia to bring Cameron back as soon as shed’s wel enough to take care of her again, but Mia has other ideas.
Mia is depicted as a real piece of work; even before we meet her she’s already served a five-year prison term for beating a man to death,though the reason her sentence was so short was she convinced the judge she acted at least partially in self-defense, and she was able to convince both her sister and the parole board that she’d changed her ways and was preparing to live an above-board life. Of course, once Mia has Cameron in her control she immediately locks her in the basement closet along with her other victims. The real Barbara Atkinson was married; the fictional Mia Smith lives with a male partner named Chris (Stevie Baggs, Jr.) who seems to do little but sit in his ass all day and demand that Cameron and Mia’s other captives bring him beer. In one of the film’s most bizarre scenes. Mia goes to a Lesbian bar and picks up a youngish white woman who says she used to be a nurse until disability forced her to retire; Mia invites her to move in and, once she says yes, she ends up locked in the basement closet like the rest of Mia’s captives. Mia seems to have targeted this woman because as a former norse she had major experience assisting in childbirths – one of Mia’s slaves, Joanne (Teisha Speight), continually gets pregnant and then her babies come out stillborn but the Lesbian nurse doesn’t last long because she has a history of food allergies and needs to take medications, and of course Mia couldn’t be less interested in providing them for her.
At least part of Mia’s motivation seems to be financial – she’s targeting abductees who are receiving disability payments or other sources of government income, and one of the reasons she’s so enraged at JOanne’s stillborn pregnancies was she was hoping for a child for whom she could collect welfare. Just how Joanne keeps getting pregnant is a bit oif a mystery; maybe Chris is the father or maybe the dad is Harland [Jason Jamal Ligon], one of Mia’s other abductees. Or maybe she’s already renting out the girls to turn tricks, though I thought that only occurred to her later in the story after she picked up a homeless man named Travis (Willie Raysor), who goes by the street name “Pastor” because he carries around a Bible that’s been hollowed out to conceal a whiskey flask. Travis suggests to Mia that she have the girls turn tricks at the sleazy motel near their Nashville home. Mia does that, and one of Cameron’s “regulars” is a heavy-set white guy who turns otu to be a police officer – Cameron notices his badge. She naïvely thinks he’ll help her esca but instead of driving her to the police swtation he returns her to Mia’s, where she clubs her with a baseball bat and then Chris and Travis both kick her whie she’s down and helpless. Ultimately some of Mia’s financial shenanigans attract the attention of the authorities in Nashville, so she and her entourage make a hasty retreat back to Atlanta, where they rent an apartment whose basement isn’t large enough for all the captives – so they lock Cameron in an attic and announce they’re going to starve her to death.
Ultimately Mia’s caught when a neighbor notices the smell of animal shot coming from her basement. The landlord sends a man to cut the lock of the basement door – and he finds, not forbidden pets, but human beings living in unspeakable squalor. Amazingly, Mia is sent not to a Georgia state prison but merely to a county jail, and whehin a year she’s asking for parole and telling the parole board, as she’d told a similar board years before, that she’s learned her lesson and reformed. Cameron shows up for a victim-impact statement and righteously tells the board not ever to let Mia see the light of day again after all the terrible things she did to her. I found Girl in the Closet to be rough going,mainly because Mia is too much the cold-blooded villainess without any redeeming qualities or human features. She’s a psychopath wtih utterly mo redeeming qualities whatsoever and, as Charles pointed out, the relentlessness of her evil just gets too much to be entertaining. One watches this movie as one would watch a train wreck, and it’s ironic that Lifetime ran this right after Girl in the Shed: The Kidnapping of Abby Hernandez, which I’d previously watched on Lifetime and for which I’d given high marks to director Jessica Harman and writer Michael Vickerman for making its villain, Nick Kibby, a figure of real pathos and multidimensionality; we hate what he did to the titular heroine but we also feel more than a little sorry for him. Alas, subtleties like this totally eluded Jaira Thomas and Sa’Rah Jones, and at the endwhen Mia pleads before a parole board for early release on the ground that she was abused as a child herself – and Cameron is there to make a victim-impact statement telling the board never to let her se the light of day again – I found myself groaning once again at the vampire theory pf child abuse, the idea that the abuse victim of one generation becomes the abuser in the next. Then I started reading up on the real case of Lauren Kavanaugh and found that she had been arrested for child sexual abuse herself.
