Kara Robinson Chamberlain doesn’t remember every second of being held captive by a suspected serial killer almost 21 years ago.
“The way that my memory of the trauma functions, it’s like snapshots in a flipbook—and there are some pages missing,” the now 36-year-old mother of two exclusively told E! News’ Francesca Amiker ahead of the Feb. 11 premiere of Lifetime’s The Girl Who Escaped: The Kara Robinson Story. “The filming was filling in gaps in my first-person memory.”
As an author and advocate for trauma survivors, she’s spoken extensively about her experience. But watching her story unfold in its entirety—from being abducted from her friend’s front yard by Richard Evonitz to being reunited with her family after she managed to escape 18 hours later—stirred up some feelings she wasn’t expecting.
Particularly, she recalled, while watching the moment where her mom Debra (played by Cara Buono) bursts into the police station asking where her daughter is. Enter teenage Kara (Katie Douglas), who sees Debra and utters one word: “Mom?”
“They both have this quavering,” Kara described, “and it was so emotional, and I was so surprised. I think it impacts me to see it from a different perspective—my mom’s perspective—and now as a mother, too. The things that I experienced are not what people would expect and that’s why it’s important to tell these stories.”
