`Fear' Packed With Heartbreak -- `Race Against Fear' Is All About Heartbreak

You may remember her as the pubescent girl in 1993's "Jurassic Park," who saves the day with her computer knowledge. You also may remember her, much taller, in a brief appearance in the sequel "The Lost World: Jurassic Park."

Now a college student, Ariana Richards is not a little girl anymore, and her latest project takes on a mature and frightening theme.

In "Race Against Fear: A Moment of Truth Movie," airing Monday at 8 p.m. on KING-TV, Richards plays Mickey, a young track athlete aspiring to perfection in the wake of the death of her father, a world-class runner.

"She's really got strong dreams," says Richards. "She really wants to go for her dreams, go to the Olympics. And, of course, she's also shattered in the beginning because her dad dies. It was his dream for her to go and run, so she follows that dream for him. It makes her vulnerable."

To achieve her goals, Mickey turns her energies and her trust to her new coach, Carl Johnson (William Bumiller). When Mickey's grades and social life begin to suffer because of her athletic activities, her mother, Margaret (Susan Blakely), begins to worry. Those worries turn out to be well-founded when Mickey's coach takes advantage of her trust and desire to please and rapes her.

"The events leading up to the rape are really subtle," says Richards. "When she mentions something (he did) to another student, they say it's nothing unusual. So even though she recognized signs that there was something wrong, the other students and her peers just brushed it off like it was nothing. So she tried to forget about it, but it just kept getting worse."

Mickey wants to bring Johnson to justice, especially when it's discovered that a former student of Johnson's, Kaycee King (Tracee Ellis Ross), also suffered the same fate. Now famous, King doesn't want to endanger her success and help Mickey to put Johnson away.

"It's just horrendous," says Richards. "It's like the rape keeps happening to her. All her friends in school turn against her; she's off the team; she can't achieve her goals. She's all alone in this, except for her mom. She's the one who supports Mickey. And if it wasn't for her mom, I don't know how she would have gotten through it, or how she possibly could have fought against him.

"It's really the story of a teen and a family winning a good fight."

For Richards, the role meant some intense emotional and physical scenes, which she actually enjoyed. "I actually started loving the really emotional scenes, the really challenging ones. They became my favorites. I couldn't get enough of the real physical ones."

Was it scary at all, playing a rape scene? "I think it would be a lot more scary if I wasn't friends with the guy I was working with. We were able to talk it through so we both felt comfortable, and that really helped a lot."