Hidden True Crime - GABBY PETITO: In Memory of Gabby | Analysis Continues and Signs of Domestic Violence

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

This episode was recorded on September 22, 2021, but we never shared it until now. Gabby Petito's body was found three days before recording this episode. She had been strangled to death, just as Dr John had explained was a concern, after seeing Gabby demonstrate to Moab Police how Brian held her jaw during their argument that day. We continue to assess what we saw in the body cam footage, and we dedicate this episode to all victims of domestic violence. Host, Criminal psychologist Dr John Matthias, has worked for years with victims of domestic violence. Domestic Abuse Hotline: [phone] About Hidden True Crime: What started as a simple conversation at their dinner table became a captivating podcast. Join the dynamic duo of Dr. John Matthias, a criminal psychologist, and Lauren Matthias, an investigative journalist, as they delve into the psychological facets of unthinkable crimes every week. Their unique perspectives and in-depth analysis offer a fresh take on true crime storytelling. Thank you for your support through sponsorships, subscribing, listening, and becoming a Patreon member at Patreon.com/HiddenTrueCrime Our Sponsors:* Check out Acorns: https://acorns.com/HIDDENTRUECRIME* Check out Acorns: https://acorns.com/HIDDENTRUECRIME* Check out Armoire and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://www.armoire.style* Check out Effecty and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://www.effecty.com* Check out Happy Mammoth and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://happymammoth.comSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/hidden-a-true-crime-podcast1836/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Quince uses premium materials like European linen, organic cotton, but they cut out the middleman. So everything is priced way lower than you'd expect. Refresh. your every day with luxury you can actually use. Head to quince.com slash hidden true crime for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's quince, quince, u I and c e.com slash hidden true crime for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash hidden true crime. This episode that we are about to listen to, it was originally recorded live with hidden true crime on September 22nd, 2021, but we never actually posted it on our podcast until today. And we have decided to share it now. Just three days before recording this episode back in 2021, Gabby Petito's body was found in Spread Creek,

a camping area outside of Jackson Hole, Wyoming on the eastern boundary of Grand Teton National Park. The police body camp footage that we talked about in our last episode and that we're going to continue to discuss in part of this episode, well, that was recorded by Moab, Utah Police. on August 12th, 2021. After witnesses called 911 about a domestic disturbance and police pulled Gabby and Brian Laundry, her boyfriend, over. The body camp footage was released by police while the world looked for missing Gabby, hoping to find her and bring her home.

But just days after that body cam footage was released, her body was found. Gabby had been strangled to death. Just as Dr. John had explained was a concern after seeing Gabby in the body camp footage demonstrate to Moa police how Brian laundry he held her jaw during the argument that day. Despite that, though, Utah police let Brian off without any charges after they pulled the couple over. They labeled Gabby the instigator, and they even gave Brian a hotel room for the night. The Teton County coroner, he concluded that Gabby Petito was strangled, a victim of domestic violence, and that her body was left in the wilderness for nearly a month.

She lost her life two weeks after Moab police let the couple go without any charges. In this episode, we continue to assess and talk about what we saw in the body camp footage. Only this time, Gabby was no longer missing. We knew her fate. And we dedicate this episode to all victims of domestic violence. We drove by and the gentleman was slapping the girl. He was slapping her? Yes.

And then we stopped. They ran up and down the sidewalk. He proceeded to hit her. off in the car and they drove off. I had to go earlier today to pick up a prescription. This is a strange story. But when I was checking out, there was a young woman who, she was like a dead ringer for Gabby Petito.

And I was just like, whoa, like, what the heck? So she was probably around the same age. She looked a lot like her. So, you know, it was kind of a strange thing. And then because I was driving home, I got behind a van. It had California place, but it was the same van that they were in. And I thought, wow, this is crazy.

But it focused me on the fact that we want to focus on Gabby tonight, and we want to do a tribute. And it seemed like those strange coincidences were directing my attention to particular tragedy in this particular case. My mind has been on this a lot. Of course, we still are going to cover the Daveo case and are in the middle of covering that. But I think like a lot of people, this has really kind of consumed us. I want to dedicate this episode tonight to Gabby Petito and all the victims of domestic violence.

And hopefully, you know, we're going to pick up where we left off on the body cam footage analysis we were doing. But I would also like to answer some questions or talk about domestic violence in general and maybe help hopefully if we're lucky to raise some awareness of domestic violence and You know if we're even luckier maybe we can help a few people get out of violent relationships or maybe even save a life and if we can do that then everything we've ever done would be worth it So this is a really important topic and it's it's a really heartfelt topic for me. I've been involved with domestic, my first job ever, one of my first jobs ever in Las Vegas was with an organization called Safe Nest. They're still here. They started

the first women's shelter in Las Vegas in the 70s, I believe. I got a job moonlighting with them running batterers treatment groups, or in other words, groups for abusers. That was one of the first things I ever did out of grad school. I've been involved in. in domestic violence treatment and interventions and policy even a little bit later on. So I'm passionate about this. Gabby, Petito, certainly gives us an opportunity to really dive into this issue. If other domestic violence victims could have just a fraction of the attention, she's received. And we understand that, that she has received a special amount of attention.

But I think what Gabby's legacy can be and what her memory can be is the ability to give more attention to those other people and to domestic violence and take it upon ourselves to recognize signs. And so we want to embrace who Gabby Petito is and was and what she stands for and keep her memory alive by John talking a little bit more about it. And for many of you, you know that we did do before Gabby's body was found, we did an analysis of the body cam footage or at least the first 12 minutes, For the first 12 minutes, Dr. John and I sat there and we analyzed about 12 minutes of the body camp footage. So today, I know that many people have asked us

to finish the analysis. It's clearly a very long video. I have cut it down to about 20 more minutes, 20 minutes. And again, as John said, this is a show dedicated to all domestic violence victims. Bear with us while we pull this up. Start with the 911 call. Grand Caddy Sheriff's Office.

Are you able to get a description of the entire? Hi, can you hear me, sir? I'm right on the corner of Main Street by Moonflower, and we're driving by, and I'd like to report a domestic dispute to Florida with the white fan, Florida license plate, white land, gentlemen, five, six years. They just drove off. They're going down Main Street, Main Street from Moonflower.

But what do you say? What were they doing? We drove by and the gentleman was slapping the girl. Yes, and then we stopped. They ran up and down the sidewalk. He proceeded to hit her, hopped in the car, and they drove off. Again, one witness definitely saw. In the previous body cam footage, the first 12 minutes, some of the critical moments that we talked about were number one, that when the cop, when the police officer separated Gabby from Brian, she was quite emotional.

Let's go back. That when they were in the car together and they separated them and one of the officers asked Brian what was going on. The first thing he asked was, have you spoken to Gabby as if he was looking for information about what she had said? Now, of course, in retrospect, I think we understand that they had some altercation or he had been hitting her or slapping her as one witness identified. And I think he was concerned that she was going to tell the police that he was going to

look. So we have screen share on Zoom with the body can put it. So bear with us while we pull this up just a second. I don't know my phone. I don't really go. I don't see. I'm on my own. So I was saying let's just go for walking to trying to get the keys for resources.

Back out. Get away. Excuse me. So I said you post her to create some business. Obviously, right? What happened? Could you pause it? So this idea that that he was going to be abandoned or left alone without his phone is we talked about that briefly.

So that I think that will help set up to stage two, right? That there's this issue of abandonment I think is going to turn out to be a really, really critical element of this situation. There's a lot of research supporting the idea that abandonment plays of large parts, part in domestic violence situations, actually. Don Dutton is a psychologist up in Canada who wrote a book called The Abusive Personality. And his argument is and has been for many years now, going back to the 90s, that abusers tend to have insecure

attachments going back to early childhood, that they aren't securely attached, which means essentially that this fear of abandonment potentially depending on the type of attachment they have it figures prominently in their behaviors so here we see a perfect example of that right we see Brian saying he does have a phone by the way he's saying he doesn't so that's not totally accurate but I don't really have a phone is what he said yeah so here we see him saying that if she takes my phone and leaves I'm on my own, right? He's expressing the fear of abandonment. Duden refers to these types of abusers as borderline abusers.

And he's one of the few psychologists I've ever seen who actually talks about how abusive men have a lot of features of borderline personality disorder. He makes a strong argument that which is unusual, because most people, diagnosed with borderline personality disorder tend to be females but he actually kind of turns the table a little bit and says a lot of abusers have those qualities and primary among those qualities are this fear of abandonment and rejection and that goes back to early attachment

behaviors so and specifically for if there's any mental health folks listening to this insecure, ambivalent slash anxious type attachments are the most likely to fear abandoned. As adults, that's called insecure preoccupied attachment. So any of those attachment styles would, and I don't know, just so I'm clear about this, I don't know Brian enough to make this assessment. I'm talking theoretically and I'm speculating here, but I'm basing this on some research in the domestic violence area. And, you know, I don't know if this applies to him,

but certainly this is a really important moment because he's expressing his fear of abandonment and he is showing us something that's very consistent with some of the research in this area. What Brian was trying to do was abandon her. He took her keys. he took her phone that's in the witness statement that came out today what he was doing was similar you know did look like he was about to abandon her and what he ended up doing so i don't think

we can judge gabby on a fear of abandonment here and wanting to get back into her car and also i think you have to see you know looking at it now i think you'd have to say that um whatever anxiety the police officers were seen in her was was driven by the fact that she's traumatized you know what they're seen is fear and trauma this is yes she's she might have some fear of abandonment but that's real like he he tries to run out of the car so um you know all of these things that they're seen in her the the um oCD and you know her how she's hyperventilating and hysterical. I mean, I think, you know, that's not an atypical response from a victim of domestic violence in terms of, you know, she knows that he was hitting her previously. She's afraid

and she's not only afraid in this moment, she's looking ahead. She knows that, you know, typically in these moments when there's some type of outside intervention, that her fear is going to increase because she knows what's going to happen as a result of this in terms of he's going to be angry. He's going to potentially take out this moment on her. He's going to blame her for it, right? Like, she's looking into the future. She's been there before, presumably. Now that we know more information, we can say, this is nothing new to her. She's been through this. She knows what's going to come from this. He's going to be really upset. He's going to be potentially physically violent again with her. He's going to chastise her, right? She knows what's coming.

So she's afraid and she's probably traumatized. So this isn't about her being a victim of domestic violence. Here we go. So you close her and she hit you. She was like a push and she jumped on me. She was already swinging and I was like, you might lifting up your rights. You want to say something really quickly too.

Scratches don't happen because of slaps and hits. Scratches happen when you're defending yourself and trying to get away from someone or maybe trying to get an object back that they've stolen like a phone. Just all right. Those are defensive wounds. You see those types of wounds on, you know, victims that are being strangled or being, right, that are being held or, or constrained or that's the type of marks he has. Right. I suppose, fingernails. But I'm not to lose or tender or anything like that. I don't try to make her calm down and be like, look, everyone's watching.

Do I see my heart rate up, whenever the lights flash on. So again, he's blaming the fact that he's going 42 miles per hour and a 15 miles per hour, uh, you know, speed limit as adrenaline and he saw the lights and that's why he sped up. To me, it's still kind of crazy that they just dismissed that as, oh yeah, okay. I see the lights, you see the lights. And you're going to just take off. Again, 42 and a 15. That's you know if she takes any medications,

is what they're asking him. And his response was, she's crazy. Right. This is a really important moment, because I'm sure many victims have heard that, you know. Maybe he can maybe most victims. of domestic violence and heard some version of that. So he's doing a few things with that, obviously.

He's trying to get the police to agree with them. He's blaming her, right? He's blaming her for his behavior, so he's doing some victim blaming. He's dehumanizing her. He's painting her as someone who's crazy and therefore shouldn't be taken seriously. And he's gaslighting, right?

He's saying that her version of reality or whatever she tells you isn't real. That, you know, because she's crazy, she's not to be trusted. So don't listen to her, right? Like when they're making this assessment of who the aggressor is, they're listening to all this, right? And the more rapport he has with them, the more seriously they're going to take it.

So I think you've got a combination of things going on there. You've got gaslighting, victim blaming, and some dehumanizing. And that's a potent combination. You know, he's able to accomplish that with one word, right? And to me, it's always a bit of a red, if somebody says they're crazy and just dismisses them so simply, that's a little bit of a red flag. I think calling someone crazy is never a valid analysis of a complex situation. She appeared to look crazy by the very person who drove her there.

And I think that this is the reason that Gabby came out of the van and the first thing she said, is I'm OCD. Her dad has confirmed on Dr. Phil that she's never been diagnosed with OCD, which is what we suspected. This is what he tells her. You're crazy. You have OCD. You're over the top.

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I think for victims of abuse, you know, there's so much shame and there's so much embarrassment and there's so much fear that there is this tendency to blame themselves. And, you know, because the abusers blame them, they internalize that, right? So I think I think you're seeing this self. blame as a function of her being in an abusive relationship rather than her having mental health problems you know the police saw it through the lens of mental health but you know we'll talk about that a little later that one of the police officers keeps talking about you know having them take showers to calm down which is fine you know i mean i understand what he's doing i'm not

i don't want to be critical of the police because this is a very complex situation and you know i've I told Lauren, the number of police officers that could have gotten this right is probably very, very few. And it's happening quickly in real time. To make the assessment that there's some real risk here, I think, would have been difficult. The officer by suggesting that they all take showers to calm down is, you know, he's trying to be relatable and personable. But what he's also doing is he, there's something that therapists talk about, we talk about

the idea of what we call countertransference, which is that when we're, when I'm in a prison evaluating an inmate, for example, the question always is how much of my stuff is coming into play, how much of my issues and my biases are coming into play? And that's what we call, and that's based upon my life experience and my history. And there's always some potential for my personal stuff to get in the way of my interpretation. So that's called countertransference. So the police officer is dealing a lot, you know, he's got a lot of countertransference here around anxiety and mental health issues and he talks about his wife. And that in and of itself is not a problem.

It only becomes a problem if it starts to bias his perception. So, you know, police officers, as far as I know, aren't really trained to look at their own internal stuff or their own personal issues and understand how that could bias and interpretation of events, but any therapist listening to this would understand the importance of that and how important it is when we're dealing with people that are highly emotional or distraught or dealing with some really deep problems for us to kind of keep our stuff out. Everything she's saying is same thing.

I haven't heard what he said, but that's what he said is also the witness saying, I never saw him hit her, I saw him show her, but I couldn't tell you if it was an aggression against her or a defense against her. So at this point, it sounds like C, is a primary aggressive. So that's the point where they decide she's the aggressor. And this part is really interesting to me. So I'm giving a heads up. They're about to go tell Brian that they've decided she's the aggressor.

And so a quick comment on that part. You know, it's not clear what the officers knew in terms of the 911 call. Right. So I think the officers received conflicting information about what had happened initially. So I think that was a little confusing to them. You know, if it was clear, if they had received the information that Brian was hitting her and that they took off, that he locked her out and then he was hitting her and then they took off, you know, I wonder if they would have seen it differently.

I don't think that's the information they received. So it's a little confusing about, you know, they're starting off with some imperfect information about what happened. And I think that puts them in a little bit of a difficult situation in terms of really understanding the situation. You just learned that. And what did he do? He laughed. Yeah, right. So this is a really.

pivotal moment I think when when I first when we first watched this we didn't get to comment on it because we were out of time that night but I talked about with Lauren the difference that so therapists are trained to make a distinction between what's called content and process content is the is what's being said so content is in this case Gabby the him being told Brian being told that Gabby's the primary aggressor. And then process is what happens between the officer. It's the nonverbals. It's the behavior that happens between the officer and Brian. So when Brian learns about this content, he laughs. And one of the things therapists look at is, is there congruence between what's being

said and the reaction to what's being said? So, for example, if somebody comes into my office and they say that their father just died and they're laughing hysterically, that would be incongruent. The content wouldn't match the process. The content wouldn't match the reaction. So you have something like that going on here, right? That if you're told that your fiancé is the aggressor, and you find that funny, you know, that's a strange reaction to the situation. So that was one thing that we went through this initially that really stood out to me. Like, now again, officers aren't going to be trained to really really pick up on this. But it's one of those moments that might feel peculiar to someone, though. Like, why is he laughing? Right? Like, and the answer to that question, I think,

I mean, we don't know for sure why he's laughing. It could be we could argue that it's a nervous laughter. He's just, you know, the whole situation is very tense. So maybe he's just relieving, you know, a little bit of anxiety through his laughter. But I think the more compelling explanation is that he's laughing because he knows it's not true. He's laughing because in the context of their relationship and their history and probably some abuse on his part, that he finds it, he can't control himself. It's like a laughter that is spontaneous

based on what the officer says, but I think he actually is laughing because he knows how wrong the officers are and he feels like he probably got away with something. And it's interesting, that after this moment, he actually relaxes quite a bit. You know, I've said in the other body cam footage that he's kind of high-strung. You know, he's really working hard to suppress his emotions.

And it looks to me like there's some hostility that he's suppressing. I said that on Friday and some anger. He's really doing his best to kind of tamp that down and keep it under control. And you'll notice that after this moment, after this laughter, which is like, man, Man, did you guys get this wrong? Like, really? You're gonna call her the aggressor? Okay, like he's, it's such a spontaneous laughter

that it's totally inconsistent with what he's being told, right? A more normal response, I think, in this situation should be something like, you know, let's talk about that. I don't think I agree with you. Is there any way we can, you know, I don't agree with you that she was aggressor. I think it was just a mis-con, communication and right if if it is something less serious then then I think he's probably not

going to react that way so I have this real sense here that um the laughter is not only inappropriate but it's in in some ways it's like in poker it's a tell the tell here is that he knows that this is he knows in their relationship history that there's been violence that he's in control and has been in control and it's absurd to call her the aggressor. So if there is a talent here at all, and psychologists generally don't talk about that kind of stuff, you know, that's more like poker language. But if I were to point out a towel, this would be one of those moments. I watched this several times now, this moment.

When they're walking up to him, he is stressed out. They're talking about DV. They're talking about possible arrests. He's letting him know all this legal. Jarden he is he is nervous and the moment that they say this that's when he laughs and if you keep watching as we keep going notice he's going to keep laughing and smiling here and there what else he he relaxes he this is a pivotal moment because the interactions change and he becomes more um he becomes friendlier and more amiable with the police um so i i i think

I think he really, until this point, I think he was really worried that he might be the one arrested. Clearly. You know, I think one of the things the police didn't do, and I don't know, I'm not sure how the training works here, but they're not really trying to get a history of the relationship or the violence. And I mean, I understand why they wouldn't, they probably don't have time. You know, they're probably dealing with calls all day, similar to this.

Like, they just aren't going to have the time. aren't going to have the time to get into the relationship history like, you know, with both of them. You know, how did you guys meet? How long have you been together? You know, I mean, all that kind of stuff. So, you know, that's one of the luxuries that, as a forensic psychologist, for example, I have all the time in the world to kind of dig into the history of relationship and to catch inconsistencies and, you know, to really figure out if there might be some violence. The officers don't have that. You know, they're just trying to make an assessment and get out. But, you know, one of his concerns is that they're going to get that history,

and she's going to tell them that history. And the reason I think she doesn't tell that history is because she's concerned for her own safety. I think she knows if she says, you know what? Yeah, we have a history of violence. He hits me, chokes me. And she wants to be with him and continue this journey. She's going to pay a price for it. Right.

Of course, we already know she did pay a price, but in retrospect, looking at this, she doesn't want to reveal that history because she knows what's coming if she does. Smiling again, just notice. And he look at this, he smiles over. He goes, yeah, a 22-year-old blonde, small girl, and then he smiles. Like, he knows exactly what he's up against, that she's helpless against him. Right. And he's mild like that. It's that inconsistency between what's being said, the content and his reaction or his behaviors,

content and process. Right. You can't see this difficult to get through the other with her. Smiling again. He's much more relaxed now than he was. Look at a paper with the court day. I get rid of the four days.

Laughing, smiling, he's a different person. And smiling like he's a different person here. Also, I want to point out some people said this early on. Oh, but he was trying to make sure she wasn't charged. That shows that he's a good guy. No, listen closely. This police officer is pretty much telling them that if he presses charges, or if she goes to jail tonight, there's always a possibility.

that Gabby would want to get this off her record and prosecute him and he could still be prosecuted. He's taking all of this in. And then there, she can actually still prosecute you is what he's hearing. This is interesting. So he starts with, hey, well, we're a team. You know, he's making this decision. Well, we're a team. Her and me are a team. Now, listen to this. I'm sorry about all this. So it's got an online for a day.

It's a technology that's in place. No contact order, but no contact order doesn't restrict you in strict way. So if you go talk to her and we find out and you're not going to No contact orders in place right now, but just against her, if you talk to her, you're fine, you're empowered, but if she talks to you or texts you, she's in trouble. He's learning this, he's processing this. He's processing this.

I'm getting it all. He smiles. I'm getting it all. Really quick. I get it all this time. I don't get sick that. I'll take it will be aggressive. No.

I'm curious. He's still processing. What should I do? What should I do? I'm so empowered here. And she has, she's the one that's going to get in trouble if she contacts me. I can contact her. Look at him.

He's thinking they're saying, we can give you a ride somewhere. And so so much for being a team, he's like, wait a minute. Can you guys just give me a ride to deliard to delicate arch that's that's his response all of this he's taking in his his fiancee might be charged with domestic violence he's saying they're a team and that's what his decision is can you guys just let me abandon her and take me to delicate arch right when she when she sits in jail I'm going to go to delicate arch and have a great day yeah his wheels are spinning right so so much

for the team aspect I also want to point this out to throughout this whole thing while they're talking about getting a hotel. He doesn't once think will she be okay. How's Gabby going to be? Where is she going to sleep? Anything else you want to say, babe? Sorry. Yeah. And why doesn't why? I mean, if I was in his position, I would suggest that she get the hotel and not him. I mean, I don't know if the police are basing this on certain policies they have to follow. but why does she get the hotel? Why does he get the hotel when she doesn't? Don't worry about this.

Don't feel like you are making anybody do anything extra. Don't you worry, Brian, about making any of us do anything actually. He's like, oh, I'm not worrying. I'm good. I'm good. Her anxiety, it's my own anxiety. And sometimes it's, I just, I got to walk away, I got to breathe. I'm going to back on.

There's nothing I can tell you. That's going to really make a different. But at the end of the day, I'm sorry to all this is happening. I'm sorry. No, he's still like, you guys going to drive me somewhere. He still hasn't once asked, is Gabby okay? Where's Gabby going to stay? You know, there's no, it is all about him.

And that's what I noticed. There's no empathy. There's no empathy. We said that in the first part. But that, by the way, is, is, is, would be one of the red flags for abuse, potential abuse is, does the, does the person have empathy? Right. Do they concern for you? Do they care about you?

Hey, Brian. Yeah. Can I take two minutes your time? So because there wasn't a subpo took place and you are obviously showing sign of the strikes. Do you mind if I take pictures of me? Get them forward. So this is interesting to me because this is the Ranger that's been with Gabby. She said, Gabby wants her phone to call her parents. He goes, it's in a spot.

I know right where it is. That to me would imply that he almost hit her phone or it's in this place that only he knows. Oh, it's in a spot. You can't even tell you. He's like, I'll go get it. He knew exactly where Gabby's phone was, which means he took it. This is a very, very important question. How you answer this question is going to determine what happens next. But the only person is to answer this question to you, think very hard before you ask the question. Do not quickly answer it.

Think very hard. When you slapped him those times. Most people don't realize how much their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making billions, pulling details about you from public records and the Internet, and then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers. It's why you get endless robocalls and why ads seem to follow you everywhere.

That's where ORA comes in. ORA actively removes your data from broker sites and keeps it off. They also instantly alert you if your information shows up in a breach or on the dark web. But ORA goes beyond data protection. With one app, you get a VPN, antivirus, password manager, spam call protection, dark web monitoring, and even up to $5 million in identity theft insurance, all backed by 24-7 U.S.-based fraud support. Other companies might sell just credit monitoring,

or just a VPN. ORA gives you all of it, together, at the same price competitors charge for just one service. Start your free trial today at ORA.com slash remove. Protect yourself now at aura.com slash remove. Are you attempting to cause him physical pain or physical impairment? Is that what you were attempting? She didn't even have to think about it after all that you know didn't have to think of course she wasn't

What were you attempting to do? What is the reason behind the slapping and what was it you were attempting to accomplish my side Trying to get him to stop telling me to calm down and probably wanted her phone down and by the way I've been in a relationship where someone would tell me to calm down I did not act pretty. So if in this moment she says I was protecting myself or if she makes some deeper disclosure about domestic violence, you know, that potentially could have changed everything. But if she says I was trying to save my life because last week he tried to choke me, right? I'm not saying that happened. I'm just saying that, and I'm not, I'm certainly not blaming her.

Like it would, I don't, almost every victim I can think of wouldn't be truthful in this moment if they were in a domestic violence situation, if they were being abused. She's already shaken up. She's distraught, you know. Sadly, I think this moment may have contributed to the outcome here. You know, and I'm not, I don't know how much, but I could see him getting enraged when they got back together and blaming her for this whole thing and telling her, you know, you almost got me arrested. Right. Like, I'm sure it wasn't pretty for her to have to deal with the aftermath of this entire situation. I'm sure you felt very empowered after this, too. Also, notice how much

Also notice how calm she is. She calmed down. You know, they talk about her emotions and her anxiety. She's actually quite calm. I'm pretty sure what I have to have I need some stuff like that or my best solution. This is what I'm going to do. I decided I am not going to cite for domestic violence. It was only going to be a dude class B misdemeanor.

However, the domestic violence. silence portion of it enhances it makes like a major pain on the blood especially you're 22 right I'm choosing not to cite you today so you are not going to be charged all right but this is what I do have to do I am separating tonight okay I want you guys both to be tonight away from each other relax breathe because there's no reason to be fine okay I hate that. He tells her to stop crying. He really can't. It's a police officer who hasn't been trained in emotion. So I'm not, he's not a psychologist, but he really cannot handle female emotions like he's telling her to stop crying.

That bothers me. I'll just say that. This is, I understand that this can feel like it's a nightmare. But you come out as the golden flower on top of mine. Okay. So you're going to be taking the band tonight and you're going to go somewhere else. I am going to get him lined up to the hotel room tonight. I want you guys to stay away from each other. Both of you guys are saying from what you told me and what he told me. You guys have a bunch of little things that are building up, building up, and finally the little string that you guys were tight walking out of the way. So I just want everybody. I mean, it's not a bunch of little things building up. It's a fundamental rupture in the relationship, right? Like, I mean, I understand again how the officer would see it that way because that's how Brian sold it. But it goes deeper than that.

You know, there is in the cycle of violence, there is a phase, the tension building phase where, you know, the abuser becomes increasingly more upset over time until they finally explode. But I think it's kind of minimizing the situation here. And also to say that she comes out of this, what did he say? She comes out of this like a golden flower something. I didn't quite hear all right. Yeah, you're going to stop crying. You're a golden flower on top of a man. I was triggered by that. I would, yeah.

Right. And he means that because she's not being charged, she comes out of this really well. But in the context of an abusive relationship, there's obviously some misunderstanding that she's not coming out of this. Well, obviously, she's going to pay the price for this. Right. Right. Right.

Please. Yes, Chancellor, we tell her. Don't even know, touch your parents, whatever. I've got him in my hotel room tonight. So here in just a minute, I have to keep you guys separated. Right now, don't contact each other or don't wave at him. Okay? Do you want me to say anything to him?

Because I can do that for you. Don't me to let him know that you love him and then you'll see him tomorrow, stuff like that? Oh, he's bad about that too. Okay, I'll make sure that he has funger. Make sure he has his phone charger. There's his phone. Also, this is interesting too because the both officers are going back and forth saying, you know, how much they love each other, but they don't actually say that. Neither one of them said it.

One of them actually said, you know, tell the other person I love them, miss them. That's all coming from the officers. That's not coming from them. I think that's an attempt by the officers to really minimize what's going on here, right? Right, like they're creating this fiction that these two are madly in love. You know, I mean, there might be some love here, but it's not a healthy love, it's a controlling love.

And so I think this is an attempt by the officers to really kind of feel better or minimize the situation. And so you get this kind of, they're creating kind of this fantasy or fiction that there's this real deep love here and everything will be fine. And it's the Disney story. They're both going to walk away.

Young love. Yeah. They're both going to walk away happily into the sunset. So that's interesting that they kind of overlay this whole situation with all this, you know, I'm going to, you know, he loves you and she loves you and blah, blah, blah. But they never actually say that.

In fact, not only does she not say that, she just says, you know, she's concerned about his phone charger. That's hardly romantic experience. expression. Hardly romantic, but still taking care of him. Yeah. All right.

All right. One. I have a girl tell her. She claims that she did not have intent to hurt you when she was slapping at you. So technically speaking, it does not fit the letter of the code. I am not going to be charging her with DVD. Exactly. So this is.

This is why I'm going to do with. I'm not going to release you guys together. I want you guys to stay away from each other tonight. She's agreed to it. Take some time to yourselves. You guys both have the exact same story as to what led up to the incident. So taking some time tonight specifically, taking tonight away from each other is going to be with a major breaker and all of this.

I think that will help you guys, especially tomorrow when you guys meet up. So she does have a little. couple messages for you. One, so she loved it. She's looking for it to see me tomorrow. No, she didn't. Two, I'm going to tell. Yeah, good. He got to be humble around the entire complete line on. Yeah. I'm not about that. The other thing is, I don't want you guys to contact each other. No, okay. And I, but he said that I, she can text me or whatever. I was

going to send me a message. Please don't message me. But I don't hear that. He goes, wait, so can I really not text her? because I wanted to send her text and said, please don't message me. I mean, what a, like, he couldn't wait to send a text that told her what to do. And so he's saying, wait, can I not send that? Tonight, yeah.

He's like, oh, okay, I guess I won't get to send my awesome, demanding text. Passing on her leg and send her night and stuff like that, all that and stuff that I do with my wife too, okay? So I appreciate it. Just, just, just, don't. Don't just try to not contact each other when I said, oh, I'm first chattering, something happens. You guys have to jump at the car right now and drive back to floor like something.

Yeah. Exactly. Other than that, just walk me on by yourself. Thank you, Brett. You're going to get a hotel and watch your TV. Probably going to be a few months. Yes, we got to set down the rights. It's a medical.

Watch TV. So thanks. Just watch TV, enjoy yourself. Relax. Look at that smile on his face. Sometimes you got a shower. You want to have to change the clothes. You got some toes in there, right?

All right, they're good. Because they're going to have everything that you need to ship. All right. All right, again. You want to step out for me? As you can see, I have keys in my hand, which is good.

So something that I do, that I emphasize to him and I don't know if I emphasize to you or not. Don't text each other tonight. He wants to pass on the same message. You're looking forward to talking to you again, but I told him, and you, unless there's a message. There's earth shattering emergency news.

Don't text tonight, okay? Even with the good nights, I love you. He's saying good night now, saying he loves you now and you guys can talk tomorrow morning, okay? He's gonna go to the hotel. I'm gonna give you the keys to the van. All righty. So here's that.

I'm giving him a ride over to the hotel. Okay, so that is gonna be okay. Will it be a far drive for me to get him good morning? This is important. She's asking if this is gonna be a far drive for her to get him to the hotel in the morning. I'm not going to tell you where he's going to be at tonight. Like I said, I want you guys to be separated.

Listen to her. I can't tell you this. I just don't usually drive the band to go to make her. It's not like far. Most people don't realize how much their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making billions, pulling details about you from public records and the internet.

and then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers. It's why you get endless robocalls and why ads seem to follow you everywhere. That's where ORA comes in. ORA actively removes your data from broker's sites and keeps it off. They also instantly alert you if your information shows up in a breach or on the dark web. But ORA goes beyond data protection. With one app, you get a VPN, antivirus, password manager, spam call protection, dark web monitoring,

and even up to $5 million in identity theft insurance, all backed by 24-7 U.S.-based fraud support. Other companies might sell just credit monitoring, or just a VPN. ORA gives you all of it, together, at the same price competitors charge for just one service. Start your free trial today at ORA.com slash remove. Protect yourself now at aura.com slash remove.

Doesn't even usually drive the van, so she wants to make sure it's not far. In other words, she's nervous to drive. So this is a woman that Brian is claiming is trying to abandon him and she's afraid of even driving a long distance doesn't look like it's too big of a threat for brian this is a moment where she's telling the officer that he controls the van he control right that he's in control of her environment essentially if you have the keys to the van you have control of much of what's going on in their lives right he can he can dictate

where they stop how long they're on the road where they go like she's i mean i know it's subtle but she's she's pretty much saying look i don't ever drive this thing i don't even know how to drive this thing right so he's running the show here i noticed that a lot of people are triggered by this which i completely understand i've been triggered by it too gabby was in a situation here when people say why wasn't she leaving where what would she do at this point, you know. The highest risk, the highest risk for a homicide in a domestic abuse relationship occurs within seven to 14 days after a restraining order is served.

So restraining orders, we all know restraining orders, I mean, for the most part, have minimal impact and all it does is enrage the abuser. So, you know, getting a restraining order for many abusers is like the ultimate form of rejection. And it's also changing the power dynamic. It's giving the victim more control. So there's a lot of reasons why risk goes up after the restraining order is served. So, and again, it speaks to that issue of power dynamic and fears of victim, you know, in this case of Gabby disclosing to the officer that this is an abusive relationship. Also, something I want you to know, stand over here real

for your passport. If you go over to the city market, they have a list of places where you can get yourself a shower for like four, five bucks. I'm definitely pretty cheap place where you can shower, decompress, do you stress it already? Yeah, I just shower yesterday. Well, can I just say how much I love Gabby every time I listen to that? He's like, go shower. She's like, I'm good. I just showered yesterday. That's what I said today. I'm like, I'm good.

I just showered yesterday. Maybe I'll shower tomorrow, but I love this girl. It's one of my own. And also she's saying, I'm good to the police officer here. She's like, I'm good. And he doesn't listen. Again, he won't listen. She's like, I don't need one.

I'm fine. And he is determined to put his view on what helps his anxious wife onto her. I think we can, I mean, I think we can all maybe why the wife's anxious. This is, right. This is definitely one of those. I called it a life coaching moment in the previous analysis, but this is one of those moments that I talked about earlier. You know, the shower thing is when his biases are coming into play,

that he so wants to see this through the lens of anxiety and not trauma and not abuse, that he keeps coming back to this, right? This is his countertransference. This is his inability to see this situation objectively. Yeah, thank you. I might shower tomorrow too. We'll see. But don't ever tell me, don't ever tell me to go take a shower. You didn't have today happen yesterday. So I it does my way it wanders and when she gets stressed out. It's like, get to shower, relax. Take some time to yourself. So don't taste you tell you good money. It's still tomorrow morning after your eyes open up and you're fully awake and up here. It also shows you how she's been beaten down.

She's like, I'm good. I don't need a shower. And then the guy won't back down and she's like, okay, it sounds relaxing. Honestly, in my opinion, she's just now appeasing them. You know, she knows, you know, if that was a duty, be like, dude, I'm good. You know, this is a woman that's like, okay, you know, people please her. Got it. Oh, my door's open.

Yeah. You can put your backpack back back. So this is kind of the end, but we've kept a few sound bites of this ride that I felt were important. Like I said, it's my request, not legally obligated to hold to it. That's important. That whole conversation they had about don't contact each other, don't contact each other. At this moment, the cops telling them, actually, you're not legally obligated to it if, you know, you want to. He just told them that.

He just told them that. I want you guys to take some time away from each other because it will make real the difference. But you don't have to. because I just told you you're not legally obligated to. So this is important. So I'm going to go back a little bit. Go back. Go back.

This is probably one of the most critical moments in this entire body camp footage. It comes at the very end. It's hard to hear. Let's play this again a little, a few times. You can't totally hear, Brian. I'll be honest, the way I fixed the, got rid of the white noise didn't help this.

Yeah. So if you listen carefully, Brian says, am I in trouble? And you can hear what the officer says in response to that. I don't know any trouble. You got handcuffs on? I didn't tell you that I'm taking you that's jail. No, I told you I'm taking to the hotel. So like I said, my main concern,

I told her to go take a shower like I told you to, because. So, so Brian says, am I in trouble? And the officer basically says, no you're not in trouble do you have handcuffs on um wow what a moment right like they've been with him for an hour they've been telling him that gabby's the aggressor she's potentially going to get arrested she's going to have to go to court maybe right the officer just told him you know legally we can't stop you from contacting her right and all of a sudden he says am i in trouble like what is going up

So there's a legal term in forensic psychology that's really important. And it's mens rea. Mensria means guilty mind. Menzria means intent to commit a crime. Menzria, I think that's what you're seeing here. You're seeing his guilt. I think you're seeing, why would he ask if he's in trouble?

He knows he's not in trouble, right? He knows he's going to a hotel. He knows he's not arrested, but he still, he has the baggage from this violent relationship in his memory from even a few minutes ago, right? He can't just get rid of that. He can't disregard it. He knows that the officer has this way wrong. This is guilt. This is Brian saying, am I in trouble essentially admitting.

that he feels like he is in trouble and he wants confirmation from the officer that everything's okay because he knows he absolutely knows from his history with gabby that he should be in trouble yeah she seems a lot like my wife and things that really works for my wife is when she gets stressed out to go take a long hot shower so i gave her a place to go where she can get a hotel room or not a hotel room but um to get a shower tonight for like four or five bucks really cheap no problem so i skipped the part where they're talking about his trucking experience i took his wife along with them and i kept this in that was one of the major advantages of having her with me was like i could say hey i'm hungry can you get me something she was able because i was driving and she wasn't so look i don't know if he meant that to be a misogynistic joke or not but brian certainly took into that and he just laughed so hard at it. I can't believe you said that. So listen to Brian just laugh out loud that he can't believe this police officer saying again, maybe the police officer didn't mean it like this, but he's talking

about why he took a wife along on this experience. And you can definitely tell how Brian's taking it. Well, that was one of the major advantages of having her with me was I could say, hey, I'm hungry. Can you get me something? She was able, because I was driving and she wasn't, she was able to go back, get into the cooler, I guess lunch or whatever, you know. So there was that as an change. And then he laughs too. So there was that as an advantage. Ha, ha, ha, old boys club, you know, make me a sandwich.

I mean, I just feel like this whole entire ride empowers Brian. Don't text or do not even send her a text to say don't text me. Oh, but you know what? Actually, you can. And you know what? I brought my wife along on a really long road trip too. make me a sandwich. I just, I mean, if you want to solidify how this is going, sorry, babe. If you want to say, actually, keep going. Drops them off at the hotel and says bye. So I'll stop

screen sharing so we can see chat again. The number one question that I'm seeing, how does a girl or a woman like Gabby get into a relationship like this? And I think that's a great question asked because I bet a lot of women here tonight have found themselves in a relationship. like this. So there's a couple of components to my answer. Initially, I'll get to that in a minute, but I want to say something in response to that first, which is this is the kind of question that drives domestic violence advocates crazy, right? Because according to them, the question isn't, how does somebody like Gabby get into a violent relationship? The question is, how does somebody like Brian become abusive? Right. In other words, the question is misleading in a way, because the

The issue isn't holding Gabby accountable or blaming her for the violence. The issue is, why is he being violent towards her? If we could create a world where men weren't violent towards women, we would have a different world and we wouldn't have to ask that question. So I'm not dismissing the question, I'll talk about it, but I think, you know, if someone who's been in the domestic violence world for a while, that advocates say that the question kind of implies that women have low self-esteem like Gabby or, that there's something there going on

that makes Gabby culpable or allows her to be in this type of relationship. Whereas I think in the domestic violence community, the question they ask is, how does some jerk like this get away with being violent and eventually murdering someone? So that's the question they're interested in because they want accountability for batterers,

for violent men. They don't want to, you know, the goal is a kind of, for the abusers and not accountability for the victims. So I think it's important to say that up front, before I attempt to answer this question. You know, I've had debates with colleagues about this question, and some of my colleagues will argue really strongly

that it is about self-esteem in the victim, and that the victim is somehow responsible, and I try to resist that because because ultimately, Brian or abusers are responsible. They need to be responsible. It's not okay to be violent towards someone without any consequences. Or, you know, I mean, it's a different question about why women stay in violent relationships. But, you know, if I had to give an answer to that, I think,

it's a little complex in the sense that I think you have to start with the presumption that somebody like Gabby doesn't want to be an abusive relationship. She's not seeking that out. She probably doesn't. She has no idea that this guy's going to be violent until she's in it. And once she's in it, you know, she's kind of stuck. I mean, true, you could argue that someone has choice and can walk away at any time. But I would I would reference. the work of Lenora Walker. She's one of the first author, psychologists, to talk about what she called Battered Women's Syndrome.

She wrote a book in 1984, which was one of the pioneering books in the field, kind of talking about this issue. And what she said, she referenced the work of Martin Zelligman, who's now a really well-known psychologist, who in the 70s was doing research on what he called learned helplessness.

And Zelligman, he took some dogs, and dog lovers, please don't get mad at me. This is not my work. This is not my research. But- Yes, you guys can find a new name for these abusers if you want, but this is not John's research. We didn't-

This is Zelligman's research back in the 70s when you could apparently shock dogs. But what Zelligming-Dod did was he took what's called a shuttle box, which is a box that has a barrier, and on one side of the box, he would administer shocks to dogs, and that some of the dogs would figure out that if they jump to the other side, that they could escape the shocks.

But he also set up this experiment so that some dogs were getting shocked randomly and they couldn't figure out how to get to safety on the other side of the barrier. So what Zell had been found over time in this experiment was you could essentially create what he called learned helplessness. In other words, you could get these dogs to essentially just sit there and get shocked over and over, sometimes randomly. randomly, they couldn't predict when the shock screen to happen, or what they had to do to get to safety,

but they learned to give up. They learned to be helpless. And Lenora Walker cites his research as being completely relevant to why women stay in these relationships and how they get in these. So essentially what she would say is that somebody like Gabby doesn't expect, she doesn't expect, She doesn't expect or want to be in an abusive relationship,

but she gets in this relationship, and then it becomes abusive. She's with this guy who's really controlling and dominant and abusive and critical, and it becomes a type of learned helplessness. She doesn't know how to get out. She's stuck, and when she tries to get out, the abuse escalates or she feels even more helpless. So you get these symptoms of depression or, you know, you get these mental health symptoms.

like low self-esteem, depression, whatever. But a lot of time that's a function of the relationship and not a function of her. So I think you have to see whatever mental health issues she's having. I think you have to see those in the context of the abuse and the learned helplessness. And a lot of victims also develop post-traumatic stress disorder.

And I think that's not unreasonable here. Like looking at Gabby's initial reaction to the police pulling up to the van, you know, she is destroyed. She is distraught, but she looks like someone who's been, you know, a little traumatized and she's a little hypervigilant. You know, I think the officer says she's hyperventilating. I think it's more like she's hypervigilant, which is a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. So we don't know how bad the abuse was, but we know she was in a band with this guy for a few months. And we now know that several of her friends have come out and said he was really controlling.

He was jealous. He was possessive. I think he was very much afraid of her success on this, you know, her venture, her video log. And so we don't know how bad it was, but how and why she gets in this type of relationship. It's difficult to say exactly, but I think she entered this relationship with the best of hopes and intentions. And then it became something she didn't anticipate. And she found herself stuck and she didn't know how to get out. And I want to tell a personal story. I had ended my relationship, fully ended my relationship, legally ended my relationship with my abuser.

And we were also living five hours away. That's as safe as you can be. And he wasn't, he was still texting me. He was still, I was even. starting to date Dr. John. And luckily it was you, Dr. John, I don't know, many other men would have put up this because, you know, my ex was still texting me and he was still trying to take control somehow of the situation. And I think most people wouldn't understand. They're like, why don't you stop texting him? And of course, John would say that too. You need to stop. You need to block his number. I couldn't. because passive felt safer. Nor was I really, you know, so then I had a girlfriend, Lauren, you've got to block him. Just block him.

Just block his number. And I said, you don't understand the moment I block his number, he will drive five hours up here. And then he'll be outside my door. So, and that was me being five hours away from him. And I couldn't stop. he still had control over me. So I just want to explain that. Like it's not because Gabby or a girl like Gabby fell for this relationship. And these type of people also, they're great at a facade. Use Brian 101 for that. Look what he did for police in front of police. They're great episodes.

Gabby knew him since she was in high school. I'm sure she thought he was a great guy at first. You don't know someone's an abuser. You don't walk down the street and say, oh, I bet he, you know, beats his wife, you know, at night. You don't know that. You don't know that until you have invested in them and until you fall in love with them. And then when something happens and the facade starts to crack, you think, no way, I know the real, I know the real person. This is, this is, I know, this isn't them. This can't be them, you know, because you've gotten to know the facade so well. And then it cracks a little bit more and it cracks a little bit more. And then before you know it, you're in this full-blown relationship that you've invested so much time and love and energy into.

And I just... Most people don't realize how much their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making billions, pulling details about you from public records and the internet, and then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers. It's why you get endless robocalls and why ads seem to follow you everywhere. That's where ORA comes in. ORA actively removes your data from broker's sites and keeps it off.

They also instantly alert you if your information shows up in a breach or on the dark web. But ORA goes beyond data protection. With one app, you get a VPN, antivirus, password manager, spam call protection, dark web monitoring, and even up to $5 million in identity theft insurance, all backed by 24-7 U.S.-based fraud support. Other companies might sell just credit monitoring, or just a VPN. Ora gives you all of it, together, at the same price, competitors charge for just one service. Start your free trial today atora.com slash remove. Protect yourself now atora.com slash remove.

I just want to share that. So to Colby, pointing out that passive is safer. You're right. It can feel a lot safer. And people, go ahead, John. Yeah. Let me add something to that too. You know, if like with Brian, For example, if fear of abandonment is one of the primary issues, emotional issues, driving his behaviors. Brian's behavior and abuser's behavior. Right. The abuser's behavior. So I'm using Brian as an example. But one of the things they do is they try to create a lot of dependency.

So you'll get somebody like him making comments like, well, you can't do this without me or you can't live without me or you're not going to succeed without me, right? Like I'm sure if we could go back and look at, if Gabby had some, you know, secret video of them traveling for those few months leading up to this, I'm sure you would see a lot of that. You know, the comment that Gabby made about he doesn't believe I can do any of this is consistent with somebody being critical and sending the message that you need me in life. You need me to be successful. You can't live without me, right? And that gets reinforced over and over and over. And so that becomes a barrier too, right? There's this kind of sense of dependency that the victim, the abuser, the victim needs the abuser to make it life, to succeed.

You know, once they're, once they're beaten down, once a victim's beaten down so much, that they kind of feel like they can't go on without the person. I know to some people that seems crazy, right? Like for a normal person that hasn't been an abusive relationship, you might think, well, just leave, just, you know, walk up the door and go. But it's much more complex than that. Right, much more complex. Much more complex. And so this Gabby Petito case, well, yes, she is getting a lot of attention.

Our hope is that it's going to help many domestic abuse victims and that we can all start learning. the signs of abuse. You don't see someone and now. These police officers did not know what was going to happen to Gabby in a week. The woman, the ranger, the park ranger, the female that was there, she gave an exclusive interview to Desert News in Salt Lake City, Salt Lake City, Utah's newspaper. Her body cam footage hasn't been released, but I'm going to guess it might be one day. She said she sat with her.

She talked about regret and pain. And one thing I noticed she said, and I want to talk about it, John, because I think it's so important. She said, I look back. She said that she did get personal with Gabby and told her she felt her relationship with her was, her relationship with Brian was toxic. And she said, I did tell her that. I got personal and I told her that. She said, but I look back now and I think, what more could I have said to Gabby? What more?

That's her regret. What more could I have said to Gabby to have gotten her to leave? And I heard that and it was a little frustrating to me. And I don't know if you want to share why, you know, I know why I was frustrating for me to hear that. I mean, where the hell was she supposed to go? Excuse me. But if you want to talk about why that's not like, and I don't blame this cop. She, she police, a ranger, park ranger, excuse me, she had a lot of empathy, but a park ranger isn't going to be trained in domestic violence either.

So I'm not blaming her, but I'm just pointing out something that's very misunderstood with domestic abuse victims. And I hope that you'll talk about that a bit. Well, I think the goal in any domestic abuse situation is to hold the abuser accountable. So because of the dynamics, the power and balance between the abuser and the victim, you know, it's very unlikely that that type of speech is going to have any impact on. on Gabby, for example, you know, and that's why it's so critical in those situations to hold the abuser accountable and to, you know, have some type of intervention with him.

The statistics on that, you know, women that leave abusive relationships, it's generally around five to seven attempts before they're successful. And that happens usually over a period of months or years. So that's, That just shows how ingrained and how insidious it can be for people can be in the most abusive relationships imaginable and they keep going back.

And it seems like, you know, to the normal person, it seems like crazy making, you know, and it's very frustrating, I'm sure, to a lot of friends and family of those people. But like most things in life, you know, we kind of have to come to our own realization of a situation to really take action and we have to own it ourselves. So I don't think there was anything she could have said. I don't think Gabby was in a position or wanted to leave and she knew the risks. She knew the risks as well as anyone that if she just walked out of that van and left, that there probably would have been really difficult for her to function after that or just

or she would have been at risk for some type of violence. Right. And people don't hold somebody accountable all the time too. You know, the people you're close to, so it's not like someone can say, hey, get out, I'm going to help you. Like, you know, it's not so easy. It's complicated. You know, many times people will help an abuser or try to convince someone it couldn't be that bad because it's happening behind closed doors. So it's, it's, yeah, thank you. It's not. Yeah, thank you. It's not the victim's fault. And there's nothing that this park ranger could have said to Gabby. She was scared to drive 15 minutes to go pick him up in a hotel room. Where was she supposed to go? What was she supposed to do? And if anything, it could have been her decision to end the relationship for all. We know that did cause what happened. And so somebody asked, speaking of that, because leaving an abusive relationship is so dangerous, which is another reason why many.

women's day because it's dangerous. How would you how what is the safest way to leave a dangerous relationship? I think it really depends on you know, there's a there's another kind of common belief in the domestic violence community that the victims know their situations the best and they know how to to manage the abuse are the best. So it really depends on the individual situation, I think. Assessing risks, you know, I think it's probably always useful to maybe contact of domestic violence advocate and have a conversation about risk and to think about developing a safety plan that addresses those risks. But, you know, there's no, there's no simple way to do that. It really depends on the nature of the relationship and the relationship

of history and the risks involved. And most victims know their abusers better than anyone and they know how to manage those risks. So it could be leaving in the middle of the night. It could be, you know, bringing a friend over to negotiate a departure. I don't know. It just really depends on the situation.

Yeah. Someone's brought up a couple of times coercive control and request for you. you to talk about that a bit. Yeah, so coercive control is, I mentioned some research by Tini and Gerlock from 2014, where they talk about coercive control as more of an emotional type of abuse, as opposed to what they call pathological, physical. physical. So, and I talk a lot about the research of Gottman and Jacobson, where they talk about, they talk about the difference between pit bulls and cobras in terms of assessing types of abusers. But coercive control is subtler. It's a type of violence where there's kind of emotional, there can be more emotional intimidation.

There's a tendency to isolate to try to isolate victims, sort of like Brian locking Gabby out of the van, right? Like he's not technically being physically abusive, but it's certainly control. He's trying to take control of the situation. He's trying to take control of her behaviors. He's trying to foster compliance on her behalf. Gaslighting would be a form of coercive control. It's more emotional. It's challenging someone's perception of reality so that they kind of lose faith in their ability to process the world.

Some examples of gaslighting, you express a concern and that your response is you're crazy. You cry and you're hyperventilating. You say, you said this and they say, that's not what I said, that's what you heard. You are crying and you're over-emotional. You asked them not to be late and you're OCD. It was clear that Gabby was experiencing a lot of that. You're asked to take a shower. I don't want to take a shower.

No, go take a shower. OK. That's not really gaslighting, but it's another example of just, no, you need a shower. Right. And I think sometimes coercive control is more difficult to see as abuse sometimes. sometimes you know if somebody is is beating you physically it's pretty clear you're being abused like there's no question that physical abuse um is a different type of abuse than someone who's trying

to manipulate you emotionally so coercive control is a little bit more difficult to figure out i think or to understand um she wanted to know what you've thought about the parents reaction to all of this and what it says about Brian, the abuser, and his family? And what do you make of the parents' reaction to this? I mean, I don't obviously have a lot of information on the family, so this would be pure conjecture, but they're not the healthiest family, that's for sure. There seems to be a lot of dysfunction there. You know, one thing that we know about abusers is they come from abusive homes.

So that's possible here. I mean, I don't really know enough about them, but we know that domestic abusers either witness domestic violence between their parents, or they were physically abused or abused in some way themselves. So that's not universally true, but for the most part, that would be considered a risk factor for someone to become abuses if they come from that type of home.

So there could be some of that, you know. There seems to be a lot of loyalty, obviously, in that family because they're not, you know, they're protecting their son to an extreme degree. They're not providing law enforcement with any information. So yeah, it's an interesting dynamic for sure. What would you say to people listening tonight to those that suspect they have a friend or loved one in an abusive situation? what should we do? Because again, we understand the attention Gabby Petito is getting and we understand that this is happening every day to victims.

And so we want a memory of Gabby to all be better. What do we say or do if we suspect someone we care about is in an abusive situation and needs to leave? You know, let them know that you love them and you support them and you're going to be there for them and listen to them and let them know that you suspect there's abuse. use. And I mean, I think the main thing you can do is to be a source of support. So that if somebody wants to come to you without judgment and really disclose or figure a way out, figure out a way out, that you can be there to help them guide them through that process. And to let them know you'll believe them. I think that when I started to share things, you get the whole idea, well, if something is broken, you fix it or their facades are so wonderful. I mean, you're going to believe them and not questions and then not wonder if they can fix it.

Renee, she said, excellent question about how to leave. After my divorce, someone told me that the only thing that is harder than being married to a narcissist is leaving one, truth. But it is worth the risk, find a support system and stay strong. So in order for us to be that support system to people that know us, believe them and tell the truth. It is true. I had a friend. And it meant so much because this friend ended up knowing the person I was, with too. And she stood up for me and was so strong and was like, get out. And I felt validated too.

You know, she wasn't another person thinking, no way, you know, now fix it. Go to therapy. So I think, yeah, to let them know you're there and to tell them the truth, you're not going to get anyone to leave if they don't, you know, because they're scary, but just to always be ready for them to leave and to let them know they can run to your arms. You know, you're a safe place. Yeah, without judgment. I think also I want to say this, looking back on my experience, tell people how you really feel when I finally got out so many people came to me and said, oh, good, I'm glad.

I'm like, well, why, why didn't you tell me that before? I was looking for validation. I was looking for people to tell me I wasn't crazy. to tell me what they saw. So tell them. That doesn't mean you're going to get them to leave, but tell them. You know, I did want to mention quickly that one of our

Patreon supporters, Amber, asked a question before we started this, and she said it would be really important to talk about some of the red flags. What are some of the signs that maybe you're in an abusive relationship? So there's basically four areas of abuse that are the most common. Those would be emotional, financial, physical, and sexual. The emotional is probably the most subtle and the most difficult to, you know, kind of tease out.

But if you're dating someone and you're just getting to know them, I think it's a little trickier. But I think some of the subtle signs in the beginning of a relationship would be any type of, like, criticism. even if it's meant to be kind of well-intended, you know, if the person is like overly critical and they criticize, you know, what you're wearing or how you look or what you did at work, right? If there's this constant kind of undertone of criticism, that's a red flag. If there's a lack of empathy when you first meet someone and your first dating, I think that's a red flag. You know, if the person can identify with what you're experiencing or what you're feeling, that's something that would be really important to kind of pick up on early on.

If the person tries to isolate you, if the person doesn't want to go out with your friends or meet your friends or has no curiosity about your friends, that's a red flag, any type of isolation. And then when you get in the relationship, any attempted humiliation or intimidation or threats, any type of name calling or yelling, any belittling, any gaslighting, those are all red flags, if there's some tendency to resort to malprivilege, you know, I'm the man and I know best, and just shut up and, you know, be the female, that's definitely a red flag. If there's a sense of entitlement, that what I want is more important than when you want, that's a red flag.

If there's over dependency, in other words, if the person is telling you things, like I said about Brian like you need me you know if you leave me that would be a mistake because you clearly need me I'm the most important part of your life that's a red flag blaming the victim would be a red flag if you're in that type of if you're in an abusive relationship and the person's blaming you all the time and calling you crazy and saying that you clearly don't understand what a great guy I am that's a red flag there's the financial part so if the person you're with tries to control all the resources in the house, if they have control of the bank accounts,

if they're in charge of, you know, if you don't know the kind of money you're making or where it's going, that's probably a red flag in terms of physical abuse. If there's any type of pushing or shoving or any tendency to resort to any type of physical violence without communicating, without any attempt to understand you before that violence,

that's obviously a huge rate. flag and then the sexual part if there's any type of non-consensual sex or any attempt to coerce someone into having sex against their will or without their consent that's obviously a red flag but more subtly if there's any degrading comments about sex about how perhaps there's not enough sex or the sex is inadequate or any type of those types of humiliating comments about sex that's a red flag as well I I hope that helps. I think it's an important question for our viewers to really think about.

And of course, it doesn't mean there could be some of those and the relationship could be fine. But if those elements are persistent and they don't stop, and especially if they're present in the beginning of a relationship, I would have a lot of concerns. And at the very least, even if it's not abusive, it's probably not a healthy relationship. I want to go back to something I said and emphasize it because I know White friends don't tell other friends they see an abusive relationship. You don't want the friend to isolate themselves from you. You see the isolation. You see that this person is controlling them. If you say to them, I don't like the dude you're with, you know, they're going to not talk to you

anymore. So again, I want to reiterate, be the friend that says you're in a really, really bad relationship. And I'm concerned that it's abusive. And I'm here if you need. And even if they don't talk to you again after that for a while and even if that is your worst fear comes true when they decide to leave or when they're hitting a breaking point they will go to you and that is more important than maybe you know a distant relationship for a couple of months yeah there's kind of a fundamental assumption in mental health uh that somebody won't change in unless they're ready to um You know, there's the joke about how many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb?

And the answer is one, but the light ball needs to, it has to want to change first. So it's true of any type of situation where people are going to change that, you know, typically people need to want to change. They have to have some willingness or desire to change before they will. So pushing someone just doesn't work usually.

If it seems like it's life and death, you know, if for example, in Gabby's situation, if there was some indication that her life was at stake, you know, I think maybe that's a different scenario. That might require an intervention at a different level. If it doesn't seem to be life and death, then unfortunately it requires. some patience and support. But, you know, with Gabby, you know, I don't know, there's things

coming out that Brian was starting to become more aggressive towards the end. He was in a restaurant acting very aggressively. You know, unfortunately, I wish some of that information had gotten back to the family. I could certainly imagine them flying or driving out to get her and just taking her from, which, you know, I'm sure she would object to, but if it's life and death, you do what you have to do, just like with substance abuse, when families do interventions because they believe that, you know, their son or daughter or whoever friend

is on the cusp of an overdose, and if they continue using heroin at the level that they currently are, that they're probably not going to survive. Again, emergency situations, crisis situations require a different level of intervention. You see a, I don't think you can see it. Anyway, that's a selfie I took in my relationship when I was really upset. And I wrote, she was made to appear crazy by the very man who drove her there. I used to keep this Instagram account called Light Love Lauren.

It's not very active. So that's not marketing either because I don't post right now. So don't. But my point is you feel crazy. You wonder if something is wrong with you because you have reactive abuse. And I saw that in Gabby. Gabby felt bad for her emotions to Gabby. She probably was a lot more emotional than she's used to, which makes her feel OCD or makes her feel that she has anxiety or something's wrong with her because she's shocked by her emotions. And that's what happens with

reactive abuse. And I acted in ways that I was ashamed of. I did things that I was ashamed of in my unhealthy relationship. I screamed at him once and stomped the floor and just just crazy stuff. And so then you're like with that reactive abuse, you know, with the reaction, you're like, oh my gosh, like I am crazy. Like this is what he's dealing with. And so I want to point that out, too, to people that are in this questioning themselves, well, I did this and I did that. It's hard to know. It's really confusing when you're in it. And then the other thing, I want to say too is I think the reason we'd like to blame victims oftentimes in domestic violent situations and nobody's blaming Gabby here but the question of like what happened in her

family to make her like an abuser or this person must be really unhealthy because she's with an abuser. I think we want to believe it could never happen to us or someone that we love. And that's just simply not true. Gabby can being Gabby and in Gabby's situation can actually happen to anyone. And again, I know we need to wind down and it's been over two hour, hit an hour. But again, the reason why we want to embrace Gabby is because anyone can be Gabby. And there are a lot of Gabby's out there. And I think we all need to be a little bit more aware of that. And the signs are subtle. And you really have to be aware as we can help those we love. There's only so many windows like this to really bring awareness to this situation to domestic violence. So

tragically, you know, obviously I think we'd all wish that this ended differently, but maybe we can honor her a little bit, but in this window of opportunity to bring more awareness to domestic violence and to shine a light on this really difficult topic. I want to reiterate the importance of what you were saying a minute ago about blaming yourself. I think that that makes it really difficult. You know, when you have that kind of shame, like the story you told about yelling, you know, it creates a lot of shame and embarrassment. And, you know, it really is an insidious situation because you kind of point the finger at yourself.

right and that that's that's going to make it really difficult to see what's really going on to see the relationship for what it really is so if if people out there are experiencing that sense of shame and embarrassment or humiliation and fear or whatever from being in an abusive relationship that's completely normal don't let that deter you from digging deeper and really trying to figure out, you know, what's going on. Dr. John, I'll give you the last words tonight. Okay. Thank you. Yeah.

I just want to make a comment. You know, one of the things I like to do is to we talk about all the negativity and crime and relationships and domestic violence. And so I think the people that listen to our podcast know that it's really important to me to kind of to weigh in with some of the positives too. And to if if crime is the absolute worst in human beings, then I want to consider some of the best as well. And so I just want to offer a few thoughts on healthy relationships.

And this is the work of John Gottman again. I talk a lot about Gottman, but Godman talks about this idea of what he calls emotional bids, which is that when couples communicate, they're always kind of throwing out bids for attention or for people to respond to, and more subtly they're throwing out emotional bids. Every couple has ruptures or, you know, there's fights or conflict, but it's the way that couples address those ruptures. It's the way they repair them that matters. That's what makes a healthy relationship. So, If there's an emotional bid that gets rejected and it never gets addressed or repaired, that's bad.

But when there's fighting, like with, again, you know, we're talking about Gabby, like when Brian and Gabby are fighting, they have no capacity to repair the damage. They can't step back and really address the underlying emotions that are going on. And so that's why their relationship never works. So I guess what I'm saying is my hope is that people can kind of maybe look at their relationships and understand that when there's conflict or fighting, that there's always a way to repair that if you're willing to acknowledge your partner and you're willing to listen. And I'm not talking about if there's severe abuse or physical abuse, that's a different thing. I'm talking about emotional abuse yeah right emotional that that's I'm talking about reasonably healthy relationships where there's not somebody's not hitting you or

belittling you all the time I think those relationships are generally beyond repair but in healthy relationships it's this capacity to really listen to your partner and hear what they're saying on both sides right so usually women I mean unfortunately true that you know women are better with emotions and they do most of the repairing but that's not the way it should be. I think that the key to Gottman is the ability to repair the relationship and to deal with the conflict, to address it directly and not bury it or run away from it. And as a quick aside, he's done some research which is phenomenal showing that he calls it the four horsemen of relationships that if there's too much criticism,

if there's contempt, if there's defensiveness, and if there's stonewalling, if you have some or all of those, then your relationship is going to really, it's going to be an uphill battle. So criticism is, you know, belittling someone finding fault. Contempt is essentially, you know, an intense dislike of someone or even wanting them to fail. defenseiveness would be not listening to someone and blaming them for all their problems.

And stonewalling is when you just don't listen, when you just shut down. So if any of those are present in a relationship, that's a really bad sign. In fact, in their research, they could predict, I forget the number now. They can predict with like 85 or 90% accuracy that a relationship would end if those were present. So especially all four. So if you have those, that's another bad sign. And more than likely, those four, the four horsemen would be indicative of, probably indicative on an abusive relationship.

A healthy relationship, on the other hand, would, it allows for ruptures to be fixed. And if you go through the four horsemen and you look at the opposite of each of those, so the opposite of criticism is praise, the opposite of contempt is. respect the opposite of defensiveness is openness and the opposite of stonewalling is listening. So I think about it this way. A healthy relationship is the complete opposite of the four horsemen. So if you're evaluating the health of a relationship, those are the things I would look at. Is somebody praiseworthy? Are they listening to you? Are they open to your life and to what matters to you? And do they show you respect?

Thank you. There are a lot of complaints out there that Gabby's getting a lot of attention. You know, that it's a syndrome of a pretty young, blonde girl. Right. She has gotten more attention. We obviously know that those are issues. That's just a really big topic and... We recognize it.

We recognize it. Yeah, we recognize that there's a huge issue there, something that we should talk about and should be addressed. But I think, you know, big picture, and we've talked about this, there's this window here to increase awareness of domestic violence. And unfortunately, there was some recent research like a decade ago showing that the public perceptions of domestic violence really haven't changed much at all. And the reason for that is many people or most people tend to see domestic violence as a private

matter. In other words, you know, if it happens in a marriage or an intimate relationship, that's between them, right? That's between the couple. That's private. Whereas, you know, so if you see your neighbors fighting and one of them hits the other one, you're going to say, oh, you know, that's between them. But if a stranger approaches your neighbor and start to

beating them up, you know, you're probably going to call the police. So a lot of people see it as a private matter. And there's a tendency. The second part of that is the research shows that there's a tendency to blame victims, that, you know, that women, the women in abusive relationships deserve it and they're responsible. And I think those two things haven't changed in many, many, many years. And it's really hard to move the needle on that. So as long as there's some perception that it's a private matter and shouldn't be addressed, even though it's no different than an assault that would occur with a stranger

and that victims are responsible, nothing's going to change. Yeah, thank you guys for being with us tonight. I know we've gone way over, but we think this is an important topic, and we appreciate all of our viewers and listeners. And as always, as I always say, I'm very grateful that people are willing to

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