Recognising Coercive Control Through Gabby Petito’s Story

Before we begin, please note: this article refers to a real and tragic case of domestic abuse. You don't need to read it all at once, or at all, if it feels too much. Take your time. If you feel tense, overwhelmed, or unsettled, that matters more than getting through the words.

You watched the bodycam footage and felt something tighten in your chest. Maybe you recognised the way Gabby apologised: frantically, desperately, taking all the blame. Maybe you heard echoes of your own voice in hers. Maybe you saw someone you used to be, or someone you're afraid you still are.

Many people watched the Gabby Petito documentary feeling confused, distressed, or unsettled without fully understanding why. For some, it brought up a sense of recognition. For others, it simply left a heavy feeling that lingered.

This response makes sense.

Stories like Gabby's are not confronting because they are rare; they are confronting because they reveal how easily coercive control can be missed, misunderstood, or minimised, even when it is happening in plain sight. Even when witnesses call police. Even when body cameras are recording. Even when a young woman is visibly distressed and begging to be believed.

As a therapist specialising in domestic and family violence, I watched this documentary not as a spectator, but with the weight of patterns I've seen many times before. Not because Gabby's story was unique, but because it was painfully familiar.

This article is not about dissecting a crime, assigning blame, or sensationalising a tragedy. It is about understanding coercive control, the subtle, cumulative patterns of fear, manipulation, and erosion of autonomy that often go unrecognised until it is too late.

If you are reading this because something in your own relationship feels confusing, unsettling, or hard to name, you are not imagining it. And you are not alone.

Coercive control can involve any behaviour which scares, hurts, isolates, humiliates, harasses, monitors, or unreasonably controls another person's day-to-day life. It does not always involve visible violence, and it often hides behind calm voices, plausible explanations, and a public image that looks “normal."
— NSW Government

What follows uses Gabby Petito's story as a lens, not to re-tell it, but to help make visible the warning signs that so often go unseen.

The Bodycam Footage, What Everyone Saw and What They Missed

Before Gabby went missing, she and Brian were pulled over by police after a witness reported a possible domestic incident. The bodycam footage from that stop became one of the most publicly scrutinised pieces of evidence in the case, and a disturbing window into how coercive control is misunderstood, even by authorities.

In the video, Gabby is visibly distressed. Her hands shake, she is crying, she apologises repeatedly. She blames herself for “being annoying", for having OCD, for distracting Brian while he was driving. She takes responsibility for everything, even things that don't make sense. She seems desperate to convince everyone, including herself, that she is the problem.

Brian, by contrast, is composed. Calm even. He jokes with the officers. He laughs. He casually mentions that Gabby is “crazy", then dismisses it as a joke. He redirects attention. He positions himself as the reasonable one, the patient boyfriend dealing with an emotional, unstable partner.

No charges were laid. The couple was separated for the night as a precaution, and encouraged to reunite the next day.

To many viewers with lived experience of abuse, the power imbalance was unmistakable. But to the officers on scene, it looked like a relationship dispute, maybe even one where Gabby was the aggressor.

Coercive control often plays out exactly like this: the victim seems unstable or “too emotional," while the perpetrator appears reasonable or misunderstood. Outside observers, including police, take things at face value.

What the footage didn't show was the full pattern: the isolation that had been building for months, the controlling behaviours that happened behind closed doors, the chronic fear that made Gabby's anxiety something she couldn't name or escape

When Anxiety Becomes a Weapon

What many didn't see in that bodycam footage was how Gabby's anxiety had been weaponised against her. In abusive relationships, vulnerabilities, especially mental health struggles, often become tools of manipulation. The anxious feelings you have in response to someone's behaviour are dismissed, minimised, or used to undermine your credibility.

“You're just being anxious again."
”It's all in your head."
”You're overreacting."
”You're crazy."

This kind of gaslighting erodes a person's trust in their own emotions and instincts. Over time, you stop believing yourself. You start to think that maybe you are the problem. Maybe you are too sensitive, too emotional, too difficult to love. And that doubt, that internalised blame, makes it even harder to leave or seek help.

If you've ever apologised for someone else's cruelty, if you've ever felt relief when authorities suspected you instead of your partner, if you've ever been called “crazy" for having anxiety caused by someone else's behaviour, this is the pattern at work.

You're not imagining it. Your body recognised the danger before your mind could name it..

A place of stunning beauty, marked by this tragic story.

How Coercive Control Takes Hold: The Patterns That Trap

Coercive control doesn't announce itself. It builds slowly, one small compromise at a time. What looks like love at first can become a cage before you realise you've been locked inside. Looking at Gabby's story, we can see how these patterns unfolded, not as isolated incidents, but as an interconnected web of control.

The Fairy Tale Beginning: Love-Bombing and Speed

Brian described meeting Gabby as “love at first sight", an intense, overwhelming connection that moved quickly. Within nine months, Gabby had moved from New York to Florida to be with him. When he proposed after their first anniversary, he told a story about a firefly landing on her ring finger, calling it a sign that "the universe wanted us to be together."

This is what therapists call love-bombing: overwhelming affection, grand romantic gestures, and a relationship that escalates faster than it should. It feels intoxicating. It feels like destiny. And it's one of the most common tactics abusers use to sweep victims off their feet before they can properly assess what's happening.

Love-bombing creates intensity, and intensity creates attachment. By the time red flags appear, the victim is already deeply invested, emotionally, practically, and often financially. The relationship moves so fast that there's no space to notice the warning signs, or to trust the gut feelings that something isn't right.

When love feels urgent, it's worth asking: what's the rush?

Isolation: Cutting the Lifelines

Once the relationship was established, Brian began systematically cutting Gabby off from her support systems, particularly her close friend, Rose Davis. He expressed disgust about Gabby's job at a juice bar, calling her coworkers “lowlifes" and texting about them in degrading terms. He made it clear that her friendships, her work, her independence were threats to the relationship.

Rose Davis later recalled: “The more her and I were together and talking and having a good time… she actually felt more independent, and that's when he was like, 'Okay I've got to do something to change this.'"

Isolation is a cornerstone of coercive control. It ensures victims have nowhere to turn for perspective, validation, or help. When you're cut off from friends, family, or any source of external reality-checking, the abuser's version of events becomes the only version. You lose your sense of what's normal. You lose the people who might remind you of who you were before.

And often, the isolation is subtle. It's not a direct command to stop seeing people. It's complaints about your friends. It's “jokes" that undermine your relationships. It's scheduling conflicts and sulking when you choose others over them. It's making you feel guilty for wanting time away. Until eventually, it's easier to just stop trying.

If someone makes you feel bad for having other people in your life, that's not love. That's control.

The Narrative of Blame: Making You the Problem

Throughout the police interaction, Gabby repeatedly took responsibility for the conflict. She apologised for “distracting him" while driving. She blamed her OCD and anxiety. She referenced being “mean" and having a “bad mood." She internalised Brian's criticisms of her, making them her own truth.

Meanwhile, Brian casually called Gabby “crazy" to the police, then laughed it off as a joke. He pathologised her mental health struggles while the officers largely ignored that he admitted to having the same diagnosis. This is how abusers operate: they frame their partner's distress as a character flaw, a mental health issue, evidence of instability,anything but a reasonable response to ongoing mistreatment.

This narrative serves multiple purposes. It makes the victim doubt themselves. It makes others doubt the victim. It allows the abuser to position themselves as patient, long-suffering, and reasonable. And it ensures that if the victim does try to seek help, they've already been primed to blame themselves.

Self-blame isn't coincidental. It's cultivated. And once it takes root, it becomes one of the strongest barriers to leaving.

You are not “too sensitive". You are responding to something real.

The Performance of Normalcy: Public vs. Private Life

Gabby and Brian's social media presented a blissful #vanlife adventure, stunning landscapes, romantic moments, the dream of freedom and exploration. From the outside, they looked happy. Enviable, even. It was almost impossible for outsiders to imagine what was happening behind the scenes.

As Rose Davis said in the documentary: “The happiest people on social media usually have the darkest skeletons in their closet".

Abusers are often very good at maintaining a charming public persona while being entirely different behind closed doors. They know how to perform affection, how to present the relationship as ideal, how to make others believe that any problems are minor or exaggerated. This performance serves to isolate the victim even further, because who will believe you when everyone else sees someone so loving, so devoted, so “perfect"?

The gap between public image and private reality creates profound confusion for victims. You start to question your own perception. Maybe I am overreacting. Maybe it's not that bad. Maybe I'm remembering it wrong. And the abuser reinforces this doubt, pointing to the social media feed, the compliments from strangers, the friends who think you're lucky.

What happens in private is the truth. What's performed for others is strategy.

The Cycle: Tension, Explosion, Reconciliation

Gabby's friend described a pattern that many survivors will recognise: Brian would treat Gabby terribly—stealing her ID to prevent her from going out, controlling her movements, belittling her—but then follow with “amazing sweet" gestures that left Gabby feeling guilty and undeserving of him.

This is the cycle of abuse: tension builds, an explosion occurs (verbal, emotional, or physical), and then comes the reconciliation phase: apologies, promises, gifts, affection. The “good times" return, and the victim is flooded with relief. See? He's not really like that. He loves me. Things will be different now.

But the cycle always repeats. The tension builds again. The explosion comes again. And the reconciliation becomes shorter, less convincing, until eventually the victim is just waiting for the next outburst, trying to manage their behaviour to prevent it.

This cycle creates what therapists call a trauma bond, an attachment formed through intermittent reinforcement of reward and punishment. It's one of the strongest psychological traps in abusive relationships, and it's incredibly difficult to break without support.

You're not weak for staying. You're human for hoping.

Control Over Movement and Communication

Brian demonstrated overt control over Gabby's autonomy in ways that became visible during the police stop. He prevented her from entering the van, her home, the place where her belongings were. He took her keys, limiting her ability to move freely. He expressed worry about her having access to a phone, indicating a desire to monitor and restrict her communication with others.

These tactics create dependence. When you can't move freely, can't access your own transportation, can't communicate privately with others, you become trapped, not by physical barriers necessarily, but by the gradual removal of options. You're always having to ask permission, justify your movements, explain where you've been and who you've talked to.

And when someone controls these basic aspects of your life, they control your sense of agency. You begin to forget that you're allowed to make decisions without someone else's approval.

Freedom isn't just the absence of violence. It's the presence of choice.

The Fear of Leaving

Perhaps the most telling sign was something Gabby reportedly told her ex-boyfriend: she wanted to leave Brian but “wasn't sure of what he would do or what he could do".

This fear paralyses many victims. It's not about physical barriers, it's about the implicit or explicit threat of consequences. What will he do if I try to leave? Will he hurt himself? Will he hurt me? Will he destroy my belongings, ruin my reputation, turn people against me? Will he follow me?

The most dangerous time for victims of domestic abuse is when they attempt to leave. Gabby seemed to understand this instinctively. Her fear wasn't irrational. Her fear was a survival mechanism, an accurate assessment of risk.

And yet, society still asks: Why didn't she just leave?

The question isn't “why didn't she leave?" The question is “what made it so dangerous to try?"

The Gut Feelings Others Had

Rose Davis remembered telling her mother after first meeting Brian: “He's a really nice guy, but there's something off about him". She couldn't name it at the time. But that intuitive unease, that sense that something wasn't quite right, is something friends and family of abuse victims often report.

These intuitive concerns are important. They often pick up on subtle controlling behaviours, microexpressions of contempt, or the way someone talks about their partner when they think no one is paying attention. But too often, these concerns are dismissed, even by the person having them. I'm probably just being judgmental. He seems nice. She seems happy.

Trust those gut feelings. They're not paranoia. They're pattern recognition.

If something feels off, it probably is.

The Failure of the System: When Police Don't See Coercive Control

The police officers who responded to the domestic incident in Moab were not intentionally cruel. But their response reveals a systemic failure to recognise and respond to coercive control. They built rapport with Brian, commiserating about relationship difficulties and drawing parallels to one officer's ex-wife. They found him relatable. Reasonable. Someone they could connect with.

Meanwhile, they intimidated Gabby with statements like: “Be very careful about how you answer this question, as it will determine if you are charged". They kept her isolated during the stop while literally fist-bumping Brian. They ignored the discrepancies in their stories. They dismissed Brian's admission of grabbing Gabby's face, an action that cannot reasonably be considered self-defence.

Most troublingly, they reinforced Brian's narrative that Gabby's mental health was the problem. They suggested she was the aggressor. They encouraged her to reunite with him the next day, telling her things would be fine if she just calmed down.

This isn't just about these specific officers. This is about how coercive control is misunderstood by systems designed to protect people. Domestic violence training often focuses on physical violence: visible injuries, clear evidence of assault. But coercive control is harder to see. It doesn't leave bruises. It's cumulative, not episodic. It's about patterns of behaviour over time, not single incidents.

When police officers are trained to look for “the primary aggressor" in a physical altercation, they often miss the larger context. They see who was more emotional, who seemed more unstable, who technically made physical contact first. They don't see the months of psychological abuse, the isolation, the manipulation that led to that moment.

And so victims get blamed. Or worse, they get arrested.

Coercive control is domestic violence. Even when there are no visible injuries, even when the violence is “only" emotional, even when the abuser seems calm and the victim seems distressed.

The system failed Gabby. And it fails countless others every day.

What We Can Learn

Domestic violence isn't about anger management or “toxic relationships". It's about one person deliberately controlling another through fear, manipulation, and abuse of power. Coercive control does not necessarily leave physical marks, which makes it harder to detect and address through traditional legal frameworks focused on distinct violent incidents.

But it is violence. And it can be lethal.

So what do we do with this knowledge?

For individuals:

• Trust your instincts. If something feels wrong in your relationship, it probably is.

• If you recognise these patterns in your own life, please know: it's not your fault, and there is help available.

• If you see these patterns in someone you care about, offer support without judgment. Don't pressure them to leave, that can increase danger. Just be present, be consistent, and remind them you believe them.

For communities:

• Educate yourself about coercive control so you can recognise it, in your own relationships, in your friends' relationships, in public cases like Gabby's.

• Stop asking “why didn't they leave?" and start asking “what made it so dangerous to stay?"

• Believe victims. Even when—especially when—they seem “emotional" or “unstable". That distress is evidence of harm, not evidence of unreliability.

For systems:

• Police and first responders need specialised training in recognizing coercive control, understanding trauma responses, and distinguishing between primary aggressors and victims in crisis.

• Laws need to evolve to recognise patterns of behaviour, not just isolated incidents of physical violence.

• We need better support systems for people trying to leave abusive relationships: safe housing, financial assistance, legal advocacy, and long-term mental health care.

Gabby Petito's story is a tragedy. But it doesn't have to be meaningless. If her death can help even one person recognise coercive control in their own life or help one system respond differently, then perhaps something can be salvaged from this loss.

Support Is Available

If this article resonated in ways you didn’t expect, support is available.

I provide counselling for women affected by coercive control, emotional abuse, and domestic violence, at any stage, whether you’re questioning a relationship, focusing on safety, or beginning to heal.

You’re welcome to reach out when and if it feels right for you.

For immediate support, contact 1800RESPECT, a 24/7 national service providing crisis support and information.

Want to talk confidentially?

You can book a consultation here or reach out directly:

📧 Email: kat@safespacecounsellingservices.com.au
📞 Phone: 0452 285 526

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Remember: If something feels wrong, it probably is. Your instincts matter. Your safety matters. And there is help available when you’re ready to reach out. Please visit our Domestic Violence & Safety Resources page for support services and emergency contacts.