- Kamiyah Mobley was a newborn when she was abducted from a Florida hospital in 1998 by Gloria Williams, the woman who would raise her as her own.
- Now 21, Mobley has been reunited with her biological family, but still calls her kidnapper "Mom."
- The new Lifetime movie Stolen By My Mother: The Kamiyah Mobley Story, airing on January 18, takes liberties to tell a fictionalized version of Mobley's story. It stars Niecy Nash and was produced by Good Morning America's Robin Roberts.
It's the kind of story you can't forget even if you wanted to. And it's a story that's still unfolding for the people whose lives were forever affected by one action taken in a Jacksonville, FL hospital in the summer of 1998.
With Stolen By My Mother: The Kamiyah Mobley Story premiering on the Lifetime Channel on January 18, even more people will be haunted by this complicated and completely true tale, which is still making headlines in 2020.
In the moving film, part of Lifetime's 2020 Ripped From the Headlines series, Niecy Nash, Rayven Symone Ferrell, and Ta'Rhonda Jones play three strong woman hostage to an unbelievable situation. In 1998, Gloria Williams (Nash) stole infant Kamiyah Mobley (Ferrell) from a hospital and raised her as her own, leaving her biological mother (Jones) adrift for 18 years.
"You have some people who make decisions in their brokenness, and it only hurts them. And there are other people who make decisions in their pain, and that ripple effect is far and wide," Nash told Robin Roberts, who is producing the film, of her character's choice.
The movie unpacks the women's emotional tangle without coming to any black-and-white conclusions. "To a certain extent, you don't know what side to take," Jones told Roberts during the same set visit.
Here's what happened to Mobley, and where she is now—so you can decide whose side to take for yourself.
What happened to Kamiyah Mobley?
On July 10, 1998, an infant named Kamiyah Mobley was born in a hospital in Jacksonville, Florida. A few hours after 16-year-old Shanara Mobley gave birth, a woman in scrubs claiming to be a nurse arrived to keep the young mother company. The woman, who was in her 30s, took the newborn out of the room for tests—and never returned.
For the next 18 years, the woman—named Gloria Williams—raised Mobley as her own in South Carolina, under the name Alexis Kelli Manigo. Williams's family was not suspicious, as she had been pregnant recently, and had kept her miscarriage a secret. Her body continued to experience the symptoms of pregnancy, including a swollen belly and breasts, a result of pseudocyesis (a phantom pregnancy).
Williams felt pressure from her then-boyfriend, Charles Manigo, to have a child. Yet she believes his abuse is what led to her miscarriage, and to another tragedy: Williams's two sons from a previous marriage were taken from her home, deemed unsafe, to live with their father.
"My abusive ex asked me to have a baby, he wanted me to have a baby...told me it would make him stable. I wanted to believe that," Williams said during her trial in 2018. She drove to the hospital "on autopilot," stared at the infants in the nursing ward, and wandered to Mobley's room, where Mobley opened up about not knowing what to do with her child.
She knows it was "not logical," but the thought occurred to Williams that the baby could "help" her relationship with Manigo. Ultimately, though, the baby is what forced her to leave Manigo and his abuse. "I just thought to myself I can’t have him around her, I can’t do it, she deserves better and that’s when I had enough courage to leave the relationship," Williams said.
In South Carolina, the infant Mobley was miles from her mother, Shanara, who was in later footage seen sobbing in her hospital bed after Kamiyah was taken. Shanara went on to have four more children, and won $1.2 million after settling a lawsuit against the University Medical Center—though naturally, she never got over the mysterious disappearance of her first child.
According to interviews with Mobley, she and Williams had an excellent relationship. So when Gloria revealed the truth of her identity, 16-year-old Mobley decided not to speak out.
A year-and-a-half after Williams's confession, she was summoned to Jacksonville's Sheriff's office. “[Kamiyah] wanted me to run. I told her I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t leave her. I couldn’t do it. You know? I couldn’t have a life like that. I was already in this for too long,” Williams said.
Williams was brought to trial, during which she made a full—and apologetic—confession. She was sentenced to 18 years in prison, and was denied a reduced sentencing in 2019.
Where is Kamiyah Mobley today?
Mobley is now 21, and caught between worlds. She answers to both "Kamiyah" and "Alexis," depending on which family she's with. On her Instagram page, Mobley leans into this duality. Her display name is "Kamiyah Mobley Alexis Manigo," and her bio says, "Florida Baby But The South Raised Me."
"This child is in the midst of an incredible identity crisis," Iyanla Vanzant concluded during an emotional special about Mobley on the OWN network in 2019.
After the trial, Mobley continued to live in Williams's house in South Carolina, but that changed recently. In December 2019, Mobley's father, Craig Aiken, joyously posted on Facebook that Mobley was moving to Jacksonville, FL to live with her biological family.
"I fit right in," Mobley told First Coast News back in 2018. "I'm doing better than people think."
However, Mobley's relationship with her biological family appears to be more complicated than that cheery interview let on, mostly due to her sustained relationship with Williams.
"I need my birth mother to be okay with the fact that I love the woman who raised me," Mobley said on her emotional appearance on Iyanla: Fix My Life, which ultimately concluded in a heated fight with the host.
During her trial, Williams addressed the child she abducted with honesty. "I will always love you, always. But you’re not mine, your mother and father are sitting right here," she said.
Mobley and Shanara were not on speaking terms for some time.
Every year after her daughter disappeared, Shanara Mobley celebrated her July 10 birthday by cutting a cake. In an interview with the Florida Times-Union, Mobley said finding out her daughter was alive was "one of the happiest days of [her] life."
But their reunion has not been so sweet. Shanara feels she is competing with a kidnapper for her daughter's love. Mobley regularly calls Williams; she's stored under the name "Mommy" in her phone. According to the interview, Shanara did not receive any acknowledgement from Mobley on Mother's Day.
"I wish, sometimes, that she had never come home," Shanara confessed, tearfully.
At the time of that interview, the mother and daughter were not on speaking terms. However, given the fact that Mobley moved in with her biological family, that might be changing.
Catch the fictionalization on January 18—but remember to take the portrayal with a grain of salt. Mobley's biological family is not keen on the movie.
"Not my story, not going to teach anybody anything about what happened," Aiken, Mobley's father, told ABC. "Not going to help anybody prevent what happened. Plus, it's not a true story...only for profit."
Ultimately, this much is true: There are no fairytale endings in the story of Kamiyah Mobley, or Alexis Manigo.
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