My Husband's Baby (Neshama Entertainment, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, March 23) I watched another Lifetime movie with the provocative title My Husband’s Baby. This was directed by Alicia K. Harris from a script by Lu Asfaha, and centers around star football coach Damien Noble (Eddie G.) and his younger “trophy wife” Mecca (Moni Ogunsuyi, top-billed). Noble and Mecca are the co-stars of a “reality” TV show called Trophy Wives, produced by Aaron Pieper (Jeremy Walmsley, one of the few white people in the dramatis personae). Aaron is getting tired of Mecca’s do-goodisms, including hosting charity luncheons to raise money for noble causes, especially given that the other “trophy wife” on the show, a white woman named Tara (Dana Schiemann), is a bitch (or at least she plays one on the show), and is clearly Aaron’s favorite. The marriage of Damien and Mecca (just why did writer Asfaha name her after Islam’s holiest city? I kept thinking of “Macca,” one of Paul McCartney’s nicknames) is foundering on Mecca’s inability to conceive his child, even after the whole armamentarium of modern-day fertility treatments, including IVF. Things go south in a hurry when a white woman named Angela Wright (Samantha Brown) shows up on the Nobles’ doorstep and claims to be carrying Damien’s baby, which he supposedly fathered on a recent road trip with his team in which they had a party celebrating their victory on the field and got totally wasted. Damien has no memory of ever having had sex with this person, but a paternity DNA test establishes to within a 99.99996 percent certainty that Damien is the biological father of Angela’s baby. Angela insists on moving in with the Nobles and co-parenting the child with them; Mecca is understandably upset at the thought of having to accept Angela as a Mormon-style “sister-wife.”

The people around the Nobles try to work out ways of exploiting the situation to boost ratings for Trophy Wives. Mecca’s friend and manager Trish (Nadine Whiteman) suggest they work out a storyline for the show in which Damien is portrayed as a dastardly villain and Mecca righteously breaks up with him and strikes out on her own as an independent woman. But Mecca is too much in love with Damien to want to break up with him permanently, and even more so to paint him as a villain on a “reality” TV show. (I remember reading a Los Angeles Times report a few years ago about a threatened strike of reality-show writers, and joking, “It’s an illustration of the essential falsity of the ‘reality’ genre that a job called ‘reality-show writer’ exists.”) Damien has to deal with a lingering burden of mistrust from his wife because during their engagement he had sex with another woman as a means of ensuring that he really was willing to devote himself only to Mecca. Along the way Angela poisons Mecca’s best friend Trish by slipping poison into her drink, and later clubs Jalen Cross (Gabriel Davenport), Damien’s star player, on the head from behind, killing him too. Ultimately Damien and Mecca wrestle the gun away from Angela after Angela starts breaking water and giving birth just when she’s about to kill them both (fetus ex machina).

My husband Charles came out of our bedroom midway through My Husband’s Baby and correctly guessed the plot payoff [spoiler alert!]: Angela and the slimeball producer of Trophy Wives, Aaron, were in a relationship themselves and conceived this whole plan as a means of creating a more exciting storyline for the show and, in Angela’s case, getting back at Damien for forcing Jalen Cross (Gabriel Davenport), the star football player on Damien’s team, to break up with Angela because he didn’t think she was a responsible enough partner. Angela worked at the IVF clinic where Damien and Mecca were trying to have a child artificially, and stole some of Damien’s semen and used it to impregnate herself (so when Damien told Mecca he hadn’t had sex with Angela, he was telling the truth). Damien’s troubled star player Jalen had got Angela, whose real last name turns out to be “Zimmerman,” pregnant and then had broken off the relationship at Damien’s insistence. In the finale, Angela ends up holding a gun on both Damien and Mecca and saying, “You stole my baby, so I’m going to steal yours.” (We’re not sure how Angela lost her baby by Jalen after they broke up, but we were clearly supposed to assume either it was a miscarriage or an abortion.) Angela gets arrested (it’s becoming more common for Lifetime villainesses to be arrested instead of killed) and ultimately Damien and Mecca end up raising Angela’s baby, a girl. (Despite her white mother, luckily the girl ends up looking racially African enough – sort of like former President Barack Obama – to pass as Damien’s and Mecca’s child.) My Husband’s Baby actually could have made some interesting comments on the whole celebrity culture and the absurd fishbowl in which so-called “reality” TV stars are made to live, with their every move scrutinized by a skeptical public which gets to eavesdrop on them at the twist of a TV dial or access through “streaming” on the Internet. But it was, alas, the product of filmmakers who generally couldn’t have been less interested in its social-comment aspects, instead going for the sleaziest and most sexually titillating story elements. Once again, director Harris did the best she could with a troubled and exploitative script.