"In return, they said, 'Will you sing'?" Richards explains to me. "So I said yes, because it's for a good cause and we want to raise awareness about kidney cancer."

Unfortunately, the cancer message got lost along the way, because as soon as video of Richards' performance hit the Internet, the trashing began.

"I'm clearly not a singer," she says. "I wasn't doing it to show off my pipes. Thank God I wasn't singing the national anthem. But I thought it would be fun…I had no idea the backlash I would get."

As for her critics, Richards said they need not worry about her ever singing in public again.

"It took everything in me to get up there and do that," says Richards. "My dad and my sister kept saying, 'Just remember you're doing this for Mom,' so that's how I got through it. It's just unfortunate that doing something good was turned into such a negative."