Not My Family: The Monique Smith Story (Undaunted Content, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Saturday, April 12) I watched a Lifetime movie called Not My Family: The Monique Smith Story. It was based on a true-crime story about an African-American woman named Symbolie Monique Smith (played as a child by Solace Kimbro Jones, as an adult – stunningly – by Yaya DaCosta) who lives a nightmarish childhood. Her supposed mother Elizabeth (Tiffany Black) regularly beats her, and Elizabeth’s brother Leroy (Philip Fornah) sexually molests her. According to a story in The U.S. Sun (https://www.the-sun.com/news/14007992/true-story-monique-smith-lifetime-sex-trafficking-film-abuse/), Leroy started abusing Monique when she was four, though in the movie it starts a few years later than that. The only people in Monique’s life who are at all supportive are her other “uncle,” Nelson (Sir Brodie), and Elizabeth’s mother Barbara (Nikki T. Carr). Despite all the trauma at home, Monique (whom everyone around her calls “Bolie,” much to her disgust, though that’s about the least of her problems), manages to excel in school and gets an acceptance letter from the U.S. Army, which she sees as an escape from her domestic hell. But Elizabeth tells her the Army rejected her and Monique finds the actual letter from the Army accepting her torn up in Elizabeth’s trash. This is Monique’s last straw: desperate to escape the abuse at home, she steals an envelope of cash from under Elizabeth’s mattress – where she finds three different birth certificates and three Social Security cards for herself, each with a different name and date of birth, though all of them list her birthplace as New York City instead of Baltimore, where she’s been raised – and takes a bus to St. Augustine, Florida.

Alas, a young man on the bus (who’s actually one of the hottest-looking guys in the film) picks her pocket and steals her cash stash, so when the bus finally arrives at St. Augustine she’s completely broke. She’s met at the bus station by Caroline (Anona Tolar), a tall, grey-haired middle-aged woman who offers to befriend her and give her a place to stay until she can find a job, but we’re thinking this is too good to be true. I was wondering whether she was some sort of madam who was going to force Monique into prostitution, and that’s duly what happens. One night a young Black man named Gale meets her at a restaurant and offers to take her on a real date instead of just a sexual “quickie” for pay, and it seems too good to be true – which in fact it is. Gale marries her, gets her pregnant, and also burns up all their money on drugs. One night Monique, still pregnant, sees him passed out and takes the chance to escape, but the only place she can think of going to is the hellhole in Baltimore with Elizabeth and Barbara in charge. I was worried that when she got back to Baltimore Barbara would already be dead, but luckily she’s still alive, though gravely ill and both Monique and we are all too aware that her remaining time on earth is limited. Fortunately Monique is able to find work at a realty office, where she meets a young white best friend who helps her find a place of her own. When she’s moving in she meets a hot young Black man named Jonathan (Robert III Hamilton – according to imdb.com, that’s really his name!), the landlord’s maintenance man, who’s sent there to unclog a drain. Director Tailiah Breon gives us the idea of what’s going to happen next by showing Hamilton in a lot of medium shots, with his big basket snugly encased in blue jeans.

Before long he and Monique are an “item,” and in addition to being surprisingly willing to play father to her daughter by another man, he fathers her next child, a son inevitably named Jonathan, Jr. All seems to be going fairly well in Monique’s life until Jonathan, Jr. comes home with a schoolwork assignment to do a family tree – and this shakes Monique’s confidence and her equilibrium because she can’t make up a family tree since she doesn’t have a real family. She’s long since intuited that Elizabeth, the woman who raised her, beat her regularly, and allowed her brother to molest her, couldn’t have possibly been her biological mother (though actually the character reminded me of the negative aspects of my mother and our relationship, albeit without the positive ones), and she’s become more and more convinced when she’s been unable to find a birth certificate for herself in Baltimore and its environs. She ends up in New York City because the fake birth certificates Elizabeth had for her all listed that as her birthplace, and in a scene that we see first as the prologue of the movie and then is repeated midway through, she hands out a missing-person flyer on the streets of New York and asks passers-by for help finding the girl in the photo. When a woman stops her and naturally assumes she’s a mother searching for a missing daughter, Monique explains that she is the one who is missing. Ultimately Monique’s street outreach attracts the attention of a Black woman reporter for the New York Times who grabs onto her tale as a human-interest story. Together the two of them investigate and Monique persuades “Uncle” Nelson to do a DNA test – which proves conclusively that Monique and her supposed “family” are not biologically related at all.

Eventually Monique finds out that her real mom was a hopeless drug addict who died of a heroin overdose when Monique was eight – so Elizabeth’s claim that she “saved” Monique by kidnapping her when Monique was a baby might have been right after all. Certainly it’s all too likely that had Monique stayed with her birth mom, her life might have been just as miserable as it was, if not more so. One can readily imagine the kinds of scumbag men who are attracted to drug-addicted women molesting Monique as well as screwing her mom for drug money. Monique’s intense search for her true origins starts alienating Jonathan, who wishes she’d stay home and take care of the family she knows she has instead of searching for the phantoms of her past. But her search is finally rewarded when she finds her biological sister Veronica, and the two have an emotionally intense reunion. Alas, Elizabeth dies at age 77 before Monique can expose her to the authorities, and at her funeral Monique watches from inside her car with Jonathan. “Don’t you want to go see her?” he asks. “I’ve already seen her,” she dismissively and bitterly replies. My husband Charles came home from work while Not My Family was just half an hour in, and he was as moved by it as I was; though imdb.com doesn’t list a screenwriter, whoever he, she or they were did a superb job dramatizing a story that, if anything, was even grimmer in real life than it is in the movie. “Today, she works fearlessly in the Washington metropolitan area, helping affected families and raising awareness,” wrote The U.S. Sun reporter Steve Brenner. “She talks about kids in fifth grade being taught how to groom classmates, and admits one case involved a 16-year-old pregnant pimp.” (Wait until Lifetime’s producers, writers, and directors get hold of that story!) “People just need to be believed,” Monique told Brenner. “I told multiple people at high school that I was being sexually abused. But some folk don’t want to get involved.”