In 2011, the news broke that 51 year-old Doug Hutchinson had married 16 year-old Courtney Stodden.  I can still remember my initial reaction.

“Who?”

Though the stories all made Doug Hutchinson out to be a some sort of household name, I wasn’t sure who he was.  This was despite the fact that I had seen The Green Mile and Lost and a few other shows in which he had roles.  With the exception of The Green Mile‘s Percy Wetmore, the majority of Hutchinson’s roles were small and he never made enough of an impression for me to really remember him.  Doug Hutchinson was not a big star and yet, all of the initial stories about his marriage to Courtney focused on Doug and not on the 16 year-old girl that he had married.  The stories often mentioned that Courtney was blonde and a few found an excuse to list her measurements but few really seemed to give much thought to how a 16 year-old ends up married to a 51 year-old.  Courtney’s mother was often portrayed as being the ultimate stage mom, pushing her daughter into marrying an older man out of a belief that it would help her career (as if Doug Hutchinson was some sort of power player as opposed to being an occasionally employed character actor).

Today, it’s fashionable for everyone to claim that they were outraged from the moment that they heard about the Hutchinson/Stodden marriage.  At the time the story came out, though, most people treated it as just another bit of a salacious gossip from “Hollyweird.”  Doug and Courtney appeared on reality shows, including quite a few that featured them getting marriage counseling while the cameras rolled.  If Doug was usually portrayed as being an old lech, Courtney was often portrayed as being a young gold digger.  (Again, the fact that Doug Hutchinson was hardly a star rarely seemed to factor into these portrayals.  He was an actor who had co-starred with Tom Hanks and hence, people assumed he had money.)  It’s only now, with the marriage over, that people have really started to acknowledge that Courtney Stodden was a victim of both Doug Hutchinson’s grooming and the world’s tabloid culture.

Lifetime’s I Was A Child Bride: The Courtney Stodden Story dramatizes the story of Courtney’s life and her marriage to Dough Hutchinson.  The film was produced by Stodden and she also provides the narration, commenting on what’s happening onscreen and trying to explain what was going through her head at the time.  In the dramatization, she’s played by Holly J. Barrett while Doug Hutchinson is played, to creepy perfection, by Doug Savant.  Maggie Lawson plays Krista Stoddard, Courtney’s mother.  The film follows Courtney as she goes from being pushed into stardom by her mother to then being ordered to give up her career by Doug.  When the story of Doug and Courtney’s marriage comes out, Doug mourns that his career is over while Krista excitedly pulls up every online story.  When Courtney points out that most of the stories are bad, Krista chirps that all publicity is good publicity.  (The film implies that Krista is the one who leaked the details of Courtney and Doug’s marriage to the press.)  Soon, teenage Courtney is the breadwinner for both her 51 year-old husband and her mother.

The film is ultimately effective, even if it’s sometimes just as salacious as the tabloids that the movie criticizes.  I was proud of Courtney for having finally broken free from Doug.  That said, the story leaves quite a few unanswered questions, especially about the extent of the role that Krista played in Doug and Courtney getting married.  Parents are always told to be aware of who their children are talking to online.  But what do you do when the parents know and just don’t care?