‘Abducted Off the Street’: Kenya Moore Talks ‘Scary’ Side of Making True-Crime Lifetime Movie

There’s a little-discussed fact that roughly 100,000 Black women and girls are reported missing in the United States each year. Abducted Off the Street: The Carlesha Gaither Story, a gripping new Lifetime movie, aims to change that by drawing attention to one true story that, fortunately, had a rare happy ending.

Kenya Moore stars as Keisha Gaither, the mother of 22-year-old Philadelphia nursing assistant Carlesha Freeland-Gaither (Riele Downs), who was abducted in 2014.

“When I first read the script, I had to put it down after the first 10 pages. I thought, I don’t know if I can do this,” Moore says. “The subject matter is hard but very important to show and tell.”

Moore has also appeared for more than a decade on The Real Housewives of Atlanta, but for this project, she left the reality glamour and catfights behind. “This is not any Real Housewives show,” she says, noting the role required her to think about “what it might be like if something [similar] happened to me or someone in my family. That’s a scary place to even try to go.”

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Carlesha had been walking home when she was snatched off the street and pushed into a vehicle, then held hostage for nearly three days by a man who’d kidnapped before. The story moves back and forth between Carlesha’s terrifying ordeal and her parents’ horror and heartbreak, which turns to action.

We see Keisha forcefully handing out flyers, and she insists police hold a press conference and put the family on camera, where she pleads for the public’s help. One line in particular resonated with Moore: “Keisha says, ‘You know how people like Carlesha get found? When the people who love them get loud.’”

Abducted Off the Street: The Carlesha Gaither Story, Movie Premiere, Saturday, February 10, 8/7c, Lifetime