by Travis Mateer
While domestic violence doesn’t happen in a vacuum, the stories of abuse you hear about in national media, like People magazine, are part of an industry, and last December I wrote a post titled When Grief Becomes An Industry No One Wins.
In that post I highlight a connection that was made between the mother of Rebekah Barsotti, a woman who disappeared and was found dead in the Clark Fork river, and the mother of Gabby Petito, Nichole Schmidt, as they both attempt to use their respective tragedies for positive social change.
When grief becomes an industry, the competition for your attention is in the driver’s seat, not truth or the desire for justice. I’m sure Nichole Shmidt thinks she is honoring her daughter’s memory by suing the Moab Police for 50 million dollars, but how is this BIG DOLLAR lawsuit going to improve the criminal justice response Schmidt claims SHOULD HAVE protected her daughter?
When this suit was filed at the end of 2022, this is what Gabby Petito’s mother had to say about it:
“We saw it as an opportunity to help other families,” said Schmidt. “We feel we need to bring justice because she could have been protected that day. There are laws put in place to protect victims and those laws were not followed.”
Allowing the grief industry to take hold and feed the many parasites who thrive in this environment provides a lucrative opportunity for grieving family members to blame other people and/or entities instead of taking any stock in how domestic violence is cyclical and often stems from the failure of parents to model healthy relationships for their kids.
I’m not trying to create a pass for law enforcement, but the reality is domestic violence (DV) situations are some of the most dangerous situations for law enforcement to be involved in, and even when interventions happen, women often return to their abusers, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop that from happening.
Another aspect that cripples the criminal justice system is the misuse, or overuse, of civil protection orders. While I can’t get into specifics regarding my own case, one conversation I had with a paralegal gave me the anecdotal perspective that lawyers, during divorce proceedings, are increasingly suggesting orders of protection be filed, regardless of the merit, as a legal tactic. With litigation from grieving families as an added risk to consider when something bad happens, what judge is going to say NO to a civil order of protection from a woman claiming fear of a romantic partner?
The shitty, absent fathers who have daughters and fail to take care of them end up creating women with crippled self-esteem issues, and these women continue the negative cycle by gravitating toward pieces of shit, then procreating with them. And when certain factors are in place, like the physical attractiveness of the victim, the eventual tragic end to this common interpersonal dysfunction becomes fodder for True Crime leeches and other parasites.
How about we, as a society, stop doing this shit? Is that a possibility?
Podcasts have been made covering the case, news outlets worldwide are giving daily updates — it would seem the public’s incessant consumption of true crime is feeding a market need for new material at an increasingly ravenous pace. As of yesterday a Google search of Petito’s name returned over 41,000,000 hits, and between TikTok and Twitter, there are now well over a billion posts with her name as a hashtag.
What will all this attention produce, and why does Rebekah Barsotti’s mother, Angela Mastrovito, want to pursue a similar path by constructing a proper victim narrative, then using it to get laws made or changed?
To highlight what I’m talking about regarding a “proper victim narrative”, here’s a portion of Rebekah’s story from the website promoting change on her behalf (emphasis mine):
Rebekah Grace Rose Barsotti and her beloved dog Cerberus had escaped a marriage riddled with domestic violence. A Standing Order of No Contact was in place. Fleeing from the marital home in Superior, MT to Missoula, MT, they were picking up the pieces of their life to start anew. The only obstacle Rebekah thought she had to tackle was waiting Montana’s 180 day separation requirement before filing for divorce. That’s until she was lured back to Superior on July 20, 2021, to pick up the last of her personal belongings at a local Town Pump through a 3rd party caretaker to her estranged husband. This was the last time anyone saw Rebekah and Cerberus.
The emphasis of this part of the narrative depicting Rebekah as being LURED back to Superior neglects to detail the fact that drugs and drug paraphernalia were included in those personal belongings she returned to Superior to obtain. I’m not including this detail to victim-blame in any way, but to highlight how narratives must be crafted in certain ways if they are to compete in the national marketplace of misery porn.
Even worse, by relegating Rebekah’s story to the DV pile of misery porn narratives, a larger story is being missed, and that’s the story of how Sheriff Offices across Montana do double-duty as Coroners, and therefore have the power to control narratives from the very beginning by determining the cause and manner of death.
Rebekah Barsotti? Death by accident. Joey Thompson? Death by accident. And the larger question for a community experiencing these tragedies: what are we going to do about it?
I know what I’m doing about it, and I’m going to keep doing it despite the efforts of some troubled individuals to fit me into the abuser narrative. I don’t use the demographic calculations of an insidious industry to determine what to care and write about because that is just another form of narrative control, and it’s that kind of control I’m using my Weapon of Mass Instruction to educate my local community about one conversation at a time.
If you’d like to support my work, Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF) is one way to assist my efforts. Any little bit helps.
Thanks for reading!
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