Kate Anthony: Hey everyone welcome back So I wanna start this episode with a confession, which is that I watch true crime all the time. Really. Dateline, 20/20, 48 Hours, whatever limited series Netflix wants to serve me about a woman whose friends all said, “Something was off about him from the beginning,” or, “I never saw it coming.

He was He was such a family man,” right? So I’m not coming to this conversation, my point being, I’m not coming to this conversation from some morally superior place where I’m wagging my finger at people for watching true crime. I watch it, too, all the time, right? So much so that I know the rhythm, right?

I know the music cue, the ominous shot of the quiet suburban street. I know the friend who says she was finally ready to leave; the neighbor who says they seemed like such a normal couple; the detective who says, “At first we treated it like a missing persons case,” because fucking of course they did. I know the slow reveal where it turns out the ex had been tracking her and threatening her, isolating her, controlling the money, showing up at her workplace, texting her constantly, violating boundaries, using the children, terrifying her in ways that no one around her really fully understood.

I know the [00:01:00] little lilt of Keith Morrison’s voice. But what I wanna talk about today is that so many of these stories are framed as extraordinary, shocking, unbelievable. Worst ex ever. The monster next door. The case nobody saw coming. But for a lot of women, especially women who have lived inside of coercive control, emotional abuse, stalking, domestic violence, or post-separation abuse, these stories are anything but unbelievable.

They are anything but shocking. They’re horrifying, they’re devastating, but they are not unfamiliar, and that, to me, is the problem. What I wanna do here today is that I want you, by the end of this episode, to understand why true crime can both be validating and dangerous. Validating because when it’s done well, it can help people recognize [00:02:00] patterns that they did not have language for.

And dangerous sometimes because when it’s sensationalized, when it’s approached as worst ex ever, it keeps us focused on this dramatic ending instead of the ordinary warning signs that came before it. That this is not the worst ex ever. This is just commonplace at this point in time, and women can’t afford For the world to only understand danger after the worst has already happened.

And that’s what I want us to sit with today. Because when a woman is alive and she’s saying he’s scaring me,” people sometimes hear drama. There was a 20/20 episode on Friday night. See? Told you, I watch it all the time. Friday night’s 20/20 was about, I think it’s called The Stalking of Samantha or something.

This woman was stalked for, I think it was [00:03:00] 13 years. She was granted, her first PPO was granted for six years. A six-year personal protective order. Unheard of, because that’s how bad it was. And the second it expired, he was back. But this time he didn’t say anything to her, he didn’t talk to her. He just kept showing up at her on her soccer team all of a sudden, where, showing up everywhere she went.

Turned out he had a tracker on her car, right? She goes to the judge to get another PPO But because he had wised up a little bit, he wasn’t l- he wasn’t doing all the overt things that he had been doing the first time. The judge ruled it a, quote, “complicated relationship,” and denied the PPO.

A complicated relationship. They didn’t have a relationship. They had never had a relationship. He had stalked her [00:05:00] relentlessly for years. There was no relationship, ever. They never even dated until he fucking kidnapped her after spending five grand on turning a storage facility into a bunker. But they had a complicated relationship, right?

So this is what the system does to us. When we say, “I’m scared of this man,” they’re like, “Oh, you’re being dramatic. Oh, this is, high-conflict divorce. She’s just bitter,” or, “She’s emotional,” or he hasn’t hit you.” In the case of this Samantha woman with the stalker, the second time he was so much smarter, so she didn’t have anything that was gonna rise to the level that the court would put…

Even though she had a fucking prior six-year PPO attached to her request. He was smarter. But then, when a woman is dead, when this man actually kidnapped [00:06:00] her, this Samantha woman, suddenly we can see the pattern. Suddenly it’s clear. Suddenly oh, hindsight is 20/20. Oh, those texts actually were an indication of where he was going with this.

The stalking suddenly matters. The threats matter. The jealousy. The gun in the home. The custody exchanges. Suddenly the fact that she said she was afraid matters. But now she’s fucking dead. Suddenly now the family members who were like, “There was something wrong,” suddenly now they are being believed.

All the same behaviors that were minimized now become evidence in a murder trial. This is one of the most brutal truths about how we handle violence against women. We require catastrophe before we grant any credibility. [00:07:00] And that’s why these shows can hit so hard. They’re not just entertainment. They’re not just mystery.

For some women, they are pattern recognition. They are the thing that make you sit up a little straighter because something in you says, “Wait a minute, that sounds like my husband,” or, “That sounds like what happened when I tried to leave,” or, “That sounds like the thing I keep trying to explain to my attorney, the judge, the mediator.

Nobody seems to fucking understand why I’m scared.” We were watching something we were watching an old, 20/20, about Gabby Petito last night. Many of you know her story or at least parts of it, but I wanna give you a little bit of context just in case you don’t, ’cause it’s important.

So Gabby Petito was a 22-year-old woman who was traveling across the country in a van with her fiance, Brian Laundrie, in 2021. They were documenting parts of the trip online, and from the outside… they were documenting, like all of it. That was the whole point, was that she was trying to be, like a van life vlogging [00:08:00] influencer.

And so from the outside, from the posts, from what she was putting out, it looked like this dreamy, adventurous young couple on the road van life thing. But in August of that year Police in Moab, Utah, responded to a call about a domestic incident involving the two of them. Body cam footage from that stop later became widely known because so many people watched it after Gabby disappeared.

And there are two ways that people watch this traffic stop footage, right? When you watch the footage with an understanding of abuse dynamics, it’s terrifying. All of us in the domestic abuse advocacy world watched that traffic stop footage after Gabby went missing, ’cause it came out after she was missing, and we all watched it and said, “Oh, she’s dead and he killed her.

That’s why she’s missing.” It was very clear what was happening [00:10:00] on that traffic stop. Gabby was visibly distressed. She is hysterically crying. She is taking the blame. She is saying she’s anxious. She’s saying, “I, but I’m the one who hit him. I’m just so anxious. I have so much anxiety.” But then she says, “But I don’t normally have anxiety.

He just makes me anxious.” Conversely, Brian is calm. He is composed. He jokes with the officers. When they say to him, “We think you are the victim of domestic abuse,” he laughs. He appears to be the more reasonable one. That dynamic, the distressed woman and the calm, cool, and collected man, is something that we need to understand with much more sophistication than we usually do.

This is, by the way, what the police officers missed in the traffic stop, and the basis of a lawsuit that Gabby Petito’s family brought against the Moab Police Department, [00:10:00] because they didn’t recognize the signs. They sat there. They were trying to, they were arguing with their, themselves, them, with, not even arguing, they were trying to figure out who is the primary aggressor?

And the primary aggressor is the one who needs to be removed. That’s the legal term. The primary aggressor is the identified person who needs to be removed, who is responsible, right? If they had recognized this properly and handled it properly, they would have separated them and actually gotten Gabby support from a domestic violence advocate.

Instead, they misidentified the primary aggressor, sent him to a hotel for the night, gave her the van, and within 24 hours they were back together, and then she was dead This is why we have to understand that the distressed woman and the calm man is usually like a strong indicator actually of who the primary aggressor is, right?

[00:12:00] Because the– a woman who has been living under coercive control will look dysregulated. She’s gonna cry. She might be scattered. She might overexplain. She’s gonna blame herself. She’s gonna minimize what happened. She may try to protect her abuser, and she might seem confused because she is confused. She’s been living inside of a reality where she is made responsible for his feelings, his reactions, his moods, his behavior, and she is so gaslit about all of this that she looks somewhat c- might look unhinged.

Meanwhile, he will look calm, totally organized. He’s the reasonable one. He’s charming. He’s gonna laugh with the officers. He says to the police officers “I don’t know. Have you been in a long-term relationship?” And one of them was like, “Yeah, man, I’ve been married for five years.

I know how it goes.” The system will look at this, an uneducated, untrained system are gonna [00:13:00] look at this and say yeah, she seems to be the unstable one.” No. She is responding to instability. So as I said, Gabby was later reported missing. Her remains were found in Wyoming, and her death was ruled a homicide.

Brian Laundrie later died by suicide, and the authorities have reported that he left written statements taking responsibility for her death. He l- left like a diary, which is insane because he also talks about how he thought– what he thought he was doing was helping her and putting her out of her misery because she said she wanted to die. Anyway, so her story became one of those stories that gripped the country.

There was tons of media attention, and there w- of course, because she was a beautiful young white woman. And God love the Petito family. They, in the midst of this, they took the time and energy to say to the media, “Y’all are focusing on our daughter because she is young, [00:14:00] beautiful, and white, when there are hundreds of, and thousands of indigenous women that go missing every year, and nobody cares.

Nobody looks.” They actually took the time during their grief to flip this conversation about that, which was extraordinary. So yes, there was that part, and that matters, but here’s what the family did after her death. They created the Gabby Petito Foundation, and one of the things that they’ve talked about is wanting her story to help other people recognize the signs of domestic violence, not to sensationalize her death or turn her into content, but to help people understand the patterns that they themselves did not understand at the time.

They didn’t see it. And again, in 2020 hindsight being 2020, not “20/20” the show they saw it. They were like, “Oh, we missed it,” the isolation, the control, the fear, the way the relationship dynamic was not just like a young [00:15:00] couple fighting on a road trip, right? The way that danger can be p- present long before anyone around the victim knows how to name it.

And so they are looking at this and saying, “Actually, here’s everything that we missed. Here’s everything that Gabby didn’t know.” And they’ve now been hearing from women over the years who saw Gabby’s story laid out, saw the patterns named, and said, “Oh my God, this is my relationship. You’ve saved my life.”

And what they’re saying is, “Gabby saved your life.” They’re using the story and the examination of what happened, the language of coercive control, and they are saying they’re using all of that to educate about the things that they missed. And they very clearly say Gabby is the one telling the story.

She is the one who, having documented everything, right? Because they, what they have now is not just the footage that she [00:16:00] presented to the media. They, th- all the footage that was cut that she didn’t post that showed Brian in a very different light. So that is the benefit of these stories when they’re handled responsibly.

That is the potential power of true crime, that it can be pattern recognition. It can help women recognize danger before the rest of the world calls it danger. It can give families language for what they’re seeing. It can help friends stop saying, “I just don’t like him.” And maybe start saying, “I’m noticing that he’s isolating her, he’s monitoring her, he’s making her responsible for his emotions, and she seems afraid of his actions.”

And that’s a very different conversation. But that only happens if we stop treating these stories like, “Oh my God, can you believe this happened? He was the worst ex ever,” and start asking better questions. What were the patterns? What did people miss? What did systems minimize? What [00:17:00] language was missing?

“Can you believe this happened?” The sensationalizing of it keeps the story at a distance, right? It keeps us distant from it, and it’s like, “Ooh, wow, that’s crazy.” But pattern recognition kind of brings it closer

Hey, quick interruption to bring you a special news bulletin. So in case you’re not on my email list, I just wanted to make sure that you have heard that the Unbreakable Retreat is officially open for registration. This will be my third time hosting this retreat, and I am so excited to bring it back once again to Sedona, Arizona, this September 10th through 13th.

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Check it out. And now back to our episode

One of the things that bothers me about the phrase worst ex ever, and again, I watched it. I’m not above this, but I watch it with a different lens. But w- it makes these men, these abusive men, these worst ex ever seem like outliers. Wow, look at this uniquely terrible ex. Look at this bizarre case. Look at this unbelievable person.

But the behaviors underneath are not bizarre. They are common. The entitlement is common. The refusal to accept a woman’s no is common. The idea [00:20:00] that a woman leaving is an act of betrayal is common. The entitlement to a woman’s personhood, whether that’s sexual, whether that’s l- her labor, whether that’s her body, all of it is totally common.

It is so common, actually, that I wanna pull out a little bit, right? Because the connection between domestic abuse and broader public vio- violence is actually not just a niche feminist talking point. It’s not something that I’m talking about, that Zohn is talking about, Liz Plank is talking about, whatever, right?

It’s like actually showing up in threat assessment research, in gun violence research, in law enforcement analysis. So the US Secret Service The US Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center has studied mass attacks in public spaces, [00:21:00] obviously, and has identified domestic violence, misogyny, and other concerning behaviors as recurring issues in many attackers.

Gun violence research has repeatedly shown that a significant number of mass shootings have a domestic violence thread running through them, right? Some of them are explicitly domestic from the beginning. A man shoots his wife, ex-wife, girlfriend, children, family members. Others expand outwards to a workplace, a school, a church, a public space, a community.

So when we talk about domestic abuse, we’re not just talking about something private or contained or separate from public safety. We’re talking about one of the clearest warning signs that we have. And this is why I think the phrase misogynistic extremism is so useful. So this is what the US Secret Service and the National s- Threat Assessment [00:22:00] Center is now calling it.

They are changing the language around domestic abuse and starting to call it misogynistic extremism. Because domestic violence describes a setting. Misogynistic extremism gets closer to the belief system. It names the entitlement, the contempt, the punishment of women for saying no, the rage when a woman leaves, the obsession with access, the idea that a woman’s autonomy is an offense against him.

That is really what it is. That is really the– It’s misogynistic extremism. Misogyny, the definition of misog- misogyny is hatred of women. And yes, it’s rooted in patriarchy, of course it is. It’s rooted in a system that has trained men overtly and subtly to believe that women are available to them, responsible for them, and punishable when they [00:24:00] refuse.

It is rooted in a culture that asks women to manage men’s emotions, and then acts surprised when some men become dangerous after women stop managing them. When a man terrorizes a woman for leaving, that’s not romance gone wrong. That is not a complicated relationship. That’s not, “Oh, he was just brokenhearted when he, when she left.”

No. That is misogynistic extremism. If we call it a communication problem, we send them to couples therapy, and then the man uses– couples therapy is another one, right? That’s another show. I did a reel on that last week. We put women who are being abused, psychologically tortured, cheated on, all of the, betrayed in so many ways, and we put them in couples therapy, and then we put it on television with a therapist going how does that make you feel?”

And centering his experience, because now he has [00:25:00] trauma, and now we have to coddle him and his trauma before addressing the betrayal and the trauma that he’s actually caused. But if we call it misogynistic control, coercive control, if we call it misogynistic extremism, the response might actually fucking change.

This doesn’t mean that every abusive man becomes a mass shooter, right? That’s not the point, and it would be irresponsible to say. But what it means is that the same entitlement that drives a man to terrorize his wife can also drive him to terrorize her family, her workplace, her community. He doesn’t have anywhere to put his rage, so he goes out and shoots a bunch of people, or he goes to, her place of work and kills all, everyone there.

Early– This is why early pattern recognition matters, because by the time the violence becomes public, there was usually a private trail behind it. And this is why I [00:26:00] believe that responsible storytelling matters so much. The value of telling Gabby Petito’s story or any of these stories can’t be that we get to sit on the couch and be horrified by the ending.

Never saw it coming The value has to be that someone watching sees the beginning, sees the middle, sees what she’s been minimizing, sees the thing that her daughter is living through, sees the thing that her friend has been trying to tell her, sees that the thing the court is calling high conflict i- isn’t high conflict, and says, “Wait a minute, this is not mutual conflict, this is control.”

This is coercive control. We have to be able to name it, not by sensationalizing it, but by educating. The point is not, by the way also, to make women responsible for preventing men’s violence. I want to be very clear about that. The point is not she should have known if she had seen all these signs more clearly, [00:27:00] right?

The point is we all need to know more. The systems, like you and I, we fucking know. But why doesn’t the system know? Why doesn’t the system recognize this? I am so heartened that the National Threat Assessment Center and the s- fucking US Secret Service is starting to figure this out. They’re doing the research, and they’re talking about it, and I only know this because a friend of mine was at their conference recently, and she posted about it.

So why are we not having these bigger, broader conversations about this? One of the things that I tell women is that patterns, as I’m saying here, matter more than necessarily isolated incidents. We want isolated incidents. We need the isolated incidents to show the pattern, right?

And so this is part of the documentation process. I hate that women have to translate their lived terror into court-friendly documentation, [00:29:00] but here we are. If you’re dealing with legal systems, you’ve got to understand the language that those systems respond to. I am not suggesting that you walk into court and say actually, it’s misogynistic extremism.”

‘Cause the misogynistic extremism is the extreme part of it, but let’s be clear that it’s all rooted in misogyny. Look, we can consume true crime and also critique the way it’s framed. We can be fascinated by these stories and also disturbed by the fact that women’s suffering becomes entertainment.

We can watch Dateline and also ask why so many women had to die before the culture learned the vocabulary of coercive control. We can admit that the storytelling is compelling and still refuse to accept the idea that these cases are just shocking anomalies. They are not. They are the most extreme outcomes of dynamics that many women are navigating every single day in less visible forms, [00:30:00] and these outcomes are not necessarily all that extreme or unpredictable or anything like that.

They are so predictable. But the reason these stories keep happening is not just because individual men are uniquely monstrous. They are, often. But we live in a culture that still teaches men that access to women is a right, and that us leaving them is a betrayal, and that is absolutely not okay. I think I’ve said enough on this.

You know where I stand. Let me just say that if you are navigating divorce or post-separation dynamics where the pattern is bigger than the people around you seem to understand, and you seems like you’re living in this vacuum where people just don’t get you, Phoenix Rising is absolutely where you will get the support that you need.

Phoenix Rising is my ongoing coaching membership and community for women dealing with high-conflict divorce, coercive control, custody stress, co-parenting chaos, legal strategy, and rebuilding. You do not have to keep explaining this to people who are giving you [00:31:00] advice for a divorce you’re not actually having.

You can find more information at kateanthony.com. Click anywhere it says Phoenix Rising, and I really hope that you take away the broader message from this, that obviously I talk about all the time how there are systems that are supporting this culture of misogynistic extremism, and I think that true crime does that to a degree and also has an opportunity to do a little better if we don’t sus- sensationalize and we look at what the patterns are.

And yeah, maybe it won’t be as popular, but we have to kn- we have to see the patterns. We’ve got to see the patterns, and I think we consume, women consume true crime at this level because we recognize it. We’re like yeah. That’s what we’ve been saying.” But the system also has to recognize it.

That’s all I have for you today. I love and adore you. As always, there is support available to you. There’s [00:32:00] a lot, there are a lot of supports out there. If you listen to me and you choose the support that I have to give, I am so grateful. And check out my website, kateanthony.com. I’ve got all new, a whole new website.

If you haven’t been there in a while, check it out. New branding. You might notice things look a little different around here. Yep, I redid everything. So go check it out, kateanthony.com. Okay, bye.