The Final Word
In April 2022, one month after my 35th birthday, I was raped. My aggressor did not accost me in an alley; he didn’t slip Rohypnol in my drink. He enacted that night a form of sexual violence so intimate, so egregious, so utterly common that until just a few decades ago, marriage rendered it legally invisible.
Before the attack, I was a writer. I don’t know what I became the morning after.
Prior to my rape, I’d published two books and several dozen essays and won numerous awards. My books had appeared in bookstore windows; my opinion pieces were discussed on podcasts produced by NPR and The New York Times. I’d built a fulfilling career for myself as a professor, and once, while traveling with my students to Northern Ireland to explore the role of personal narrative in conflict resolution (How do you forgive a man, a country, for blowing up your life? Your wife? Your community? Your home? Your body?), I’d placed an order for 10 baskets of fish and chips for my class and then excused myself to take a phone call for a live on-air interview with a sociologist and the BBC.
In the days before my assault, I suppose is what I mean, I had been productive, with much to say.
Beginning the morning after, I wouldn’t write anything for three whole years.
That evening began in my bedroom. You know how this story goes. In some ways, it doesn’t even matter what happened next—not often in the eyes of the law, much less the eyes of most of America.
Because I had had sex with him before.
Because I had willingly invited him into my bedroom.
Because there was no point in calling it a crime if it was an act I had performed willingly several times prior.
I said no; he took me anyway.
In the aftermath, I lost myself, my voice. What good are words from women when so many men choose not to listen? And when the law—more often than not—tells those men they have that right?
In the days and weeks that followed, I began to perform a sort of linguistic gymnastics, using codified phrases like “consent issues” or “a misunderstanding” to describe the sexual assault that had taken place, because this language—smoothed over, dulled—seemed to allow me, however briefly, to separate myself from my own story. But what I now wish I’d said, nearly four years ago, is that what that man committed that night was rape.
All this time has passed between then and now, but what I come back to is largely my silence: how it’s exactly what that man wanted, what he was banking on me to give, and how my body responded—for three whole years—with dedicated muteness in everything.
Then, a spring three years removed, and a docuseries that reignited the story of a woman whose life, relationship, and murder an entire nation found itself tethered to.
Gabby Petito was only 22 years old the day she left home in a Ford Transit Connect van alongside her fiancé, Brian Laundrie, a man later seen slapping and hitting her outside a co-op grocery store in Wyoming, according to a 911 caller. Her dream was to travel the country with her fiancé and document their experience living off the grid, visiting national parks and pitching tents and stringing hammocks between red rock and canyons. Nearly three months later, however, her body was recovered from a dispersed camping area in Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest, her death ruled a homicide by strangulation. Her fiancé, meanwhile, was conspicuously missing, until weeks later, when he was found dead in a Florida nature preserve, the result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. In the pages of a spiral-bound notebook found near him: a confession to Petito’s murder, which he called “merciful” and “what she wanted,” alongside a request that police “pick up all [his] things,” writing, “Gabby hated people who litter.”
When I was raped at 35, I was initially resistant to calling what happened rape, but it wasn’t my first experience with a violent man. I’d extracted myself just four years prior from a long-term relationship with a man who had often scared me, whose rage and violent outbursts had caused me to involuntarily buckle onto floorboards or cower behind apartment fixtures I hoped he’d hesitate to break. After we separated, I spent the next three years alone, terrified of confirming the statistics that assert the overwhelming likelihood that victims of one violent partnership will find themselves in another.
I considered it a risk I wouldn’t take.
The summer I began to date again was the summer of Gabby Petito’s murder, and the first thing I thought when I learned of her story was how easily it could’ve been mine. The similarities, at that time, felt striking: both of us blond, white, American women in love with men we thought we’d marry, partners who’d once filmed us running down California beaches and into their loving arms. In the footage—hers and mine—we do cartwheels and lean in to kiss our men. We’re tan, jubilant, our whole lives ahead of us. There’s a road, and we are on it; we see where it ends, and we like it there.
The person I was then—and the person Gabby will ephemerally remain—was a woman comfortable being in the outdoors; good at it, in fact. Presumably, we both liked sleeping in tents and building fires and finding flat stretches with minimal inclines so as not to lose circulation as we slept. We were our happiest offline, though the pressure of our work often required us to stay digitally connected.
The first time I saw Petito’s footage—her drone rising above her campsite to film a panorama of arid desert and mountains glistening in morning sunlight—I felt a gnawing discomfort at our similarities, but it was the tent that did me in.
I would’ve recognized it anywhere. An orange and beige Ozark Trail Dome tent, it was all but identical to my own Half Dome 2 tent from REI, printed in those same two colors. Both feature extra-strong, shock-corded aluminum poles and full-coverage rain flies that promise protection from the elements, if not from the men who terrorized us. I’d pitched my near carbon copy more than a decade before in six minutes flat as the sun dropped from the sky in Mesa Verde National Park, threatening to plunge the campsite into darkness. When, hours later, I climbed inside to sleep pressed against my boyfriend, our sweatshirts smelling of charcoal and smoke, I worried that he might kill me, just as Brian Laundrie would kill Gabby Petito.
This, of course, is where the similarities between us stop.
Still, I spent three more years beside him, until the day came when we both recognized the danger in our dynamic and permanently separated. Now, nearly 10 years later, I’ve written two books and countless essays on my experience of intimate partner violence, drawing on those three years I spent with that man, whose abuse first began to escalate while we were camping in the American West and in the same national parks Petito and Laundrie would later hike, or had planned to. My boyfriend at the time—a man who drew an uncanny resemblance to Laundrie and was even born close to Laundrie’s hometown—kissed my cheek and forehead in photos we posted to social media. He taught at a private elementary school and played the ukulele. Once, he’d given me 99 miniature giraffes, lining their rubber bodies atop my oven’s range in a cavalry of whimsy. But he also made me worry—first in the American desert and then inside our American home—that I would not survive the escalation, that I would be injured, that I would die, a fear Gabby Petito no doubt felt in the final moments of her own young life.
Shortly after her body was recovered near the Spread Creek campground—but 22 days before Laundrie’s own body was found in the Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park in North Port, Florida, just a few miles from my parents’ home—I wrote about Petito’s murder in an essay for The New York Times. I felt that I was finally finding the voice to talk about my experience and that the violence was in the rear-view, past tense.
By the time Netflix released American Murder: Gabby Petito, a three-part documentary on the case, last February, it had been eight years since that abusive relationship ended, and three years since the rape I experienced by one of the first men who followed. I had a lot to say about male violence, and I was doing my best to say it, but there were limitations around my language: I spoke of the first abusive partner, but not the next—the one who heard no and thought yes anyway. The one who counted on the fact that I wouldn’t report the attack and told me I would ruin his life if I did. The one who knew of my history of being abused and abused me anyway, because he could.
How to describe the uncanny experience of sitting in my living room, watching never-before-seen footage of Gabby Petito, the past rushing to the present? In the documentary, Petito is once again thrust to the cultural forefront, as executive producers including Dr. Phillip C. McGraw—yes, that Dr. Phil—escort viewers through Petito’s life and final days, complete with photos and videos pulled from Petito’s laptop and interviews with family members and friends. It should come as no surprise to viewers familiar with Dr. Phil, a man whose signature, sensational bluntness earned him a talk show that ran for an impressive—and excruciatingly exploitative—21 seasons, that the documentary pushes the envelope. After all, McGraw—who claimed he never liked traditional one-on-one counseling and once self-identified as “not the … ‘Let’s talk about your mother’ kind of psychologist,” preferring instead to psychoanalyze his clients in front of a live studio audience and millions of viewers at home—was the first to interview Petito’s parents in 2021, after their daughter initially went missing. In a heavily advertised exclusive, McGraw sat with Petito’s parents—her mother, Nichole Schmidt; stepfather, Jim Schmidt; father, Joseph Petito; and stepmother, Tara Petito—and threatened Brian Laundrie, speaking directly to the camera: “I got a big platform and a big mouth, and I am not letting this go away.”
McGraw doesn’t feature in the Netflix special, which for nearly two weeks held a spot in the streaming service’s top 10 most-viewed programs, but unsettlingly enough, a vocal clone of Petito does. Twenty-one minutes into the first episode of the series, a caption appears over an animated page from a journal entry: Gabby Petito’s journal entries and text messages are brought to life, it reads, in this series in her own voice, using voice recreation technology.
Then, Petito herself, infiltrating.
“We bought a van,” she says. Her voice is small and excitable, a morning cartoon, a sunny Saturday. “A 2012 Ford Transit Connect,” she continues. “We are going to have so much fun designing and building this van together.”
The process for vocal re-creation, or deepfake voice technology, is not nearly as complicated—or exclusive—as one might think. A simple Google search reveals dozens of websites offering vocal cloning services, which promise to seamlessly produce voices that preserve emotion and subtle intonations and, moreover, will prove “virtually indistinguishable from the original speaker.” Users need submit only five to 30 minutes of clean, authentic audio, which the programs analyze for acoustic features—among them, cadence, pitch, and timbre—before creating a vocal model mere minutes later.
Although the documentary fails to describe the process used for its vocal simulation, Petito’s voice—which is used frequently throughout the series, often without any distinction being made between original and clone—was likely developed by extracting samples, with family permission, from hard-drive footage she’d shot but was unable to upload before her murder. Mercifully, this same software is not used to give voice to Brian Laundrie, but Petito’s artificial narration is nonetheless deeply unsettling; at times, there are discernible pauses between her words—a palpable indication, perhaps, of the software’s early limits, but they also seem convincingly organic.
Though the use of vocal cloning is not altogether new—the 2021 documentary Roadrunner, on famed chef Anthony Bourdain, used similar voice-over elements—audiences are currently experiencing in real time an escalation of what technology makes possible. Notably, Roadrunner employed vocal re-creation software merely to narrate a few passages Bourdain had written, including an email sent to a friend, the artist David Choe: “My life is sort of shit now,” the Bourdain deepfake says. “You are successful, and I am successful, and I’m wondering: Are you happy?” His vocal clone only gives voice to language Bourdain had already created, and for this reason, the film’s producer, Morgan Neville, insists that there was no manipulation, describing the process instead as a “modern storytelling technique.”
“I wasn’t putting words into [Bourdain’s] mouth,” Neville stated in an interview with GQ. “I was just trying to make them come alive.”
Nonetheless, critics such as Bourdain’s ex-wife Ottavia Busia-Bourdain felt differently, denouncing Neville’s assertion that she’d offered him her blessing, tweeting, “I certainly was NOT the one who said Tony would have been cool with that.”
What four years ago Roadrunner gave legs to walk, American Murder allowed to gallop. Here, deepfake technology gives voice to not only Petito’s private correspondences—that is, text messages exchanged with friends and family in the months before her murder—but also her journal entries, which of course were never intended for any audience but herself. My own objection to the film’s vocal cloning was as much to the voice itself—a thing as personal and intimate as a fingerprint, artificially created—as to the gross invasion of privacy it required.
That evening, after I had viewed all three episodes of the docuseries, Petito’s voice, both real and fake, kept me awake. I wondered which version of myself might have been given voice had I not escaped my abusive partner, what exactly that voice might say, and who among my friends or family might have dictated—and ultimately consented to—those enormously sensitive ethical deliberations.
Petito’s death, after all, was the ultimate crime of control: Brian Laundrie could not control her, so he killed her. Was the posthumous publication of her private text messages and journal entries, and then the artificial re-creation of her voice, not further fueling her exploitation? I couldn’t help but feel that Petito’s parents, however well-intentioned they might have been, had only further exacerbated her mistreatment by consenting to the artificial creation of their dead daughter’s voice.
As a writer, I am all too conscious of the way dominant narratives have the power to eclipse and even rewrite the truth; as a journalist and educator, I spend weeks with my undergraduate students discussing the moral and ethical considerations inherent in telling anyone else’s story. I teach memoirist Mark Doty’s seminal essay “Return to Sender,” in which he grapples with the ethics and consequences of writing one’s story when it invariably intersects with others’ stories: “The lives of other people are unknowable. Period. I wouldn’t go as far as a poet colleague of mine who says that ‘representation is murder,’ but I would acknowledge that to represent is to maim.”
We owe one another, in other words, more care when we write and publish in nonfiction than we do in any other genre. As journalists, especially—whether our medium is the written word or film—we are tasked with making meaning of the raw material of life, but to do our jobs with integrity, we must also wrestle with what is inevitably blemished in that interpretation, or misinterpretation.
But when I woke the following morning, I’d found my way to a new mode of seeing—something that further reminds me of the power of narratives, the way everything can shift with as little as the light.
Perhaps it is too generous a read, too empathetic for McGraw’s sensational brand of production, too forgiving, bighearted, magnanimous, but I couldn’t help but acknowledge that hearing Petito’s life in her own voice had proved a wildly effective antidote to my own experience with intimate partner violence, which so often strips a victim of her voice, if not her life in its entirety.
Further moral conversations undoubtedly loom on the ethics of vocal re-creation software and who has the right to make one’s private life public, but for now, I can report that it proved haunting to hear Petito’s voice, to listen as she narrates (with what audiences understand to be contrived intimacy) the journal entries she’d penned in her final days, when she believed herself to be behind life’s wheel. Although society continually affirms that women cannot be trusted to tell the larger stories of their lives, Petito’s vocal clone allows audiences to hear aloud the voice attached to the body of a woman madly in love but found in the fetal position anyway, near a riverbed in the northwestern corner of wild Wyoming.
“The morning of [September] 19th,” her stepfather, Jim Schmidt, says in part three of the series, “they told us that they had found remains consistent with our daughter Gabby. [She was] laying there on the ground for weeks, in the wild, just left there like she was a piece of trash by someone who was supposed to love her.”
Someone who was supposed to love her: This is, in fact, who is most likely to kill American women. The year of Gabby’s murder, more than 1,600 women were murdered by current or former partners.
Experiencing domestic violence, and later writing countless essays and a book about it, taught me that it is an epidemic in America, though woefully overlooked, save for the occasional unabashed gawking we give to sensational stories like Petito’s. White, conventionally attractive missing and murdered women often benefit from overexposure in the media, while missing Black, brown, and Indigenous women are painfully ignored. Still, nearly half of all women in the United States will experience intimate partner violence at some point in their lifetime, and the leading cause of death in pregnant American women is the men who fathered those babies.
“Even though our plans got pushed back,” the artificial Petito narrates at one point in the film, “like [our] wedding/baby plans, I’m very happy.”
The statistics surrounding domestic violence are ones I’m intimately familiar with—owing first to my history and then to my work—but ultimately, what Netflix’s American Murder proved was the value in bringing a story like Petito’s to jarringly intimate life, especially in homes where women live in danger with their men.
Nearly a decade out from my own abusive nightmare, and three years out from the rape that followed, I tried to imagine how many women had watched the series inside living rooms with or in proximity to the men who hurt them. I wondered, too, what it might have meant for them to hear her voice, her lilting commentary on her camping, her plan of “downsizing all [their] belongings and moving [their] humble abode on wheels.”
I think of my own self-censorship, the silence my body resolutely committed to.
And I think of what Jim Schmidt offered in the feature’s final moments.
“I can only hope that … she’s looking down on us,” he said, “and saying, ‘Thank you for being my voice when I couldn’t speak anymore.’ ”
And though I suspect it will take cultural and ethical discourse a long time to establish professional and legal safeguards around what technology has already made possible, the reclaiming of a narrative—in this case, Petito’s life—is in no small part what makes the docuseries so gut-wrenchingly powerful, at least for me. So notable is Petito’s voice, in fact, that eventually, I came to miss it, for over the course of the documentary, her simulated voice gradually gives way to silent, digitalized re-creations of her final text messages, until even her voice is lost to time and circumstance. By the third and final episode, her voice is absent entirely, replaced by songs reportedly drawn from a Spotify playlist shared by Petito and Laundrie, playing over footage posted in Petito’s final days. The absence of her voice only seemed to mirror the absence of humanity from so many startling statistics.
And yet, as with any issue of this magnitude, further nuances begin to emerge: Some aspect of Petito’s life, perhaps, has been reclaimed, not by her own authorship but instead via a robot, her parents, Netflix, and even Phil McGraw, despite the fact that he hasn’t had a license to practice psychology in nearly 20 years.
So often, the last word on a woman’s life is eclipsed by the larger narrative of her abuser: his name, his story, his sentencing, the horrible way in which he killed her. Here, Petito’s vocal cadences have been restored, and in this way her voice has arguably succeeded in living on beyond her abuser. Still, the fact remains that it is a man—albeit in the case of the docuseries, her loving stepfather—who continues to speak for her, to even imagine the consolatory, placating words she might offer in support of the invasion of her privacy. And I continue to wonder: Is hearing someone, or the ghost of someone, really the best way to honor one’s legacy in the wake of fatal abuse? Is it worth the moral and ethical discomfort?
I have much to say, and I know it is largely owing to privilege and luck that I have survived long enough to say it. But for women like Petito, and the millions of other victims whose voices were similarly stolen, silenced, eviscerated, I hesitate to celebrate this advance, for even if reconstructed through technology, the fact remains: Yet another woman is dead.
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