A mother attempts to reunite with her estranged daughter, a member of R. Kelly‘s alleged sex cult, in this clip from tonight’s two-part finale of the Lifetime docuseries Surviving R. Kelly.
During the episode, Michelle Kramer recounts how her daughter Dominique Gardner, then working as a dental assistant in Chicago, fell into Kelly’s circle, with the singer eventually asking that she move to Atlanta.
“At this point, she was 21, 22. What could I do? I had to make the hardest choice,” Kramer said. “All I could do is pray and hope that just one day she would wake up and come home.”
After nearly a year without seeing her daughter, Kramer finally spotted Gardner – who looked “unrecognizable” – in a TMZ video with another of Kelly’s girlfriends Joycelyn Savage; TMZ posted the video following several articles questioned the welfare of the women in Kelly’s alleged “sex cult.”
The TMZ video showed Savage and Gardner shopping in Beverly Hills and Kramer, “putting two and two together,” descended on the ritzy Los Angeles district and located her daughter staying in a nearby hotel. She managed to contact her daughter using the front desk’s phone, a moment captured in the above video.
“She cried like a little girl just hurting for her mommy,” Kramer said of the tearful reunion over the phone. “I said, ‘Baby, can I come back please?’ And she said, ‘Yes momma, come back at 6.’”
The final two episodes of the six-hour Surviving R. Kelly, “All the Missing Girls” and “Black Girls Matter,” premieres Saturday night on Lifetime. Previous episodes have featured testimonials from Kelly’s victims and a deep look in the singer’s sex tape trial.