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Monique Smith is a woman who waged a long battle to find out the truth of her identity and family. Her story will be explored in Lifetime's Not My Family: The Monique Smith Story, which is scheduled to premiere this April 12, 2025.
Not My Family: The Monique Smith Story follows Smith's inspiring journey from being abused and mistreated as a child to launching a decades-long quest to find out her true identity.
The Lifetime movie was written by Sylvia L. Jones, who is a former news journalist turned screenwriter, and premieres tomorrow on the channel. It will be available to stream the next day on the Lifetime streaming service.
Who is Monique Smith?
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Monique Smith is a woman who started a search for her true identity after having a tumultuous childhood. Smith grew up in Baltimore and she was abused as a child by her mother and her two uncles.
Tired of the life she was living, Smith ran away from home when she was just 18 years old. She fled to Florida and fell into sex work to earn a living. She eventually got married and then even got divorced. Smith then decided to start a new life by first finding out the truth about her identity.
Growing up, Smith was never allowed to see her birth certificate. She asked her mother for it a number of times but was refused on different pretexts. Without her birth certificate, she could not carve out a career for herself.
Smith could not join the Marines or Baltimore’s police department and could not even be enrolled in college. For years, she worked for Johns Hopkins Hospital praying that they would not ask for her identification card.
Smith had had enough living like this and she then decided to go on a quest to find answers to the questions she had been asking since her childhood, and most importantly get hold of her birth certificate.
What happened to Smith?
When Monique Smith went on a search for answers about her identity, she was faced with more questions. She discovered that the family she grew up with was not her biological family and that her mother had sought multiple replacement Social Security cards for her.
Each of these cards was under a different name. Smith told A&E True Crime in an interview how she found out that the woman who raised her kidnapped her in New York when she was just one year old.
Smith had also called the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children asking the agency to add her to their list of missing children. She told them how she was also a missing kid who was not reported.
She then became Missing Child Number 1201258 and at the age of 55, Monique Smith finally managed to get her hands on her birth certificate. She learned that her birth name was Simboli Ruffin.
Smith also found out that her birth mother had died a long time ago and was from New York, and she had six sisters. However, the identity of her father could not be known.
Lifetime's Not My Family: The Monique Smith Story details Smith's journey of discovering her real identity and having to convince people to help her along the way. It brings to us the story of how she sought justice for herself after years of neglect and abuse.
