Abducted by My Teacher: The Elizabeth Thomas Story (Marwar Junction Productions, Corus Entertainment, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night’s (Saturday, August 12) Lifetime “premiere” movie was Abducted by My Teacher: The Elizabeth Thomas Story, based on a true story: the successful seduction and kidnapping of 15-year-old high-school student Elizabeth Thomas (Summer H. Howell) by her 50-something health sciences teacher, Tad Cummins (Michael Fishman), in 2017. The story took place in a small town called Culleoka, Tennessee, in Maury County, and it was presented by Elizabeth Smart (one of the producers on the film and host of a Behind the Headlines documentary that immediately followed it). Elizabeth Smart was the victim of a teen abduction herself by a middle-aged Mormon who had decided to make her his second wife – much to the disgust of his first one, who’d given up a career she loved as a music teacher to marry him, and she’s turned her own history into a sort of cottage industry in which she has a long-term deal with Lifetime to serve as producer and host of TV-movies about other, more recent victims of kidnapping and child abuse. Written by Kristine Huntley and directed by Shawn Linden (whose imdb.com photo shows a hot and surprisingly nellie-looking young blond man who set off at least a few tingles on my Lust-O-Meter), Abducted by My Teacher presents Tad Cummins as the proverbial “cool teacher,” who’s attracted a group of kids whom he lets eat lunch in his classroom so they don’t have to brave the insane pecking order and social games of the school cafeteria. Among the members of his Island of Misfit Toys are Tim (the quite cute Alec Carlos, whose character I thought was being set up to be the age-peer boyfriend Elizabeth would end up with, but. no-o-o-o-o), Sheila (Jacqueline Loewen) and Rachel (Payton Gowder).

Elizabeth Thomas came from a peculiar background that made her especially vulnerable to the lecherous intentions of a pedophile teacher: she had never set foot inside an official school before because her mom had home-schooled her. Then her parents broke up; we never see her mother in the film and neither the movie, the Behind the Headlines documentary shown after it nor an article on the real case (https://www.eonline.com/news/1382688/abducted-by-my-teacher-why-elizabeth-thomas-is-done-hiding-her-horrifying-story) explain what happened to her. Her dad Ed (Aaron Merke) ended up with custody of Elizabeth (whose real name was Mary Catherine Elizabeth Thomas, by the way) and her brother Ben (Gino Ananias) and two sisters, including Lily (Averie Peters). Elizabeth is denounced as “trailer trash” on her first day at school (the more I think about this movie, the more it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Elizabeth’s mom was right to home-school her) and it gets worse until Tad Cummins reaches out to her. Tad comes on as if he wants to be her best friend – not only to Elizabeth but to all his students – and he reminded me of Kenneth a.k.a. Kermit Anderson, the prototypical “cool teacher” I had in sophomore English class in my 1960’s high-school days until he was fired for allegedly having an affair with an underage female student. (I remember his indignation when he was first hit with that charge; many years later, when his name turned up in a local newspaper while I was in community college, the article mentioned that he had married a former student, a woman whose name I recognized, and was being prosecuted for having had sex with her when she was underage.) Tad insists on having the students call him by his first name, and he offers to take Elizabeth to his church with his wife Connie (a marvelous enactment of ignorance by Tracy Penner). The church turns out to be pastored by a woman minister and to feature a choir singing white-bread versions of songs like “Amazing Grace,” and Tad’s attentions to Elizabeth seem to be perfectly licit. Then Tad casually tells her that he wishes he could see her naked, and she’s mildly shocked where a girl with more experience with school before would have no doubt been disgusted.

Through much of this film’s first act one wishes one could walk into the screen and tell Elizabeth what a creep Tad is and how inappropriate his actions really are; as things turn out, she’s hopelessly and helplessly naïve about him and seems to be falling at least somewhat in love with him. Tad gets Elizabeth an after-school job as a waitress in a café run by a woman friend of his, and he also takes her into a back room of his classroom, which features a bed whose “legitimate” purpose is for doing CPR demonstrations (he is a health sciences teacher, after all!). Then one of the other girl students catches Tad and Elizabeth kissing in his classroom and reports him. The Maury County Sheriff’s Department (apparently Culleoka is either unincorporated or doesn’t have its own police force) launches an investigation and the school board immediately suspends Tad. The authorities forbid Tad and Elizabeth from having any contact with each other, but they continue to text each other and eventually they meet in the parking lot of the restaurant where she works. Before Elizabeth goes to work that day she tells her sister Lily that if she’s not back home by 7 (it was really 6) Lily should call the police – indicating she’s got some awareness of who Tad is and what he really wants from her – only Tad stops by the restaurant (driving his wife’s car since he knew the police were watching his), demands that Elizabeth leave with him, and when she initially expresses reluctance Tad shows a gun. Though he doesn’t make an outright threat, just seeing the gun convinces Our Heroine that Tad might kill her (or himself, the real Elizabeth Thomas said later in an interview for the Behind the Headlines documentary). Eventually he kidnaps her and the two tear off on a cross-country flight, while the local police get help not only from the FBI but its state counterpart, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. Tad and Elizabeth first go across the state line from southern Tennessee to northern Alabama, where they both throw off their cell phones so the cops can’t use the phones’ tracking features to trace them. Then they’re next spotted in Oklahoma, though after that Kristine Huntley’s sense of geography gets a bit scrambled and at first I thought the final capture occurred in Texas but it actually took place in California.

Tad took them to San Diego and concocted a plan to buy them a kayak and take it down the coast into Mexico, thereby escaping U.S. jurisdiction – only they’re stopped by a beach ranger or something who tells them he can’t allow them to continue when the waves are as choppy as they are and they could easily capsize and drown. So they get back in their car and end up driving up the California coast until they pass San Francisco and end up in the mountain country, where a seemingly friendly guy running a campground gives them a few dollars and tells them there’s a commune nearby where they may be able to stay for a few days. Only they don’t stay long because the folks at the commune expect them to work for their keep, and Tad high-tails it back to his friend, who lets them stay in a deserted cabin that’s basically just four walls and a roof with no foundation, no insulation, just a crappy mattress on the floor. Tad and Elizabeth spend the night together on this horrible object and apparently have sex for the first time. After watching the Behind the Headlines documentary I got more and more irked at the soft-pedaling of the real relationship between the two. In fact, according to Elizabeth Thomas herself, Tad kept demanding sex from her, sometimes several times a day, throughout their flight, but aside from a brief hint in a scene showing Tad and Elizabeth leaving that bed-equipped back room in his classroom and him furtively re-buttoning his shirt, Kristine Huntley has played coy with us and not established for sure whether they were having sex with each other. Doubtless she did this to avoid running afoul of the U.S.’s weird laws against depicting sex between adults and underage partners, but she could have been a lot more honest and still stayed on the right side of the law. Having Elizabeth sit up in bed and complain that she had thought the experience would be romantic and instead she just felt used would have made the real-life point without showing any of the nasties that would have got her, Linden, Elizabeth Smart and the whole Lifetime production staff in trouble.

Their life as fugitives (at one point Tad compared them to Bonnie and Clyde, a depressing thought given how the real Bonnie and Clyde ended up!) comes to an abrupt end the next morning, when FBI agents surround the cabin and arrest and handcuff not only Tad but Elizabeth as well. That sets up the third act, which is in some ways the most depressing part of the movie. Not only is Elizabeth treated like a criminal, but when she returns to Culleoka she’s ostracized and treated as a temptress who lured a basically good man to his destruction – a real-life reversal the actual Elizabeth Thomas insists happened to her as well. One of her fiercest enemies is her old school buddy Rachel, who comes by the doughnut shop where Elizabeth is working (by now her dad has apparently also disappeared from her life and her brother Ben is running the household and taking care of business in more ways than one) and starts insulting Elizabeth when she gives Rachel her drive-through order. Elizabeth immediately loses it and throws a drink in Rachel’s face, and the manager sadly tells Elizabeth she’ll have to fire her even though she approves of what Elizabeth did: “If anyone ever deserved to have a drink thrown in her face, it’s Rachel.” Ultimately Elizabeth prepares herself to testify against Tad at his trial – only there isn’t one because Tad pleads guilty to two charges that could add up to 30 years in prison. Elizabeth comments grimly when the prosecutor explains that the maximum sentence for Tad throwing their phones away is twice that of the Mann Act violation of “transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes.” The final scene shows Elizabeth writing a victim impact statement, which the prosecutor actually has to read in court because Elizabeth herself can’t do it – though in the movie, unlike in reality, Elizabeth pulls herself together and finishes the reading.

After watching the Behind the Headlines documentary I was more upset than I had been seeing the movie at how much of it was fudged. Not only was Tad’s sexual exploitation of Elizabeth reduced to almost nothing, Elizabeth herself was a heavy-set woman but the actress playing her, Summer H. Howell, was a petite little slip of a thing (and not a particularly good performer either; even if Huntley had written her the scenes of humiliation and shame that were omitted from the script, I'm not sure whether Howell could have played them). And though a “where are they now?” post-credits sequence said that Elizabeth got married in June 2019 (just five months after Tad was finally sentenced to 20 years), her husband Skylar Durla isn’t shown as an on-screen character and there’s no indication of how they met or how Elizabeth managed to adjust to a normal life with him, including a normal sex life. (I’ve had this qualm before about previous Lifetime movies about real-life victims of child sexual abuse, including the one about Elizabeth Smart’s own case: how do you adjust and have a normal sex life when your introduction to sex is at the hands of a serial abuser who constantly exploits you and uses you as an animate sex doll?) Also there’s no clue as to how Tad Cummins flew under the radar for as long as he did; in fact, neither the Lifetime movie nor the documentary answer the obvious question, namely whether he’d ever done this before. It’s hard to believe he hadn’t – his so-called “grooming” routine seems too well-oiled and well-practiced – but there’ve been real-life cases of men who became so infatuated with kids they went after them sexually despite never having shown evidence of pedophilia before (notably Danielle Van Dam and her abuser-turned-killer, neighbor and family friend David Westerfield). And one irony of the film that I loved was that so many of Tad Cummins' classroom lectures are about sex, including how to use a condom and how much sperm a male releases during the sex act: the curriculum almost seems to help him groom Elizabeth, though I don't want to take that too seriously because of all the nonsensical madness modern-day Right-wingers say about "grooming," including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's bizarre assertion that allowing teachers honestly to answer students' questions about Queer and Transgender people is itself "grooming."